Within three hours, a servant delivered what the Titan had made for me.
I couldn’t believe it.
The craftsmanship was incredible. It was a long pen and thin around the grip for my hand as it was smaller than the average Titan’s. I inserted the ink capsule. It slid inside without catching on the sides. It was without a doubt the best pen I’d ever had.
I used it to write messages inside the cards. They were all identical. I had decided to make the invitations myself, but when I saw how many guests would be attending our wedding, I quickly backed out of that idea.
There would be thousands of guests. And that wasn’t including their plus ones!
Instead, I decided to only make my friends’ invitations. I handed the finished cards to the messenger, who bowed and backed toward the exit before turning his back on me.
I swear, I would never get used to that. I was the same old me. I didn’t have any special birthright like Fiath. I wasn’t a noble. I didn’t come with titles or power or land.
Maybe that was why I was a little hesitant about becoming the empress.
Empress!
Fiath was my dream guy. He looked the way I liked. He talked the way I liked. He fucked the way I liked…
But did I want to be the empress to a vast empire, an alien race that until a couple of weeks ago, I had no clue even existed?
No, I didn’t.
I wanted a small, quiet, and happy life.
With Fiath.
But there was no way for me to have that with him being the emperor.
I sighed and tidied up the materials I used to make the invitations. I guess I was going to have to get used to it.
It could have been worse. Being handed unlimited power in the galaxy wasn’t exactly a hardship.
I smiled at the thought of my friends receiving their invitations.
After I told Fiath about them, he immediately leaped into action and got “his people” to work on locating them. They asked me about the last place I’d seen them and where I thought they might be now.
I had no idea. They were out there in the galaxy somewhere.
It took just a few hours for the investigator to come back with verification that he’d managed to locate one of my friends.
Sirena.
I couldn’t believe it. How could they have found her so quickly?
“She didn’t exactly make it difficult,” the tracker said. “She’s living with Lord Taw and they’re very happy together.”
Lord Taw lived on one of the classier, more well-to-do planets. Typical of Sirena. She always had liked to keep a step above the rest of us when it came to the greasy social ladder.
Except this time. I mean, there was no one more senior than the emperor, was there?
It took two more days before the next friend was found. And they didn’t find just one, but three!
I started to cry when I heard the briefs about their stories and what’d happened to them. They’d each found love—with a Titan, no less!—and although they’d had their hardships along the way, they were now very happy.
Alice turned out to be the hardest to find. When her location was finally discovered, it came as no surprise to me at all. She was the only one of us that’d managed to find their way back to Earth.
She lived there on a large farm with her own Titan—yet again!—and they were very happy.
I got to work finishing off the invitations right away and had them complete within a day.
I was so excited, I could hardly sit still.
Fiath waited for all my friends to be discovered before he announced the date of the ceremony. I could hear the roars of approval from the local townsfolk and the drums ringing out across the countryside.
I counted down the days until I would see my friends again, until I could take them in my arms and breathe them in.
The wedding would take place in the palace where we resided. It wasn’t traditional, but then nothing about our marriage was traditional.
Least of all me.
The Titan emperor was expected to marry for power. That was the way it’d been done for generations. Now, Fiath was to marry someone of low birth and from a planet that was only just getting its toe wet in the galaxy.
The empire became obsessed with me and my home planet.
Millions of Titans booked holidays to visit Earth and explore where their new empress had come from. I could imagine the local people in my hometown, wondering who these strange people suddenly turning up were.
They would assume they were from Europe and would be grateful for the tourism and money they brought to the area. It hadn’t been the same since the mills shut down.
Fiath had to pull some strings and change some laws to ensure he could marry me. There was little resistance. No one argued against the emperor’s wishes.
Then it came to the day before our wedding. My friends would be showing up soon. I couldn’t sleep the entire night, I was so excited.
It’d only really been weeks—weeks to me, at least, since I woke up from that pod—but it could have been months since they woke up.
I wore one of my best new tailor-made dresses and waited on the largest balcony that overlooked the town.
Fiath took me by the hand.
“Nervous?” he said.
“Excited,” I said. “I can’t wait for you to meet my friends.”
“Are they anything like you?”
“We’re cut from the same cloth.”
Fiath chuckled at the expression.
“Then they will be smart, beautiful, and a gift from the gods,” he said.
“Tell them that and they’ll be putty in your hands.”
He ran a finger along my cheek.
“There’s only one woman I
