⚠️ This article contains spoilers for Wingless in the Sky (Book 1), up to and including Act 2.
"You come back to me, girl. Do you understand? You COME BACK."
— Amalia, to Lia
Full name: Lady Amalia Domiandi, born of a minor noble house
Position: Widow of Prince Domian; ward of the Imperial court; sister-in-law to Empress Maren
Kinship: Domian was King Marius's brother — making Amalia Maren's sister-in-law by marriage, not blood. It is the only family either of them has left.
Moves with careful, controlled grace — the walk of someone who has learned to take up as little space as possible. Dresses simply. Hair braided back. Nothing remarkable about her appearance, which is, as Maren correctly identifies, a form of power.
Her tell is her hands. When she is frightened or cornered, they tighten against each other. Anyone who knows her well has learned to watch for it.
Wife of Prince Domian — King Marius's younger brother — and mother of Lia. When Maren exiled the remaining De Valoren branch in the consolidation of power that followed Marius's death, Domian was among those removed. He disappeared. Whether he fled, was taken, or died, no one has told Amalia with certainty. She has been waiting for an answer for years. She is still waiting.
She remained at the Imperial court as Maren's sister-in-law — the last surviving piece of the family Maren married into, kept close partly out of whatever obligation Maren feels toward her dead husband's kin, and partly because it is easier to keep an eye on someone you know.
The relationship between the two women is not warm. It is not hostile either. It is the complicated closeness of people who share a loss they cannot speak about honestly with anyone else.
Quiet, pious, unassuming — and underneath all of that, iron. The quietness is not weakness. It is the shape that survival has taken in her. She has spent years in a court where she holds no power, has no allies beyond her daughter, has no recourse for the injustice done to her husband and her house. She has not broken. She has simply made herself small and waited.
When Lia is summoned before Maren after the lightning incident, Amalia is already there — bursting into the Empress's private quarters and refusing to leave despite guards, dignity, and Maren's rising fury. She falls to her knees. She begs. She is dragged out crying. Lia watches with a sympathetic glance and says nothing, because there is nothing to say.
"I'll have you dragged out and locked in your chambers if you don't stop this wailing! You're my sister-in-law, but my patience has limits!"
That is one side of her. The other is the woman who grabs Lia by the arms when Lia announces she is going to Aeloria, looks her straight in the face, and speaks with furious intensity:
"You come back to me, girl. Do you understand? You COME BACK."
Not a plea. A command.
She is terrified. She is also not wrong. Lia has agreed to go voluntarily to a sky city where humans are considered inferior at best, with a prince who acquired her as compensation for a diplomatic incident. Amalia's fear is the most rational response in the room.
"We are a ragged, dispossessed house, long bereft of inheritance rights! Maren made sure of that..."
"For your FATHER, you mean. You still dream of finding him with that vision thing you told me about. Chasing a ghost. You're going to get yourself killed."
She is right about the motivation and right about the danger. She cannot stop it. She lets Lia go anyway, because Lia is going — and what Amalia can offer instead of permission is the command to come back.
Her letters to Aeloria are careful, frightened underneath the surface, trying not to burden Lia with that fear. Lia reads between the lines easily. Some nights she presses the letters to her chest and cries, missing the ordinary things: the way Amalia would brush her hair before bed, the way she hummed old songs while arranging flowers.
Three weeks after Lia's departure, Maren summons Amalia privately and asks her to watch a man — Silvan Marcodi, a minor trade broker who has been behaving unusually.
"I want someone who can move in social spaces. Someone who understands how to be invisible in a crowd. Someone who's been a fixture here long enough that no one gives them a second glance."
Amalia's hands tighten. Her tell.
"Why me?"
Direct question. Maren gives her a direct answer.
"Because no one would notice you."
Amalia flinches. It is true, and cruel, and in Maren's language it is also an acknowledgment: your invisibility is real. I am giving it a use.
The silence between them holds the full weight of what is unspoken — Maren asking favors from the woman whose husband she exiled, whose daughter she sent away. Both aware of it. Neither willing to name it.
Then something shifts in Amalia's expression. Not panic. Not resignation. Something harder to name — recognition, perhaps. She has been drifting since Lia left. Temple visits. Empty rooms. Long walks with no destination. Now there is something to do.
"Lia is your ward. Now she's gone. You're asking her mother to do your intelligence work."
Maren meets her eyes.
"I'm asking you to help find a stolen life-stone before a man dies. Lia's name has nothing to do with it."
It is not entirely true. Both of them know it.
"I'll watch him."
She stands. At the door, she pauses.
"The markets are busy in the mornings. I'll blend in with the other shoppers."
"Good. Grevin's men will dress as street guards and patrol your districts. If you need anything, go to him."
"I will be fine, Majesty. I know how to be invisible. Years of practice."
The door closes softly. Maren sits alone in the shifting afternoon light.
She'd just turned Amalia's pain into an asset. Nobody would watch the quiet, pious widow. She'd made that invisibility useful. It was the right choice. It still felt like cruelty.
This article is about a Character — Supporting Character
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