The white room was an assault on the senses. It smelled of ozone and cold sterility, a scent that promised clinical cruelty. My body, drained of its divine might, felt every ache, every point of contact with the hard platform. My muscles, starved of their power, were heavy and unresponsive. But the true torture was the monitors. My own defeat played back for me in a silent, endless loop—the strain, the collapse, the utter helplessness.

As if sensing my thoughts, the Architect gestured toward the platform I was bound to. “A foundation of pain is necessary for deconstruction,” he stated calmly.

I didn’t understand until I felt it. From the surface of the slab beneath my feet, two small, vice-like clamps materialized, pressing into the tender arches he had brutalized earlier. A low, grinding pressure began, not as intense as his hand, but relentless. It was a constant, throbbing agony, a deep, sickening ache designed to be inescapable, a foundation of misery upon which he could build. I gasped, my back arching against the restraints as the torment flared anew. My bare feet, now pinned and subjected to this automated torture, felt like they were being crushed by the weight of my own failure.

The Architect approached, his footsteps echoing in the tomb-like silence. He moved to my head, standing over me. I was forced to stare up at him, my neck held immobile by the alloy collar. His shadow fell across my face.

“The Boots, a symbol of your journey, your warrior’s path,” he lectured, his voice a soft poison. “But this…” His gloved fingers hovered near my brow, near my tiara. “This is different. This is a symbol of royalty. Of wisdom. Of a mind they say is divinely inspired. But all crowns can be removed.”

My tiara was not mere jewelry. Forged by Hephaestus, it was a badge of my station as Princess of Themyscira and an extension of my will—my star, my weapon. A hot, defiant rage, all I had left, burned in my chest. He would not take this from me.

His fingers touched the golden metal at my temples. I tried to jerk my head away, a futile gesture that only scraped my skin against the inside of my collar. His touch was firm, exploratory.

“Ah, I see,” he murmured, a hint of discovery in his voice. “It is not merely worn. It is fitted. Embedded.”

He was right. The tiara was secured by two sharp, pin-like points that pressed into my temples, a constant reminder of my duties. A proper, swift removal was painless. But he had no intention of being proper or swift.

With agonizing slowness, he began to pull it away from my forehead. Instead of lifting it cleanly, he dragged it. The sharp points dug into my skin, scraping across my temples. A searing, white-hot line of pain followed the tiara’s path. It felt like he was peeling my royalty away from my very flesh. I squeezed my eyes shut, a strangled groan escaping my lips as the metal tore at my skin. The constant, grinding pressure in my feet was a roaring bonfire of pain, but this new agony at my head was a lightning strike—sharp, focused, and utterly degrading.

He was uncrowning me. This man, with his cold hands and colder heart, was stripping me of my birthright. The humiliation was a physical force, a crushing weight on my chest that made it hard to breathe. The tear tracks on my face were cold now, but I could feel fresh tears of pain and shame welling, and I hated myself for them. I was Diana, daughter of Hippolyta, and I was being broken like a child’s toy.

With a final, sickening scrape, the tiara came free. The sudden coolness of the air on my bleeding temples was a shock. The Architect held the golden circlet in his hands, examining it as if it were a curious fossil. He turned it over, his thumb tracing the star at its center. My star. He had taken my star.

He glanced at the monitors. On the screens, the image of my face, twisted in agony, was replaced by a new, live feed. It showed my head, now bare. Two small trickles of blood, starkly red against my pale skin, ran from the scrapes on my temples down toward my jaw. I looked defeated. I looked broken.

“The crown of wisdom is removed,” the Architect declared to the empty room, holding the tiara aloft like a spoil of war. “And what is left? Not a princess. Not a strategist. Just an animal in a trap, bleeding and screaming.”

He placed my tiara on a small, sterile pedestal next to the platform, another trophy added to his collection. The constant, grinding pain in my feet continued its wretched rhythm. The sharp, stinging pain on my brow was a fresh brand of shame. And before me, the monitors displayed my own bloody, uncrowned face for me to witness. The barrage was relentless. He had taken my foundation. He had taken my crown. And I was left to wonder, with a terror that eclipsed all the pain, what piece of me he intended to carve away next.