Marie VIII, Great Princess

## Maria VIII

Photo by Edward Chamberlin, 1829

**Maria VIII** (14 September 1810 – 10 June 1897) of the House of Solar, was the 19th Great Princess (as and heir presumptive to the throne of the Solar Kingdom, and the throne of the Lunar Empire. She was the younger child and only daughter of Emperor Wilhelm VII and Empress Augusta Solar. She was born with such an aggressive form of haemophilia that her parents constantly feared for her life. She was the younger sister and the only surviving sibling of Prince Wilhelm VIII (later Emperor Wilhelm VIII). The mother of Tatiana II (the 20th Great Princess), Victoria II (the 4th Divine Princess), and Elaine (the 5th Divine Princess); after her own death, she was granted the standard posthumous style of **Her Imperial Highness, Maria VIII of the Lunar-Solar Empire, the 19th Great Princess**, as well as the posthumous name of **The Great One**. Through marriage to Prince Alexei of Mars, she was the Princess consort of Mars (as Prince Alexei was the first-born child of his parents). She was later canonized after her death as **Saint Maria VII the Great Princess**. Originally **Princess Maria VII** by birth, she was given the name and patronymic *Alexandrina Feodorovna* when she married her husband, Prince Alexei of Mars. She and her immediate family were all killed while attending a peace conference hosted in the southern reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy on a small planet named Andromeda.

A daughter of Empress Augusta, despite being the second child of her parents, and the only daughter, she was doted on due to her hemophiliac condition; it was considered so severe that Princess Marie was never allowed outside, and sharp things were kept away from her in fear that she could cut herself. Maria had lost her eldest first-cousin Princess Fredricka and her aunt Princess Victoria, to hemophilia, and bore two hemophiliac heirs, Princesses Tatiana and Victoria II. Due to the heavy interbreeding in the House of Lunar-Solar, hemophiliacs were fairly common; in fact, Maria and Wilhelm`s mother had inherited it from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. It was only passed down to Maria, while Wilhelm didn`t inherit the disease. Mars (both the Kingdom and the planet) were vassal states underneath the Lunar-Solar Empire, which caused them to clash heads often with Venus and the Venusian Empire. The Russian Queen of Mars, Matrona Rasputin, and the mother of Prince Alexei of Mars disapproved of Venus and their rulers; having personally ordered the attack on them. The Lunar-Solar Empire considered the attack unethical, and Princess Maria called for the execution of her mother and father-in-law, the people euthastically cheered when Queen Matrona was executed as she had been a cruel and dictator-type of ruler. She was also granted an additional sainthood, making her **Saint Marie VII, the Great Princess, and Martyr of the Empire**.

## Early life

   Alexandrina was born on 14 September 1810 at the Wysteria Palace Chapel in Moon-Galactic as *Princess Maria Alexei Augusta May* of the Lunar-Solar Empire. She was the second child and only daughter among the two children of Wilhelm VII, Lunar Emperor and his wife, Empress Augusta Solar, the first daughter of Frederick, Hereditary Prince of Denmark and his wife, Sophia Frederica of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. As an infant, she was noted to exclude a shimmering golden-colored aura.

Maria was baptised on 14 October 1810 (three days before the death of her father) in the Protestant Lutheran Church and given the first name of her mother and three of her mother`s cousins. Her godparents were Princess Victoria (her paternal aunt), Queen Matrona of Dagmar (her paternal aunt), the Duchess of Moon-Galatia (her great-grandaunt), the Queen and King of Mars (her future parents-in-law), and Princess Charlotte of Prussia. Her mother gave her the nickname "Alexa", a play on one of her names (Alexei); this nickname was later adopted by her husband. Her Dagmarian relatives nicknamed her as "Al", to distinguish her from her aunt Alexei, Princess of Coran, who was known within the family as Alexa. Maria`s eldest first cousin Princess Fredricka suffered from hemophilia and died in May 1819 after she was stabbed in the stomach during a attack on the Imperial Palace when Maria was about eight-years-old. As she had only an older brother (Wilhelm), she clung to his side like a leech and became something akin to a personal secretary. Despite that, even Wilhelm worried over her whenever she got small cuts and fussed over her (similar to a mother bear) whenever she got horribly injured.

In November 1820, Maria fell deadly ill which shocked the courtiers of the Imperial court, the other royal courts of the other planets (excluding Earth) were similarly stunned as the Princess had no prior records of previous health problems (excluding her hemophilia).