Isemeine Charus was dead.

She had not had a good life. This was one of the most frequent thoughts she'd had prior to her death.

Despite being born into the most privileged family in her kingdom, Isemeine's life had been one filled with fear.

As a child, she had been told to fear other people, specifically those who might seek to use her as a means of applying leverage to her family.

A family that would not feel burdened were she to disappear.

As an older child, she had grown afraid of animals.

This was not a natural fear, but it had been one that remained with her. She'd forced it down when traveling through the city, always remaining at a safe distance or simply returning to the castle if she couldn't find passage without drawing too near horses, or donkeys, or anything possessing four legs.

As an even older child, she had grown afraid of her sisters.

Once removed from succession, she had been the butt of their jokes on nearly every occasion, no matter how she tried to remain civil and pleasant. It had seemed to her like a cruel joke—like one of the stories she had been told or read as a small child—but that was her life.

Verging on adulthood, she had become afraid of love.

She had loved her family, as all children do. That love had slowly dripped away over the years, beginning with her parents' refusal to remove her from the heartless lessons of Mister Compton, continuing with the execution of Mister Godfry on her father's command, quickening with the mockery of her sisters after she had become My Lady instead of Your Highness, and then depleting in entirety when her father had married her to the most horrible, vile, disgusting, childish, infantile, idiotic, terrifying, awful person she had never imagined existed.

She hated him.

She had imagined, too, that she would find love and romance someday, some dashing young man who would sweep her off her feet and carry her away on a white horse, never to experience any of her fears again.

Instead she had been betrothed to Normannus, and she had felt such fear that eventually the mere sight of him paralyzed her, leaving her shaking and whimpering for hours without the slightest capacity for thought or action.

This was the love she knew.

It was nothing like the stories.

It disgusted her.

It terrified her.

She'd begun to have daydreams. She seldom was capable of sleep at night, unable to rest with that man so near to her. At best she would faint from lack of breath, but that was not a means of rest. She slept at times in the mornings or the early evenings, but too often her sisters or mother would wake her, declaring that the future wife of a Hero could not be so lazy.

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In her daydreams, however, Isemeine fled from Charus City, never to return. She spent her time studying machines and acquiring new knowledge. She imagined a place without fear, where none would terrify her as they had in her home. She was content there.

She did not dream of love anymore.

Love had betrayed her in every possible way.

Hers was a life that could only be improved by the excision of such a hateful feeling.

Then, on one strange day, she had met a strange man.

He spoke oddly, and she had found it amusing.

He knew of machines and science, and she had found it enthralling.

He was another outworlder, and she had again felt fear.

Then he had done something that none had since Mister Godfry had rescued her from that awful, terrifying test of fear.

This strange, knowledgeable outworlder had cared.

But it was not a one-time occurrence, some transaction.

No, he genuinely cared about her.

A part of Isemeine that had been withered and empty for years began to slowly refill, beginning with a single droplet when he had grown visibly furious on her behalf, and it had continued to fill ever so slightly more over the course of the day.

A question had begun to flit about somewhere in the back of her mind as she spent hours living her life without fear for the first time since she had grown conscious of what fear was.

Was this, perhaps, what my life could have been if I'd had a family that loved me?

But Isemeine Charus was dead, and that thought had died with her.

A powerful round of ammunition fired from one of the enchanted guns used by the kingdom's elite royal guard in defense of the royal family had struck her, a princess who was royalty but could not ascend the throne, in the head by accident as she fled at last from her fears.

Now those fears were dead along with her.

The most powerful dungeon core in existence at the moment of her death would say that an end is also the edge of a new beginning.

Isemeine Charus was dead, but now the girl she had become was alive.

She was no longer Isemeine Charus, however.

Isemeine Charus was dead.

She was now Mina, and hers was a future with truly limitless potential.

Mina took a quick breath and turned to Carl, the man who had made her rebirth possible, whom she remembered as sitting in the seat next to her. The seat of the magic-and-steam-powered steamcar she had devised after a year of tutoring from Valgud Flintbrow, who was an ordinary dwarf that her parents had procured from one of the dwarven cities, though he had time and again refused to elaborate in any great detail about himself.

"We've done it!" Mina, a girl without fear, shouted in genuine excitement, feeling another small droplet of love drip down inside her heart. "We've ma