Inside Royal Dorian Castle, in the lavish quarters reserved for the highest-ranking noble guests, there now lived a rather peculiar woman.
She stood alone near the tall windows, dressed in a blue-and-white pinafore-style uniform, the uniform of Royal Eden Academy. On anyone else, it might have looked simply elegant. On her, in these royal chambers, it only deepened the strangeness of the sight. She was a very beautiful young woman in her early twenties, with chocolate-brown hair cut to her neck and tied slightly back, and blue-green eyes that now stared past the glass and out into the castle grounds.
Beyond the windows stretched a beautiful courtyard, carefully arranged with pale stone paths, trimmed greenery, and fountains that shone under the daylight with almost unreal clarity. It was the kind of view people dreamed of when they imagined royalty. A place too beautiful, too grand, too still to feel entirely real.
And yet it was real.
