A red-haired princess stood at the rail of her balcony, looking out over her father's kingdom.
Far from that balcony, in another world entirely, a Japanese high school girl was counting the hours until she could sit down with her favorite girls' romance game, Our Ray of Light. She never reached her save file. A high-speed truck came out of nowhere, and in place of an evening with her game it gave her a new life inside it.
At that same moment, in a room of the royal palace, Pride collapsed.
When she opened her eyes again, the girl understood that she was not herself anymore. She was in the body of eight-year-old Pride Royal Ivy, the final boss of the game she loved, and every memory of her previous life had come with her.
She lay still on the bed and let the knowledge settle. From the game she remembered exactly who Pride Royal Ivy was: a cruel queen who terrorized her own country. She remembered how Pride would torture the heroine of the game, her own little sister, Tiara. She remembered how Pride would torture Tiara's love interests, one after another. She remembered that Pride died at the end of it. Lying there in a child's body, the girl was horrified.
She was still turning it over when the door swung open and her father hurried in. Albert had heard his daughter had collapsed and had come to see her with his own eyes.
Pride looked up at him, and remembered with a jolt that she had not yet met Tiara.
So she asked him about Tiara.
Her father was stunned. His daughter had never been told she had a sister, and she had spoken the name aloud. She could see the future. The news delighted him, because in this world every person was born with a power of their own, and the ability to foresee what was coming was the mark of the queen of Frieia. Pride watched his happy face and felt a small confusion take root. This was not how the scene had gone in the game.
After he left, she sat with what she had done. Her foresight was the very thing that would make her queen. She turned the rest of it over as well: what the queen did afterward, how she used the throne, how she killed Tiara and Tiara's lovers on the way to the game's bad ending. Pride shook her head hard. She did not want to kill good people.
And then she remembered a future event that could not wait, and she was off the bed and running for the window while her maid shrieked at her to come back.
Pride climbed to the edge of the window and called down. Below, in the courtyard, her father was preparing to leave in his carriage. Albert looked up, shocked to see her leaning out into the air, and Pride shouted her warning down to him: the carriage had a broken wheel, and it would be the end of him.
A hard gust of wind came across the wall and knocked her off balance. Everyone in the courtyard watched her go, and a servant caught her just in time.
In the game, Pride had not foreseen the accident until it was far too late. This time, her memories of another life had reached her father before the wheel did. The girl sagged in the servant's arms, relieved, and only then noticed the faces around her. Her servants were terrified. They were begging her for mercy, apologizing for letting their princess come so close to danger, and there was real fear in their voices, because the Pride they knew was a cold, heartless villainess.
She started to cry.
She cried herself out, and then she slept, while her father spoke of getting her an adoptive sibling. In her dreams she was given one of the evil Pride's memories, of an innocent boy being tortured for her amusement.
When she woke, Pride walked toward a certain room. As she went, she counted the ways the story had already come apart. Her father should have died in the carriage accident. Her mother should have followed him soon after, from a broken heart. That was what had made Pride queen so young, and that was what had started her down the tyrant's path. Now none of it had happened.
In that room she met Stale, seven years old, a commoner child — and, in the game, her future husband.
Her father explained that the boy had been handcuffed so that he could not use his teleportation ability. Pride looked at the cuffs on a seven-year-old's wrists and felt sick that a child had been taken from his mother and chained up in a palace. She reached out and shook his hand.
Then her father told her that Stale would be signing a servant's contract with her, and the memory arrived. She knew what came next: Stale could not read, and he would be tricked into signing a predatory fealty contract, one that made him a servant who could not refuse any command she gave him.
She decided to change it. That night, she went to Stale's room and gave him the key to his handcuffs.
He refused it.
If he escaped again, he said, his mother would be hurt. Or the castle would simply take another one of his friends in his place, and he did not want that. Pride understood then that he had already said his goodbyes properly and come here with his resolve steeled. He thanked her for her concern, and she left.
The next day, Stale signed the contract with Pride and became her younger brother and her future husband.
Watching the two children, a blue-haired man named Gilbert congratulated the princess, mockingly. Her father scolded him for teasing his daughter and dragged him away by the arm.
Later, Pride took Stale to the library. She was delighted to have found a playmate, and she kept trying to get him to call her by her first name, which the shy boy found very hard to do.
They ran together through the halls, and then Stale collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
Pride sat with him afterward while he rested in his room, and worked out what the exhaustion meant: he had been studying without rest, working himself down to nothing, trying to become someone worthy of the royal family. And that brought another of the evil Pride's deeds up out of her memory. That Pride had made Stale take his own mother's life for her amusement. The guilt of it made her feel ill.
Stale began to wake, and Pride hugged him. Blushing, still half asleep, he heard her apologize for separating him from his mother, and heard her promise to do her very best for him and for the people of her country. Then she gave him something else, an ominous thing from such a sweet girl: a request that he kill her, if she ever became evil.
He went back to sleep, and dreamed.
In the dream, a sadistic Pride forced him to murder his own mother. The maniacal woman left him trembling in despair, and then forbade him to even end his own life after committing such an atrocity. All the shattered boy could do was curse Pride and long for revenge.
The nightmare woke him, and it confused him. He walked the corridors of the house, and remembered that he still had Pride's handkerchief in his pocket. He remembered being taken away from his crying mother. He remembered his plan, which had been to get close to Pride so that one day he could reunite with his mother.
But Pride had turned out to be a kind, gentle girl instead of the selfish princess he had built in his head, and that left him with nothing to hold on to.
His thoughts were interrupted by Pride herself. She hugged him and called him into a room, and inside he was handed a letter from his mother, full of her well-wishes. Stale began to tear up from homesickness while Albert explained that his mother was being provided with regular financial aid, and that he would be allowed to exchange letters with her once a year — at Pride's request.
He knew what that meant. She was breaking palace rules for him. And he could not understand why the kind girl hugging him believed she could one day turn evil. He swore, standing there, that he would protect Pride forever and make her happy.
Across the room, Gilbert watched the two children with a displeased look on his face.