After a relatively peaceful sleep spent dreaming of poor Artem getting the rest she had continuously denied him, Regina woke up to the chirping of the birds and Henrietta’s pokes.


    “Wake up,” Henrietta mercilessly said as Regina groaned.


    “By the blood,” Regina spluttered as she tried to shift away from her cousin’s prodding finger. “Hen, can you not wake me gently?”


    “Not when it is the day of your engagement ball,” Henrietta replied, her pokes stopping as Regina bolted upright. “You have another long day ahead of you… and you know our family wants you to make a perfect debut.”


    “How lovely,” Regina muttered as she finally began dragging herself out of bed and toward a day sure to be filled with her two least favorite events… assassination and socialization.


    Grimly aware that she needed to prove her worth to her family as a political piece while dodging the poisons that might land her body in the middle of the Alpin treasure vault, Regina got dressed and departed for the palace with her family.


    Once there, she was left in a private dressing room with Henrietta, who she dismissed as fast as she could.


    “I need,” Regina plaintively said, “some time to myself. I am taking such a… a giant leap in life as I come closer to being one with my beloved Artem. I need some privacy to – to –”


    “Please do not say anything else,” Henrietta replied, already backing away from Regina. “I do not need more details on how you plan to be one with your flower prince..”


    “What in Carcosa do you mean–” had been all Regina could say before Henrietta had vanished, looking as though a pack of hungry Sheridans were nipping at her heels.


    Still, as odd as Henrietta’s actions were, Regina did not question her luck in driving her closest friend away.


    As tolerant as Henrietta usually was, Regina did not want to explain why she had to ransack the room she was in to search for hidden sources of poison.


    Once Henrietta was out of sight, Regina wrapped her handkerchief around her face and pulled out some gloves from her bodice to cover her hands. Properly covered, Regina began immediately searching every surface she could find as she tried to think about how poison might find her.


    “My assassin might have tried some kind of contact poison,” Regina muttered. “Perhaps it could be something I am supposed to touch with my hands or my face. Could it have been a substance placed on something I might touch… like my armoire or my face powder or my dress?”


    Her face powder and dress for the ball that night would likely be safe. Her father had repeatedly stressed that he had gone to great lengths to buy her only the finest clothing and accessories for her engagement ball. Said clothing and accessories were being guarded by loyal Sheridan retainers who would hardly let anyone else tamper with them.


    (After all, the Sheridan family only wanted their relatives to die if that was their will.)


    However, the furniture at the royal palace could easily be contaminated by contact poison… and if Regina opened every drawer and searched for hidden compartments, she might find the poison meant to kill her.


    Unfortunately, Regina’s thorough, if time-limited, search for poison was hardly noiseless.


    Thus, when Henrietta came back with eyebrows raised, saying, “I appreciate your ardor for Prince Artem but can neither of you be a little more discreet?”


    ...Henrietta found Regina doing something far more embarrassing than listening to Artem’s serenade.


    “Er,” Regina said, flushing as she was caught ransacking the beautiful dressing room like a bridal bandit. “I just… love hearing the sound of wooden drawers coming off their hinges? As does Artem? Which is why I thought I would start practicing before the actual wedding?”


    “Makes sense,” Henrietta replied, looking around the disheveled room with something akin to respect. “I enjoy the noise that comes from lifting large vases up and down.”


    “Huh,” Regina said, blinking as she moved away from the ravaged drawers and took off her gloves. “That does explain your amazing physique.”


    Yet before Regina could say much more, Henrietta disappeared while mumbling something about commissioning more pottery… just as a nearly unnoticeable servant arrived to take Regina to her next destination.


    “My lady,” the man said, his features as bland as his voice, “your breakfast awaits…  as do your parents. Please follow me.”


    <center>


    ~?<big>?</big>?~


    </center>


    There were no assassination attempts as Regina made her way to the breakfast room.


    However, as Regina stared at the lavish spread before her, she feared this meal might turn into the means of her murder.


    “Why are you not eating?” her mother asked after she had lovingly buttered a fresh biscuit with one of her ever present knives. “I even told the palace chefs to make you little cakes as a treat.”


    ‘Well, mother,’ Regina thought but did not say, ‘this is because normally I do not need to fear being poisoned at a routine meal.’


    After all, even if the little, cream-filled cakes in front of Regina looked delectable…


    Her assassin might easily murder her by coating her meals with poison while the palace chefs were not looking. It was even possible the palace chefs themselves were baking horrifying poisons into the center of the little cakes, knowing no creature on earth could resist that combination of cream and sweetness.


    In fact, her food was not the only thing that could be contaminated. For all Regina knew, her assassin might have targeted her plates or cutlery!


    Thus, everything in front of Regina was far too dangerous for her to even touch.


    Yet even as her parents stared at her and she stared at her forbidden cakes, Regina felt her head swim and her mouth water.


    She had not eaten anything at the party last night, caught as she was in a social whirl, and Henrietta’s merciless morning call had left no time to sate her appetite. At this rate, Regina feared that if she went without eating for much longer, she might faint in the middle of the engagement ball and die by the hands of her angry disgraced family.


    On the other hand, Regina realized, just because the assassin wanted to murder her did not mean they could possibly get away with murdering all the Sheridans around her…


    …Including her parents, who had been happily eating for the last fifteen minutes with no signs of discoloration at any extremities or frothing from the mouth.


    So, with a feral snarl born of equal parts desperation and hunger, Regina almost leaped across the table to begin eating from her parents’ plates with her bare hands.


    The items on her parents’ plates were some of the only things she could safely eat in the palace. After all, they had already taste-tested it for her.


    It was only when Regina was halfway through her father’s steak and her mother’s biscuits that she finally realized how horrified both of her parents looked… and realized she needed to make an excuse before she was deemed defective enough to destroy.


    “I just,” Regina weakly noted, “decided in the last period of life I have with my… er… loving family, I wanted to share one last thing with you…”


    Her parents’ clear confusion only deepened, to Regina’s utter embarrassment and horror.


    Thus, in clear desperation, she grabbed her father’s remaining steak and mother’s last biscuit in her hands and thrust them into the air, as though she were going to battle swathed in gravy.


    “I want to share our last meal not just at the same table but from the same plates!” Regina cried. “Mother and father… I know our family has not been the same ever since…”


    Regina swallowed, unable to continue that particular sentence, even in service of saving her own life. However, she managed to rally with a great lie to distract from her mistake, “...But I love you both so much, I just wanted to do whatever I could to be closer to you!”


    Then, Regina crammed items from both of the meals into her mouth at the same time, furiously chewed, and said, “We must be united one final time before I am wrenched away by marriage. This is one last time where we can be the family we were meant to be!”


    It was all lies and nonsense, of course. Regina did not harbor any hopes that she and her parents would ever turn back to what they had been in the past, before her sister had died…


    The foolish part of her that had ever longed for such a thing had long since been destroyed.


    To her surprise, Regina’s ridiculous words actually caused her parents to soften. In front of her astonished eyes, her father’s perpetual anxiousness and mother’s cynical mask both wavered for a moment until they looked nearly the same way they did in her distant memories.


    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    Unfortunately, her mother then asked, “Does that mean you wish to call for dessert?”


    That was when Regina grabbed her mother’s goblet of wine, drank it to the last drop, and ran off with the hasty excuse that her dearest Artem was calling her.


    <center>


    ~?<big>?</big>?~


    </center>


    Having hastily fled from the dining room and into a random hallway, Regina found herself lost, confused, and deeply nervous that she might not be able to find a potential escape route before some lurking assassin found her.


    She had had a single glimpse of red hair the third time she had circled the same hallway complex and attempted to follow the person in the butler outfit, only to find herself even more hopelessly lost.


    ‘By the blood,’ Regina thought in increasing panic and annoyance, ‘were the architects behind this place inspired by bees?!’


    Before she could turn back and try to navigate the complex series of corridors linking all the different rooms of the royal palace,  Regina found herself stumbling directly into the path of someone with the same brilliant, blood-red hair of the butler she had been attempting to follow.


    However, this person was dressed as a maid.


    Blinking, she timidly asked the servant, “Were you not just wearing a butler’s outfit?”


    The servant just smiled and said, “Perhaps. Memory is a strange and changing power, is it not?


    Before Regina could say anything else, the servant bowed and said, “Please follow me to the tea parlor, Lady Regina. You have yet more people to meet.”


    Before Regina could wonder how the servant knew her name, she was walking down a strange hallway that she had never previously noticed…


    …that suddenly opened into an outdoor parlor.


    Twisting to thank the servant for their service, she was shocked to realize both the hallway and the servant had vanished.


    Disconcerted, Regina turned back to the parlor in front of her…


    …only to find herself in front of all the nobles she had seen in her first vision, all bowing to her in unison.


    “Please,” Regina spluttered as she saw the downturned heads of Dukes Neville and Kuzey, Marquesses La Belle and Poisson, and Lord Robin Buren as they paid respects to her new position as a soon-to-be-princess. “I-it would please me greatly if you were to rise. I hope to establish friendships with all of you and your families!”


    After all, the more “friends” Regina had, the more valuable it would be to keep her alive… and the less time she would be alone and vulnerable to assassins.


    Robin was the first to rise out of his bow. As he did so Regina could have sworn he even winked.


    “Then friends we shall be,” Robin cheerfully said. “I could never refuse the friendship of such a lovely and lively lady!”


    “Do try to repress your instincts to flirt with our future princess,” Duke Neville said, sighing. “Lady Regina, please do not take offense at anything that comes from the mouth of Lord Robin. He would flirt with a plank of wood if it was shaped sufficiently like a woman.”


    “That was one time,” Robin responded, brow twitching a little, “and it was not my fault that you shaped the tree to look so… buxom.”


    As Duke Neville raised his hand to his brow to massage it, Robin turned to Regina again and smiled.


    “Do not worry, my dear princess. No one could ever mistake you for anything but the reason why Prince Artem is the luckiest member of the royal family.”


    Regina felt a furious blush spread across her face… a blush that faded fast when the rest of the noblemen began scrutinizing her.


    Unfortunately, even if Robin Buren was willing to be kind, the rest of the noblemen were far less… supportive.


    “Have you ever thought,” Marquess Poisson asked, “of incorporating more fish in your diet? Fish oil would give your hair a little more… luster. Perhaps you could even massage it into your skin nightly.”


    “If she does that,” Duke Kuzey thoughtfully noted, “then she had better take care it is the right kind of fish. If a feet fish helps soften skin, it is only to better penetrate that skin with their teeth.”


    Before Regina could think through what that even meant or worse, have another traumatic flashback memory to that hideous rose-gold feet-fish mask grasping her corpse in her last vision –


    Marquess La Belle interrupted, with a sharp and condescending click of his tongue.


    “No,” the beautiful red-haired man snapped, even as he stared at Regina in abject dismay. “You are all fools! Why try to prescribe a long-term solution to an immediate problem? No amount of oil from feet nor fish will help her dull complexion at tonight’s ball. What she needs is this.”


    Then, to Regina’s horror, he pulled out and then opened a small compact full of face powder –


    Face powder that could be laced with anything.


    “Hold still, Lady Regina,” Marquess La Belle said with a terrifying look in his eyes. “I promise this will not hurt… much.”


    Regina had no time to think.


    With a level of gymnastic ability Regina had never realized she possessed, her hand shot out and…


    …unerringly knocked the compact flying into the air-


    Showering everyone but her with powder as she dove to the side to avoid the spray.


    Regina stared at five of the most powerful noblemen in Carcosa that she had just covered in potential poison. There was only one thought left in her mind.


    ‘Perhaps if I actually kill off the entire backbone of the upper nobility, my family might help me live out of sheer joy at their new political position.’


    Unfortunately, it soon became clear that nobody in this room was going to die immediately, thus meaning that Regina actually had to deal with the situation. In a fit of terror and panic, Regina borrowed the spirit of the only person who could help her… Artem at his most ridiculous.


    “I am but a pale moon in the presence of so many beautiful suns!” she said, babbling but trying to desperately remember some of Artem’s more poetic lines. “Such color is only meant for people as – er – as already colorful as all of you! So… so… so what can I do but share the bounty from Marquess La Belle’s hand?!”


    Regina braced herself, wondering how quickly she would die for not only the initial powder, but the insult of her stupid words. Would it be through a quick thrust or would someone challenge her to a magical duel? Which would be less painful?


    As Regina closed her eyes in resignation, she suddenly opened them in shock as…


    …she felt her hand grasped and then kissed by Marquess La Belle.


    “My dearest princess!” the marquess cried, his eyes now alight with wonder rather than deep irritation. “I had no idea you valued beauty so deeply! Indeed…”


    Now, the marquess sighed as he closed his eyes, seeming overcome.


    “Even if you have no beauty of your own,” Marquess La Belle tenderly said, “you can still see it in others, particularly me. My dear princess, even as you are as plain as a piece of paper, your discernment makes you worth cultivating.”


    “Er,” Regina replied, managing a tight smile. “How very… kind of you to see that in me.”


    “Indeed!” Marquess Poisson cried, coming to hold Regina’s other hand as she now turned to him in dumbfounded shock. “Your eloquence is far beyond what I expected. If your schedule allows in the days to come, please do visit one of our parties!”


    Apparently feeling left out, Duke Neville and Lord Robin then approached, though the former seemed far less enamored with Regina than the other victims of her panic.


    “I, too, thank you for your compliment,” Duke Neville said dryly, “as well as the notion that my complexion needed powdering.”


    Before Regina could apologize, Duke Neville snapped his fingers and Robin held out a lovely white flower that Regina had never previously seen.


    “In return for my burst of color,” the Duke said, “I would have the pale moon accept an equally pale flower. What do you say, my lady?”


    Thus, Regina was left to stare in horror as Robin’s flower-holding hand came ever close to her as her hands were held captive –


    “I am the palest moon here,” the silver-haired Duke interrupted calmly as the rest of the room gawked at him. “So this present should belong to me.”


    With those words, Duke Kuzey suddenly sent a wave of ice around the flower, pulling it toward him before crushing the poor bloom.


    For a frozen moment, Regina could only stare at the Duke of the North’s casual display of power. As the shock slowly released its hold, Regina realized that Duke Kuzey was not only strange but also terrifyingly powerful… and dangerous.


    Then, with an agility she had never seen in the man who mostly resembled a frozen pole, Duke Kuzey disentangled her hands from the two marquesses and spun her around three times, until she was away from all the other nobles the room contained.


    Turning to Regina with unblinking eyes, the Duke Kuzey whispered, “Even if you are unlike a three-headed raccoon and cannot turn your head in all directions for attacks, I admire how well you twist. It is entertaining. Therefore, I am going to give you a chance to prove yourself agile.”


    As Regina stumbled back in shock, Duke Kuzey turned around, bowed to the rest of the nobles and said, “While our future princess occupies herself with the rest of her preparations for her ball, I have prepared a sign of friendship for my fellow lords.”


    With a flourish, Duke Kuzey produced two blades made of glittering ice for himself… before making copies for every other man in the room.


    “Tell me,” Duke Kuzey said with soft, silky menace. “Have any of you gentlemen heard of the Northern custom of sword dancing?”


    On that ominous note, Regina decided to take advantage of the distraction and flee.


    It was only once she had entered the convenient archway that she realized she was back in the same strange hallway that had vanished before her previously. As she tried to determine how that had happened, it was less of a surprise when she looked up and the same elegant but eerie red-headed servant was standing in front of her once more.


    “My lady,” the servant, now a butler once more, said softly. “If you would please follow me,  Prince Artem and his… special guests have been waiting for you and time is a terrible thing to waste.”


    “Special guests?” Regina cried. “Who? What? When? Where? How do you change outfits so quickly?!”


    The servant did not answer and Regina followed as if her feet were moving on their own.


    “I know,” she said softly, “that time is precious, but what can I do when I have so little of it?”


    For the first time, the servant paused in their stride and looked back at her, golden eyes flashing.


    “Perhaps,” they said mildly, “you need to find the time that was taken… and take it back.”


    As Regina stared in utter horror, the world seemed to shift around her and her head ached and her eyes closed…


    When she re-opened her eyes, Regina frowned.


    “What was I doing?” she said.


    Shrugging, she continued forward into the strangely familiar garden.


    “Perhaps,” she said with a soft smile, “I do have time to smell the flowers.”