In Dire Straits

Although the chaos settled in it’s more immediate form, prying eyes wouldn’t soon forget the graphic sight they saw earlier that day.

After the initial fear, shock and disgust left the princess’s body, her emotions opted to something more firm. Rigid. Irritated, even, that something like this happened on their soil. Luna wouldn’t be quick to jump to assumptions but she knew it had something to do with the guests they had, which made her feelings betray everything they’d been told about their allied guests.

They couldn’t all be bad, she knew that much— but someone was. Very bad.

Luna refused to believe this was an Inarian who would do this to a fellow Inarian. It just… wasn’t in them.

“How did this happen!?” Exclaiming with a stomped foot, turning her head to one of the few Valor kids she knew, one she’d grown to see a lot and feel like they were on the path of friendship. They certainly had something else to bond over now. “Who do you think did it?” Luna assumed it wasn’t an accident. She didn’t have the intuition to determine based on the wound (not to mention the short bit she saw of it before they were shooed to either help or avert their pure, youthful eyes) but she did have a gut feeling.

“We need to start our own investigation!” Luna said rather triumphantly now, stopping in her tracts and raising a paw to her chest. She didn’t wait for Doli’s approval before letting her imagination run with the idea.

When the adults started to crowd her out, taking the dreadful scene into their control, Pareidolia for once had honestly been happy to go. It usually annoyed her to be handled with kid gloves — that she literally was a kid remained immaterial; aren’t princesses entitled to everyone’s business? — but this room, so to speak, was one she could not wait to escape. Breathing deep, gathering herself, she’d beaten a stunned and shaken retreat without knowing where the hell she even intended to go.

Look at the sky. Look at the jacaranda. Look at Luna, whose path you’ve crossed again. Don’t look at your mind’s eye — eye, eye, bleeding eye, gushing eye, split like a peeled grape, ugh FUCK — don’t look where the image lingered still so strong, and of course she looked anyway, because she didn’t have a choice...

Doli wanted her mom. She tried to swallow the sudden, desperate wish. Tried to hide it where it could not embarrass her in front of this other royal girl.

“She was blind... she can’t even SEE... and they still hurt her...” There was a look of deep outrage in her eyes. Outrage and horror. It exhaled from her pores when she moved; it was there in the shudder of her breath. This cruelty was foreign to her world. She didn’t understand it. She rejected it with the visceral revulsion of a woman snatching an insect caught in her hair and smashing it against the nearest wall. “I don’t know who did it, but we’ll find out, and then —”

She didn’t finish that thought. Good queens protected their subjects. Brought their wounders and enemies to justice. This, she knew in her bones, long before even her godfather had planted the idea there.

“Maybe we should start back at the scene of the crime...”