Tear Jerker / The Remarried Empress

• Navier gets so much thrown at her the moment Rashta enters the palace. Not only does Navier have to deal with her husband's open infidelity, but she also deal with the fallout of their marriage, which gets quite ugly as the divorce looms closer. She has to constantly withstand humiliating incidents caused by Rashta and Sovieshu (see Nightmare Fuel), Her closest allies, Heinrey and Nianne, leave the Eastern Empire (he will take the throne after his brother and she wants to travel with her lover after her divorcing her ex-husband) and her brother Kosair is exiled from the country, leaving Navier alone to deal with Sovieshu and Rashta on her own. Finally, Sovieshu decides to divorce Navier for his pregnant concubine just a few months after he has brought her to the palace. Navier is severely exhausted and depressed by the time she stumbles upon Heinrey at the mages' academy and proposes the remarriage.
  • The days leading up to Navier's divorce are saddening as well. The high priest is reluctant to proceed with the divorce due to how it will hurt Navier in the end. Navier's ladies-in-waiting are shocked once they find out Navier is getting a divorce, and spend the morning of the trial sobbing for their lady. And poor Navier has to spend the last days before the trial locked in the Empress' palace, waiting for the trial with a mixture of anxiety and anger against Sovieshu. It's a good thing that Navier had her plan with Heinrey to fall back on, because otherwise those pre-trial days would have been the lead-up to one of the worst days of Navier's life.
• It's sad to watch Nianne's marriage crumble due to Rashta's machinations, and her eventual departure from the Eastern Empire. The worst part is how her divorce foreshadows Navier's own divorce, something Navier lampshades later on.
• McKenna (in his bird form) nearly dies from an arrow shot by one of Sovieshu's men, to prevent Heinrey from contacting Navier. Navier's already horrified by the act, but even more so when Sovieshu sends her a dinner consisting of a whole roasted bird. Luckily McKenna's okay, but the incident shook Navier up to the point of losing all affection for Sovieshu.
• Evalie losing her magic. She's just a little orphan girl who acquired a great power and a doting sponsor. All of it threatens to fizzle out by losing her mana.
  • After Navier leaves, Sovieshu brings Evalie to his court to work with the court mage to find a way to bring her mana back (mostly as a way to get back in Navier's good graces). The other nobles suspect she is Sovieshu's new mistress, including Rashta and her adopted parents, who torment Evalie and even plan the poor girl's murder.
    • The saddest part: it's revealed that Evalie is the adopted parents' true biological child, not Rashta who they believed they had found after she went missing as a baby. When everyone finds out the truth, Evalie wants nothing to do with her biological parents, but is saddened about it.
• In a fit of jealousy after Navier and Heinrey's marriage, Duke Kapman drugs Heinrey with a love potion and he ends up in Krista's arms. Heinrey's breakdown to his wife afterward is gut-wrenching, as love potions are akin to date rape drugs in this world. Navier can't even be mad at him about it, since she can tell he's really broken up about the incident.
• After her marriage to Heinrey, Navier realizes she loves him. However, because of her trauma from her previous marriage, and her husband's secretive nature, she's afraid she will inevitably lose him too, and that the more she loves him now, the more it will hurt later. It doesn't help that every time she meets Sovieshu afterwards, he inevitably rubs salt on the wound by guilt-tripping her or trying to cast doubt on Heinrey's actions.
  • The other side of the coin is that Heinrey freely and frequently verbally expresses his love for his wife, but because of her reservations, she can't vocalize it back. As such, he grows to fear that she only has lust for him, not love.
• Krista's final fate is quite pitiful—she's locked up in the Imperial villa outside the capital, and then used by Heinrey as a bargaining chip to get her father, Duke Zemensia, to stop targeting Navier's life. When he refuses, Krista is found dead a few days later in an apparent suicide. The Duke knows for certain that she did not take her own life, which is why his actions towards Navier grow worse.
• Rashta's treatment of two of her maids. The first one discovers that Rashta was the one that plucked off the feather off the bird Sovieshu blamed Navier for. Rashta's response is to have the poor girl's tongue cut off. This causes her brother, a journalist once loyal to Rashta, to start criticizing her in the papers, sending her reputation down to the pits. The second maid is accused by Rashta of spreading rumors about her, and threatens to have her father, who's on death row, executed on the spot. The maid gets so enraged that she hits Rashta with a chair, scarring her for the rest of her life.
• The Eastern president of a consortium whose check was scrutinized by a Western merchant (under Navier's orders) gets approval from Sovieshu to swap the Imperial checks they've issued for new ones. The president discovers that the money Rashta donated under her name to various charities on her wedding night originally came from a check registered to Navier, meaning Rashta misappropriated the check and misused the former empress's funds. As he thinks back to how badly Navier was treated by the commoners when she last visited the Eastern Empire, he tears up and decides to contact the press, ensuring that Rashta faces the consequences of her actions against Navier.
  The Consortium President: How...disgraceful. I had hopes that an empress with commoner origins would usher in a new era...That is how she [Navier] left. That is how she left.
• Rashta is rather pitiful once her past and inner thoughts come to light. All she wanted was to leave her life of slavery behind, but she got mixed up with the wrong people and manipulated into making worse and worse choices. She ultimately ends up getting locked in a tower for the rest of her life, and commits suicide 3 days into her imprisonment, never getting to see her children or freedom again.
• Sovieshu, for all his faults, does end up regretting divorcing Navier and wants to win her back, to no avail. It's pitiful to watch what was once a decent, hard-working emperor descend into madness and despair over something entirely his fault that he could have prevented had he tried to communicate with his wife better.
  • He also reacts badly to Rashta's death. Athough he was basically using her, and she had done things deserving of getting locked away, he still lost someone he genuinely cared for in a horrible way.