Psyche (3)

"My lady… please don't move too much," the maid murmured gently, her hands steady as she ran a fine-toothed comb through Aeliana's hair.

Aeliana exhaled through her nose, forcing herself to still. She hadn't even realized she had been fidgeting.

Things had already changed.

She had barely been back in the mansion for a full day, and yet everything felt… different.

The halls were no longer suffocating. The air no longer carried that heavy weight of stagnation, that sense of slow decay that had clung to her room for years. Servants no longer looked at her with pity or whispered behind her back about whether she would make it through another winter.

And most obviously—

She didn't wear a veil.

She had always kept her face hidden, avoiding the stares, the looks of barely-concealed disgust, the reminder of what she had lost. But now… now she didn't.

The maids had noticed.