Nightmare Fuel / The Remarried Empress

• As Heinrey puts it, Sovieshu is a decent emperor, but a terrible husband.
  • Two young children take cookies from a plate, not aware that the Empress, a maternal figure for both of them, ordered those cookies to be laced with poison meant for one of the Emperor's concubines. One of the poison's side effects is the chance of becoming infertile, something that does not bode well for the future Emperor and Empress. Worse is, the young Sovieshu lies, claiming only he ate those cookies, not the young Navier. He proceeds to not tell her anything about this even when the matter concerns her and their future, and only tells High Priest Vimirey to justify his excuse for why he needs to divorce her. Luckily, she is able to have children. Sovieshu... does not fare as well.
  • The way Navier gets treated by Sovieshu gets worse and worse the longer Rashta stays in the palace. He gets Laura imprisioned for 3 to 5 days for "disrespecting" Rashta, blames Navier for everything bad the nobles do to his concubine, and after Kapmen punches Sovieshu for disrespecting Navier, uses the excuse to sabotage her trade negotiations with Luipt out of petty jealousy of her growing friendship with him. Finally, he comes up with a horribly convoluted plan - divorce Navier, marry the pregnant Rashta for a year, and then remarry Navier after his heir is legitimized. He never reveals this plan to Navier, who’s made it perfectly clear she never accept his child with Rashta as her own, but once he does admits it, she calls him out on blindly expecting her to agree with it.
  • When he finds out Navier and Heinrey are exchanging letters via messenger birds, Sovieshu burns the letters in a jealous rage and orders that any birds going to her room are to be shot down. As a result, McKenna is seriously injured on the way to deliver Heinrey's latest letter. While McKenna is not a real bird, it’s still not a pretty sight to see a bird cruelly shot at. Afterwards, Sovieshu sends her a meal of roasted bird... with a few of McKenna's bird feathers stuck in it for decoration. Navier faints from the shock. While McKenna survives and she is eventually reassured the messenger bird was not killed, it becomes a huge point of contention concerning Sovieshu for her.
    • What’s especially most shocking from this event is seeing Sovieshu look so worried over Navier’s wellbeing, and he’s not even comprehending that Navier’s black-out is because he’d scared her into thinking he executed McKenna! Navier is especially horrified to wake up to Sovieshu holding onto her hands while looking so concerned over her. She pushes him away because of this, but he acts utterly bewildered over this. This whole episode pretty much embodies Evil Cannot Comprehend Good.
  • But oh, that's pre-divorce Sovieshu. When Navier gets her remarriage with Heinrey approved, Sovieshu is instantly enraged, barring the two from leaving the Eastern Empire. While he has to let Heinrey go due to diplomatic tensions between their two countries, he planned on keeping Navier trapped in her family home until he could find a way to delegitimize Navier's remarriage to Heinrey. He confronts the two at her parents' house, where his screaming tantrum is seen by many commoners, which is the only reason the argument doesn't escalate further. Once Navier and Heinly escape from the East, Sovieshu spends the next few months doing everything he can to win back Navier. This is while everything involving Rashta starts to crop up as well. It's no wonder Sovieshu's mental health starts to weaken after this.
    • Sovieshu's mental health issues post-Rashta are also quite disturbing. He starts hallucinating Navier and Rashta still being around. One episode leads to him falling off a balcony and injuring himself quite seriously. After he recovers, however, he seems to have amnesia; he has forgotten Rashta's existence and his deteriorating relationship with Navier. It is not until a few days have passed before his aides realize what’s really wrong with him—he developed a split personality, one during the day that acts like his 19-year-old self without the memories of what happened in the past 6 years; while during the night he is his current, messed-up self. By the end of the story, he’s a shadow of his former self, his mental health plummeting to the point where he can't even rule properly anymore, and his former father-in-law has to step in as the de facto ruler to keep the Eastern Empire afloat.
• It’s heavily implied that Sovieshu allowed Alan to be put on trial — even though he was barely involved with his father's schemes — out of spite. The tragedy is that despite his weak character, Alan is ultimately a decent guy who is a good father to Ian and genuinely loves Rashta, even though they couldn't be together. Unfortunately, due to his father's machinations failing and his own inability to stop him before it was too late, Alan ends up being accused of trying to pass off his illegitimate daughter as the Crown Princess and is executed alongside his father. Whether Sovieshu did it to spite Alan or Rashta is up for interpretation.
• How Rashta becomes morally corrupt and mentally ill.
  • Nianne had a reputation as one of the most beautiful and charming ladies in the Eastern Empire. Rashta spreads rumors of her infidelity with her brother-in-law and her possibly illegitimate child (which wasn't even true), leading to not only her reputation tanking, but her being divorced by her husband... Sounds familiar? Navier even Lampshades later on that Nianne's divorce was foreshadowing her own fate. What's worse, Rashta didn't even do it out of revenge or anything personal. She needed some distraction from rumors about herself, and saw Nianne as a convenient target.
  • When one of her maids accidentally discovers that Rashta mistreated a bird given to Navier to shift the blame on her, Rashta has the maid's tongue cut off and tries to have her executed. When another maid accidentally starts a rumor about her looking for something (her slave bill certificate), she claims that she had her father in prison executed.
  • She was able to escape slavery due to her admirer Pix, who even lost an eye for doing so. After she contacts him again, he’s willing to help her hire an assassin to get rid of Lebetti. Rashta, as a part of a test, has said assassin kill Pix, despite him having no intention of betraying her.
  • Rashta's paranoia over Evely and Lebetti's attempts to seduce Sovieshu for revenge eventually leads her to planning outright murder.
  • After giving birth to her first child at the Rimwell Estate, she has her baby taken away, is told it died, and is given a dead baby to hold by Viscount Roteschu, who was resentful about his slave having a romantic relationship with his son Alan. This causes her severe mental trauma, to the point where, after giving birth to Glorym, Rashta finds herself unable to hold her, despite genuinely loving her daughter and knowing her son Ian actually survived. Worse still, it makes Sovieshu think she’s a bad mother, while Rashta, who still pretends Glorym is her first child, is unable to explain herself.
  • Rashta's final fate. Being locked up in a tower for the rest of your life is one thing, but taking a suicide pill 3 days in, throwing up bloody vomit, and dying in pure agony is another. And no one finds the body until a week later. Even Rashta didn't deserve that.
• Heinrey, despite his puppy qualities, is a ruthless schemer who initially planned on invading the Eastern Empire, and uses the whole divorce situation to his advantage to make the empire's reputation weaker. He doesn't even have to invade the country; everything falls into place for him, to the point where his daughter, Lari, becomes the new Crown Princess of the Eastern Empire. While manipulative, it’s better than Heinrey's initial plan - start the war using rumors about himself and Rashta as an excuse, making Rashta unpopular in the public eye, and take Navier hostage and present it as if they fell in love while she was in his custody. Fortunately, Navier proposes to him before he decides to set it into motion.
• The potency of love potions is terrifying. The first we see of them was when a single sip afflicted Grand Duke Kapmen with a near-obsession with Navier that may be life-long. When he was dosed later, Heinrey described the feeling as akin to sleep paralysis, and had an emotional breakdown to his wife over the guilt of the incident. Navier can't even be angry with him, since he's so obviously terrified over what happened.
  • The culprit of said poisoning, Lady Krista, tries to use the incident to become Heinrey's mistress. Naturally, it doesn't work out; because of that and some other incidents targeting Navier, Krista is sent to an Imperial villa outside of the capital. But then Krista's father, Duke Zemensia, tries to contact her again, he finds out that she wishes to see no one and hasn't left the villa since she arrived. He finds this suspicious as she was a well-connected socialite, and discovers that Heinrey has all but locked Krista up in the villa. He tries several times to get revenge on the royal couple, but Heinrey has other plans; he brings Krista back with a rope hanging from her neck, and threatens Duke Zemensia with her life. When the duke doesn't comply with Heinrey's demands, Krista "kills herself" a few days later. A reminder of how terrifying Heinrey can be at times.
• Lebetti's kidnapping is this. Wanting revenge against Lebetti's father, Rashta has the poor girl snatched from off the streets and sold as a slave. At least, that *would* have been the case if not for Sovieshu ordering her covert rescue. Instead, she "merely" had to endure four days of imprisonment and terror, while her father searches desperately for Lebetti for months without knowing his daughter is already safe.