to be loved. || Who Made Me A Princess

six: the child of the ruby palace

to be loved.

A nymphaea is a flower praised for purely ornamental reasons, wherein its striking beauty stems from its ability to appear effortless on sparking ponds, thus attracting previously unaware onlookers. Lee Jihyee is, unlike the flower that blooms on a water's surface, but moreso the unwitnessed roots that stalk and unfurl beneath a single nymphaea. 

"What will it take for you to love me?"

Plain, uninteresting, and perhaps overall forgettable like the slender stalks, she and her metaphorical counterpart were never one to bloom on a surface. However, like a nymphaea's roots, did she have the backbone to continue passed harsh winters.

"Will you call my name dearly like you do hers?"

That tenacity to live is what brings her to spring, when a bud sprouts into a beautiful array of golden petals, who is soon to be called Athanasia.

'Why did it have to be a Princess everyone hates?' 

When Athanasia opens her eyes to a world full of gold--Well, she doesn't expect it. She doesn't expect to have taken pills and wake up to a world in which people threw her cold, scornful looks at what would have been an otherwise innocent infant.

The Ruby Palace, for all its luxury, still deeply unsettled her despite the ever passing days that went by. It was in itself isolating without the proper attention of the people inhabiting it, but its deeply rooted history that coveted the novel of The Lovely Princess, is what made her shift uncomfortably. 
In short, the Ruby Palace was death. It permeated it, and haunted her with it in long drawn nights of lying in her crib, forced to stare above at the ceiling of a palace that housed such a cruel massacre by what would be her...Father.

The blonde shivered at the thought. 

"We're nothing but candles in the wind," She peers at a crowd of gossiping maids to her left. Lacking the stimulation due to her infancy, forces her to focus attention towards the trio, "we'd be dead at the snap of his fingers."

"Did you hear about that ghost coming out of the kitchen every night?"

"I heard the west of the grounds was a haunted palace...!"

She, like them, wanted to leave. 

Lilian York had been her one and only true blessing ever since she had woken up in her daze. Where other servants dismissed her, and found it bothersome and risky to even be near her--a baby--The brunette brought her into her arms, always with a genuine warmth to her.

She was a dime in what would otherwise be a life of dirt. 

Or, that would have been until she uttered the one confirmation she never needed to hear:

"Princess, you are the majesty's precious daughter."

The smile, and almost proud tone that reached her voice was not helping Athanasia's case.

Claude De Alger Obelia was a tyrant who abandoned his daughter and mercilessly murdered the residents of the very palace she slept in.

'I should leave this damn palace! Time, make haste!' Lest she suffer anymore of her consistent brooding and anguish over the inevitability of Athanasia's original death.

[...]

Athanasia is five when she has the complete and utter displeasure of meeting the Emperor for the first time. His imposing figure, and relentless expression renders her silent and still in complete fear, and the whole experience from being sat across him and sent back to the Ruby Palace is one much scarier than death at her door.