They called her the clingy queen.
Her name was Chasey, and she had earned the title honestly, through an obsession with the crown prince so excessive that the whole court had run out of polite words for it. To stay near the man she loved, she had not hesitated to join his army, so that she might keep watch over him every single day. She wanted his schedule, his corridors, his footsteps. She wanted to be where he was.
Her obsession finally spiralled past every limit the night she dared to sneak into the crown prince's bedroom. There was no explaining an act like that, and no one tried. She was caught red-handed on the spot. The tragic ending arrived shortly after, when the crown prince, unable to bear her frenzied harassment a moment longer, killed her with his own hands in a fit of rage.
In a small modern kitchen, an oven alarm began to shriek.
The young woman who owned the kitchen did not look up. She had put something in to bake a while ago, and the warning sounds registered somewhere at the edge of her attention, along with the first grey threads of smoke curling out from the seam of the oven door. She was absorbed in a story on her phone.
"Well, of course she died," she murmured, thumbing to the next page. "Chasey's death was inevitable. And honestly, well deserved."
The kitchen filled with smoke. She kept reading.
Without warning, the oven erupted. The explosion tore the door off its hinges, and fierce flames burst out and engulfed the entire space in a single breath. She barely managed a startled cry before the raging fire swallowed her whole.
When she woke, a woman in a maid's outfit was crying over her and begging her not to close her eyes.
"My lady, please, please stay awake — don't close your eyes, I beg you—"
The strange clothing was the first thing that made no sense. The girl stared at the ruffled apron, the long skirts, the cap, and her mind simply refused to accept the arrangement. Then the pain arrived, racking her whole body from the shoulders down, and she groaned aloud.
"Does it hurt? Where does it hurt? My lady, tell me, are you all right after the accident—" The maid could not hide her panic. Her hands hovered, terrified to touch anything.
"Accident?" the girl managed.
"The oven exploded," the maid said. "The oven exploded, my lady."
The oven exploded. Of all the sentences in the world, that one. It struck her as completely absurd, and she lay there in the wreck of her own understanding, confused and dizzy, wondering just where on earth she was.
The truth arrived in pieces over the next hours, and every piece was worse than the last. She had travelled through time. She had woken in the body of the villainess Chasey Zeviana — straight out of the novel she had been reading when the flames took her.
Later, sitting in the bath while the maids moved around her with cloths and pitchers, she stared at the water and felt her future close over her head like a lid. Her life, as far as she could tell, was already over. The more she turned it in her mind, the more discouraged she became. She had become Chasey. Not a bystander in the story, not some background noble. Chasey, whose fate was sealed on the page, who was written to die young and to die badly.
Out in the dressing room, the maids had begun to panic.
There was not a single decent dress left in the closet for their young lady to wear. The reason was no mystery to any of them. Chasey had been so consumed with chasing after the crown prince that she had neglected her wardrobe entirely, and everything that remained was either ruined or worn to threads.
One eager maid hurried in with several carefully selected new dresses laid over her arms. She held them up one at a time, glowing with the pleasure of a servant who knows her mistress's taste exactly.
The new Chasey looked at them and felt something go wrong behind her ribs.
"Wait," she said. "Wait a moment."
The maid, delighted, took this for interest and produced the next armful — provocative things, cut high and low and open, the young lady's favourite style. "Whichever you like best, my lady," she urged. "Please, take your pick."
Chasey did not take her pick. She rose and walked out to where she could see the whole of the mansion spread beneath her, all that grandeur, and she stood there hesitating, wondering whether her decision to change herself was truly the right one. It would be so much easier to be what everyone already expected.
"My lady," the maid said behind her, astonished, "you swore you would never wear anything different."
"Those dresses are dreadful," Chasey said bluntly. "I can't wear them any more."
She turned around and made it plain: she intended to change her style completely, and she wanted every one of the old gaudy, revealing outfits thrown away. All of them. Today.
The maid stood frozen, unable to believe that her mistress, who had been so stubborn about her fashion for years, had done a complete about-face in the space of an afternoon.
Afterward the maid watched her mistress's retreating figure with her mind full of questions she did not dare ask. Then, a moment later, a wave of relief went through her. Perhaps the young lady had finally come to her senses. Perhaps she had returned to normal at last.
Chasey turned back at the doorway.
"One more thing," she said. "I want you to prepare something for me. Right away."
Word of the young lady blowing up the oven and ruining all the food travelled fast among the soldiers.
They gossiped over the empty tables, torn between worry about their stomachs and dread about whatever troublesome scheme their young lady might pull next. "No lunch again." "Forget lunch, what's she going to do tomorrow?" "Don't say it. Don't put it in the air."
One soldier stopped mid-sentence and froze, staring at a figure approaching from the far end of the yard.
It was Chasey. But she came on with an entirely different air about her, dressed in a crisp military uniform, her stride poised and unhurried, and every eye in the yard turned to follow her. The transformation in both her looks and her bearing left the onlookers stunned, unable to trust what they were seeing.
She stopped in front of the crown prince's office and took a moment to admire the grandeur of the place: the height of the doors, the polished stone, the guards standing like statues. From the original novel she knew exactly what this building was. It was where the prince worked.
It was also the very place where he would kill her at the age of eighteen, for stalking him.
"Emily," she said. "How old am I, exactly? Right now."
The maid's face drained of colour. Her mistress had hit her head far harder than anyone realised — she had lost her memories, she had lost her mind, they would all be dismissed —
"My lady," Emily said, close to tears, "you celebrated your fifteenth birthday not long ago. There was a party. Everyone was very happy."
Fifteen.
Chasey let out a slow breath and felt her shoulders come down for the first time since she had woken in this world. Fifteen. That meant three years. Three whole years to change her fate and avoid that ending.
Inside the office, Crown Prince Raven was reading a report on the oven explosion and the fainting of Lady Chasey during cooking.
"Was anyone else hurt?" he asked, without lifting his eyes from the page.
"No, Your Highness. No one else was affected."
"Good," the prince said.
He said it casually, as a man says a word he has not bothered to think about, and it made perfectly clear that he had no concern whatsoever for whether the lady in question lived or died. His subordinate, standing at attention beside the desk, looked startled and rather flustered at such a heartless reaction.
The prince's gaze went cold and full of disdain, as it always did when that name came up.
"You had better get used to the environment here in the Distan army," he told his deputy commander. "Quickly." Then, after a pause: "Have you had the chance to meet Lady Chasey yet?"
"Not yet, Your Highness."
"Then take this as sincere advice. Avoid her as much as you can. It will spare you a great deal of needless trouble."
The deputy commander took the warning seriously and filed it away. This was someone he must be especially cautious of.
"You'll know her at a distance," Raven went on. "There is a strange, ominous aura around her entire body. You will feel it before you see her." A memory surfaced, and his expression darkened with genuine horror. "She once offered me waffles that, despite the name, contained not one trace of anything resembling waffle."
The deputy commander said nothing.
"Every time I see that woman's face," the crown prince said flatly, "I feel nauseated and exhausted. Avoid her. At all costs."
The moment he finished speaking, a clear voice called through the door, asking permission to enter.
It was her.
The deputy commander stood very still, silently marvelling at the crown prince's rotten luck, that the monster should appear the instant her name left his mouth.