"Lady Bessa Sonder will be the candidate for the next Empress of Iondora Empire."
Bessa thought she had truly heard wrong.
"What...?"
Not just the words, but the entire concept.
What even...? Did that even make sense?
She was an orphan. A former slave, then a one-legged alchemist-turned-farmer whose greatest ambition was to keep her tomatoes from freezing.
Empresses were born from bloodlines that went back a thousand years. Empresses were raised in palaces, schooled in politics, polished until their very breath smelled of roses and statecraft.
She was none of those things. She smelled of soil and alchemical residue and the permanent tang of prosthetic lubricant.
"Oh, you just mean someone named Bessa Sonder is going to be the next Empress? God, Your Highness, you scared me!" She tried desperately to rationalize everything, even after being told she would become Bessa Sonder.
Surely this was a joke.
She'd laugh about it later, probably. After she finished throwing up.
