Once upon a time, a young woman in a game found the scrap heap of her potential existence.

Of course, she didn’t know she was in a game. Not at the time–and she still doesn’t, now that you mention it. (Her suspicions are currently pointed squarely at herself, wondering if her family was right all along. Has her unladylike temper actually given way to a severe case of ‘losing all her marbles’?)

Her mother passed away barely a week earlier. The young woman (Antoinette Delphine, but you guessed that already) stops her father’s enlisted gang of house-servants from clearing the room out and tidying it of all evidence of her mother’s shameful sickness (and, as a consequence, of her life).

“Let me go through everything first,” Antoinette Delphine says, already stepping through the doorway. “Go ahead and tell him what I take; I don’t care.”

Now, before we go on…something important to remember is that no story of any kind is flat. They’re never what you see on the page, the screen, or the stage. Through ideation, creating, revising, chopping, sawing, and screwing, they make vast armoires where all sorts of things can be tucked in: things proudly on display, things you have to riffle around for, and things that fall between the slats into the dark corners.

While searching in her mother’s room, Antoinette Delphine finds one of those fallen-away things. She has no idea that’s what she’s found. Fallen-away things haven’t even existed until recently, because the world is only just now waking up and yawning to accept another young woman who would bring more fallen-away things to light.

(Antoinette Delphine will find more of these things later on. For example, when she flicks through auction clothes in the palace and finds fashions from worlds she’s never heard of. Or when she slides into plots that have no place for her, and so everyone else who counts on her to prop up their scripts run around and around and around in little circles of motive and expression.)

What Antoinette Delphine finds is a scrapbook of sorts. Nothing is tacked in, so, really, it’s more like a jumbled-up collection, all out of order, of article clippings, political chapbook pages, and bits of anonymous letters.

Antoinette Delphine sits on the old chair where she once oversaw her sick mother, and begins to read.

One paper, neatly typed and copied with an immaculate printing press:

The heiress has no outlet other than jealousy. She skipped her season–don’t worry about the accuracy there–probably because of her notoriously bad attitude. Maybe everyone turned her away. She’s been a problem since birth. That keeps it simple. Any kind of arc wastes our time.

Another, the page falling apart in her hand, like someone had tried to discard it like old trash:

There’s something following her that keeps her paranoid and erratic. Scandal? Rumour? Haven’t we seen that so many times? It’s predictable, but in a way that feels right. Those elite always have something slimy in their shadows…

Another, a jote-noted half-though that never made it to print:

Prediction: the heiress ropes one of the men into becoming engaged to her, but something cuts her reign short at the eleventh hour.

A long, two-person note in the margins, slant-handed:

What about her father? Would be easy to communicate. We’ve proven he can keep various other families quiet on how he’s screwed them over, so he’d find it easy to keep his daughter quiet, too.

No time and no budget. It’s not about her. It might complicate things to add too much to her. We’re running out of script space when it comes to the important stuff, anyways. The Chapelle script is still eight pages too short, and once we fix that, we have to be pretty economical with Late Spring.

Fine…even if they don’t make it to print, though, I like keeping these things in mind. It helps frame a person. Especially since we have a new girl on deck who will be getting these scripts once my contract is up. Like, would that control make her hungry for attention? Would she only believe in using underhanded methods to get what she wants? Volatility is what we’ve been leaning on…it feels convenient to me?

Antoinette Delphine was raised in a family who has no love for the public, not really.

Her grandfather chortled over his ability to spin any burbling, bubbling social upheaval to his advantage. He didn’t believe that people had true morals, just fads and fashions that he could twist to sell more product, gain more trust, and it always worked.

Her father sees people as chess pieces to move this way and that. He was born into the game and he plays it well.

And her mother was exhausted at the prospect of appearing all the time, of being seen every moment of her life. She wanted to get ahead of the papers and the stocks and the other businesses and the science, too, when they turned their scrutinizing eyes on magic.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

So yes, it makes sense, Antoinette Delphine supposes, that her mother would keep clippings like this. How she got ahold of them, who knows, but creating a map of how they were planning on framing her daughter in their papers and their whispers…it makes sense.

She feels confused too. Antoinette Delphine has led a life of extremely bad behaviour. And why? she wonders. Volatility, they say? I don’t know.

She reads on, baffled and heartbroken and frustrated:

Don’t think too hard about it; I know you like her, but readers are familiar with the trope. Her goals don’t need to be unpredictable (it’s fine, she isn’t very smart or interesting), but what she does needs to be, how she expresses them. She’s single-minded: boys. Winning. That’s it.

But, okay, I found some really old notes about her past that you could use. Keys: ‘she has no choices.’ ‘Always lashing out.’ ‘Digging her own grave.’ If she let go of everything, maybe she wouldn’t be in so much trouble all the time.

Right, okay, but why? The new girl’s expressed some confusion. I think she wants Antoinette Delphine to be more than she is: a bitch.

Who knows? Maybe she’s got some repressed feelings of her own. Haha. Romantic rival doesn’t just have to focus on the boys.

Antoinette tosses these into the fire, pissed. She moves on to the rest of the room.

But she will think of them later on. Many times, in fact. When discussing journalists with Etienne, who in some ways, is trapped by the vice of public opinion like she is. When her temper boils over. When she hears yet another circular argument about her behaviour and the way she can’t do anything right. When a strange new girl tells her that she isn’t very nice, in a way like she’s intrigued by it.

She will think of them as she looks Remi in the face, readying another immature plan. She will think, digging her own grave, and volatile, and bitch, and repressed.

~*~

A town away, Sylvain Laflamme is discovering his own fallen-away pieces of his story.

Actually, Sylvain Laflamme is the first to notice something’s a little…off. He’s been scripted to notice things, after all, remember? Whether he expresses them clearly is another story.

While Antoinette Delphine thinks she’s going a little bonkers, Sylvain Laflamme sees his new perspective as a good thing. His world seems…wider. His acquaintances, more complicated. His emotions, richer. His life is so much more full of texture.

His secret that he’ll bite down on like a cyanide pill is that he thinks that he’s waking up from the depressive doze his father’s arrest put him in.

On the same day that Antoinette Delphine discovers the notes from the “journalists,” he meets with a private investigator that he doesn’t remember hiring. They meet in the man’s office a couple towns over. Sylvain Laflamme has never heard of this town. He doesn’t see how he could have missed it; the investigator comes with his own unique set of regional idioms and interesting clothes, after all, so it must be a place with a rich history.

“Let’s go over this from the start, alright?” the investigator says. He opens a folder of information about M. Laflamme, all the way to the beginning, to the beginning that Sylvain Laflamme sort of forgot was there…a beginning that suddenly comes into perfect clarity.

“It’s a lot less complex than it seemed before,” he says (brief moments of honest vulnerability, like these, are a new part of his life, too). “I feel like I can tease it apart.”

More precisely, he feels like there are threads to tease apart at all, instead of a miasma of half-written facts.

He feels clear now, but the introduction of the new young woman will make him feel just as crazy as Antoinette Delphine.

~*~

The other love interests feel the difference less starkly, but they certainly feel something.

Remi Fontaine barely notices.

He simply feels so incredibly lucky these days–lucky he has so many friends, lucky he has parents who he adores and who understand him, lucky he’s smart enough to coast in school, lucky he’s had so many experiences that made him laugh. Remi Fontaine doesn’t concern himself with the fallen-away pieces (and just between us, there aren’t really any for him. He was the last love interest invented and had the least allotted script space). He has more to admire than ever before.

Etienne Alarie feels as if his world has shrunk.

Very, very suddenly, and very, very painfully. It’s all too clear, too loud, too close. The castle feels small, with everyone able to see him from the moment he wakes up to the moment his dreams pack up for the night. The school classrooms feel cramped, like his presence is too large for any space; he only wants to melt into the crowd. Has it always been such hell to say word after word after word after word in a speech, acting in front of the crowd, their eagle eyes waiting for him to mess up? Etienne Alarie wants to do better; he wants his space again. When did he feel like he had space, again…?

Louis Chapelle, like usual, is somewhere in the middle.

His relationship with his sisters takes on new facets, and he credits that with all of them growing up a little. He recalls the chafe of childhood in all of their interactions, and wonders if he’s the only one who does so, because he seems to be the only one who knows what it felt like to be a united front against their parents. Louis Chapelle’s art changes–he wakes up with a new certainty that inspiration is out there. More is out there. He thinks he’s deep in the usual push and pull of inspiration to create, the strange challenge of wrenching sense, aesthetic, and passion out of the mess of daily life.

Louis Chapelle knows more than he knows. He thinks he was struck with weird inspiration on the day he made up a story about the layers of realms and times and realities. The idea is fun. He will keep messing around with it, none the wiser.

~*~

So, alright then.

Where is Hanna?

When does Marie become Hanna become Chloe?

It’s not quite right to say the world was always there waiting for her to arrive, because the world as she came to know it (and as its inhabitants came to know it) wasn’t the same. It’s more accurate to say that the world made space for her. And to do that, it had to tear its own seams a little bit. Or a lot a bit.

It was always waiting for her. She spent a lot of time in it, after all, by engaging and studying and making–mostly making. Her mind built more armoires, more corners, found new nooks and questions that weren’t there before.

It’s Hanna’s world, but only very, very slightly.

It has its own things it wants to accomplish, too.