Since Esmera was abandoned on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, the only person who has looked out for her is herself.
Until a lark starts visiting her, leaving behind exotic flowers and iridescent pebbles that the internet doesn't recognise.
Esmera...
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Was waking up with a rotten chest in the life after death as agonisingly painful as it would be in the alive world? It felt like it must be. Esmera couldn't imagine it being any different as her heavy eyes forced themselves open, and she experienced her first moment of being a dead woman, a ghost, a fallen heroine doomed by a prophecy that once seemed to promise prosperity.
Esmera took a few breaths, all of them stabbing through her chest. She flinched, fighting back tears scratching at her eyelids and a whimper clawing at the inside of her throat. The pain wasn't like a knife itself but the stitches that came from repairing its wound.
She opened her eyes. The lining covering the window behind the purple silken curtains gathered on either side of the rail dampened the sunlight that entered from behind it. Even so, Esmera's eyes squealed in pain at the sight of it.
She looked around once her eyes had forgotten the darkness of death and accustomed to the light of the afterlife. The room cushioned Esmera as though she was a jewel, all lilac silk and aubergine velvet and silver embroidery. The bed she lay in could fit at least five more people, but she was glad she had it to herself.
In front of the bed stood a dresser with jewels scattered across it like costume jewellery. Even so, Esmera could tell from the glitter of the emeralds in the tiara and the rubies in the earrings that they were the real thing, just as the sparkle of the diamonds rimming the bottom edge of the lamps on either side of the bed told her that they too were genuine.
Esmera sat up slowly. Maybe dying wasn't so bad after all, if it had brought her to a place so beautiful and comfortable.
Again, pain throbbed at some part of Esmera that had no name on her mind. She traced the source of the pain to a green stone glowing in her chest. She blinked at it. It seemed familiar somehow. Maybe she had seen it before in a previous life. Maybe it had even been in the life she endured and enjoyed before this death.
She closed her eyes, returning to the cool, comfortable darkness behind her eyelids. Her mind flashed back to Tauram rushing to her with something green glowing in his beautiful hands, then back to dinner with Ruagu while that same green glowed around his neck.
It was the heartstone. And it was now in Esmera's chest.
Her eyes widened at the realisation.
She traced her fingers over it, over the vessels and chambers so intricately carved into it even as she shuddered to think it may be Nuredir's work.
Esmera barely had time to process what that would mean before the door to the room was opening, a slab of dark wood beyond the circle of luxury that had captured her attention. Tauram stood in it, filling it with his purple-clad frame.
The crown on his head was like a helmet with a plume spraying from the central point like water brushing against the upper frame of the door. His skin was paler than Esmera remembered, almost ashen. Although exhausted, he strode inside, his gait as fluid and his eyes as alive as ever, and that's when Esmera knew she was alive too.
