Surrounded by dolls, Amelia slept soundly in bed. Unaware of not only the world, but also the women who had entered her room to check on her condition.

“It’s hard seeing her like this,” Martel said, filling the silence.

“And it never gets any easier,” spoke Grace dully. She adjusted Amelia’s pillow, “Not now, not then, not… ever.”

“But your plan worked, didn’t it? We avoided the greatest danger there was, didn’t we? I mean, we’re alive, doesn’t that mean we’ve been spared?”

“Not sure... But we’ll know when she wakes up.”

The already depressive mood between them, dampened straight into the doldrums.

“I’m going to find Havoc,” Martel said in a whisper, giving Amelia a tender look before turning away, “He’s… I think he needs someone right now.”

Grace didn’t comment, she could care less. The door shut with a clack as Martel departed. Leaving Amelia alone with Grace, who considered the view of the Duke of Winchester’s estate from a large bedroom window.

Lately, Havoc and Heimdall had been drowning themselves in their work. The world outside Amelia’s bedroom was now filled with gardener’s, maids, guards, merchants and visiting nobles, all busy as bees… Though Grace couldn’t bring herself to pretend she was happy about it. Not when the person it was all for had, as if under a spell, refused to wake up for over a week.

“It shouldn’t be like this, Grace said, returning to the bed where she took a lock of Amelia’s hair and ran her fingers down through it, “You should be outside right now… Why did you have to get so close to the truth? Why did you have to scare me like that? I didn’t want to hurt you… Please believe me, I would never want that.”

Her hands trembled as she made another probing attempt to enter Amelia’s mind with her magic. But once again, Grace had to withdraw upon sensing how fragile her friend’s psyche had become. It was too dangerous to try and make any further adjustments. All because she had forcefully torn apart the protective spell keeping Amelia safe from her trauma, in an attempt to distract her from speaking about who the ‘Historian’ was.

God must be laughing. In the end, it really was her who had done the most damage. All because somewhere along the line, Grace had begun to think of Amelia as reckless and prone to inadvertently messing things up.

How ironic… That the only reason their world had escaped its destruction, was because Amelia somehow held within herself enough belief in her, that Grace had barely managed to pull off an imperfect, shadow of the spell she had seen God use only once, and reverse the impossible by only a minute.

Now, here they were, with Amelia’s head wrapped tightly in bandages from when Grace had, instead of panicking and begging Amelia to stop talking right after killing the Marquess of Rutherford, panicked and pistol whipped her friend into unconsciousness.

Her friend. Her lover. Her princess. For Grace, when it came to Amelia the words meant the same. She sat down on the bed, unable to help herself from remembering those days of the past, when Amelia had lived not at home as the daughter of a Baron, or even as a noble Viscountess… But as her royal Hand-Maiden.

A dark sentiment overcame Grace. On a whim, glancing sideways at a mirror on the wall, she let her magic shimmer to cover her own face, allowing for what was reflected to take on the illusion of a much older regard.

“When I took up my position as Heir apparent… I had wanted to reward my childhood hero,” Grace said, to herself, as she let the illusion fall away like oil on water. She traced a line down the side of Amelia’s neck. “Now, I can’t help but wonder if it’s always been me who’s been responsible for your misfortune.”

Grace bit down on her lips out of self hatred until they leaked blood. In her first life, if she had paid better attention to what Amelia wanted, how Amelia felt, instead of choosing to live inside mere delusions… could they have avoided this outcome?

**

Grace had been cleaning on that fateful day. Fifteen years after the fall of the Velvetican Kingdom, fourteen years and eight months since Amelia had abandoned her and run away into the night to never be found.

With her father dead, and her desire for power as absent as her lover, Grace had made the decision to enter into a self-imposed exile; taking up residence in the now abandoned Strightsworth manor, which she worked every day to maintain. Content to spend the rest of her days idle, so long as the world let her be.

Feather duster in hand, the moment that would change Grace’s life happened during a habitual dusting of a bookshelf. When her tool had gotten pinched and she accidentally knocked down a row of books upon pulling it free, causing all but one volume to fall to the ground, as if it had been glued to the shelf.

Having discovered a hidden lever, Grace’s curiosity was piqued, so she gave it a pull. Before she fell to the ground upon finding at long last where Amelia had disappeared too.

For there in the saferoom of the Strightsworth manor, did Grace find a pair of corpses unaffected by decay or rot despite how cold they were to the touch. A mother holding her child even in death, who must have died from starvation after Amelia had succumbed to her wounds.

Grace set aside her feather-duster, to sit next to her friend for the first time in years, until she could bear it no longer and began silently weeping. Knowing the chance to ask Amelia all the questions she had, were now lost forever.

From the ghost of a smile on Amelia’s face… The fool must have been trying to comfort her child up until her last moments. Grace tried to match it; her attempt broke into pieces. But from those shattered shards of a smile, did an idea begin to take root. Like the seeds of a flower that had been dropped on concrete to grow.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

There Grace remained, holding Amelia’s hand for who knows how long as she prepared to cast her greatest spell yet. Time, began to march endless, and when Grace at long last was forced to stop staring at Amelia’s face, with muted surprise she discovered her own hands were now withered and old.

“Better get started,” Grace rasped, feeling a tremor run through her now aged, failing heart. She could feel each beat begin to lessen in strength, despite the magic around it now swirling as hot as the sun.

Time to fix a mistake, Grace decided, as she began casting the spell that had taken decades to gather. Directing it all from her body, into that of another’s.

“Amelia,” Grace said, as the current she channelled brought back joyful memories of the past, “It’s time to wake up.”

Reality, screamed out in pain. Grace was blown back as her spell suddenly hit a wall and recoiled against her. She could feel her bones breaking even before she crumpled to the floor, where she blearily blinked to discover Amelia’s corpse had shifted into an upright position.

Grace’s hope, that she had successfully revived the dead, came crashing down to join the pain ransacking her body, the moment Amelia spoke, in a condescending, irrevocably demeaning manner.

“Sorry, but I can’t let you mess with the rules.”

**

The moment she had accepted the deal from the thing that called itself ‘God’,

Grace found herself standing in that old, dingy bar from her past with a pitcher of ale in each hand. Her life scrubbed clean, just like that, she dumped the ail on the head of a patron in mid-reach for her rear, then called out to the bartender to let him know she was taking a break.

Exiting the bar, Grace promptly found the closest bush and vomited the stress of what returning to the past actually meant. The foul taste helped her come to terms with the fact she had truly returned, and that her talk with God hadn’t been a hallucination.

Rinsing her mouth out using Lurington’s town square water-pump, Grace did an inventory check of her person, finding both the small locket round her neck, which contained a picture of her mother, as well as a small velvet pouch, which shouldn’t have been there.

God had allowed her to bring one item back to the past. Of course, the bastard had let her pick before they had listed their final condition: That Amelia could not, under any circumstance, guess that Grace had come from the future. So now the front incisor she had removed from Amelia’s child was functionally useless. Since it couldn’t even be used as proof to convince her friend she wasn’t stark raving mad.

Her hand clenched around the small white incisor. Mocking her was one thing, but disparaging Amelia’s efforts to save her child would not be allowed. Pocketing the tooth, Grace went to find Clarice the shepherd. A person from her past who she could barely remember, despite them having both grown up in the same orphanage.

“What day is it? What year?” Grace asked Clarice, having found her old friend surrounded by sheep.

“It’s… It’s the second day of the fourth month of the two-hundredth calendar year, isn’t it?” Clarice replied, too shy to ask why her Grace would ask such a basic question, “You haven’t been out in the sun too long, have you? You’re usually really good at remembering dates.”

“And you spend most of your time sleeping surrounded by sheep,” Grace said, having finally remembered a detail about Clarice, who she had mostly forgotten.

“I… I guess?” Clarice said, but Grace was already walking away. Not out of a disinterest in catching up with old faces she hadn’t seen in forever, but because of one simple fact.

“That’s not enough time!” Grace screamed, after having left Lurington to find a secluded spot in the forest, “Why couldn’t you have sent me back to when I was a child!”

She could practically hear god’s laughter on the wind. No doubt revelling in the fact he had sent her back only a week before Thompson Brown would hire a wizard to investigate her magic laced alcohol, which would eventually lead to her identity as a princess being revealed.

Grace weighed her options. But her first idea, to show up on Amelia’s doorstep and offer her services felt like she was asking for trouble. Too many mistakes around her eidetic friend, and Amelia might call her out for knowing more than she should. Even if it was only as a joke, would God make the distinction? Probably not, they might even be hoping for Amelia to accidentally guess that she had come from the future.

All at once, a solution struck Grace. If she couldn’t seek Amelia out, then why not have Amelia instead come to her?

It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Grace to walk the distance between Lurington and the small yet compact town situated at the base of the Strightsworth estate. Where she located the bookstore Amelia loved, and began laying a trap, using coins made from dirt; placed on the ground to form a trail leading into an alley.

Soon, a group of children had discovered the bait. Their curiosity endless, by the time one of them had begun doubting their good fortune, Grace had sunk her claws in their minds, turning their belief in her magic into something much deeper. Like ants, Grace made the children march into the back of an abandoned store-house, where she made a book float before them, until it was all they could see.

Belief in her magic secured, Grace began quickly rewriting the stolen book into something that would catch Amelia’s interest.

Placing herself as the protagonist, Grace layered her deception with a Historian who did not exist, and made sure to fill the details between with as much romance as she could to guarantee Amelia would read the novel from cover to back.

Regrettably, Grace couldn’t make ‘A History of the Velvetican Kingdom’ an exact representation of the future. There were gaps in her knowledge she could only fill with emotion, in addition to how unwilling Grace was to bear the thought of Amelia being deceived once again who had approached her in their first life.

Unable to bear the thought of Amelia growing close to anyone but her first, Grace used what her spies had gathered and worked to transform Amelia’s first impression of those she had been close with, into nothing more than ‘suitors’ destined for a princess.

This time, Grace would do better. Either by vetting, or elimination, she would take charge of Amelia’s poor judgment of character and save the Velvetican Kingdom while she was at it.

After several days of hard work, Grace released the children from her influence and exited the alley to appear disguised as a man. Looking at bookstore, she took out the incisor she had taken from Amelia’s child, and in a symbolic defiance of God, began casting a spell on the tooth to connect it once again with its mother.

More than willing to wait, Grace closed her eyes and immersed herself in the sensation of Amelia going about her day, from the moment she woke up, up until the very moment she heard Amelia’s voice speaking with the bookstore’s owner who opened their shop.

With a thought, Grace caused the tooth to crumble and dissolved the connection. Vowing to create an everlasting bond between them, she entered the bookstore, where Grace almost lost control of herself upon smelling Amelia’s perfume. She could practically see the scented trail leading from herself to her princess.

“Hello!” interrupted the young man working the till, and that was all he managed to say before Grace had shown him her book and placed him under a state of hypnosis.

“You will wrap this, and present it to your next customer as a gift, for her good patronage,” she instructed, and the young man nodded his head as the command sunk itself deep.

Only then did Amelia reward herself by brushing past Amelia to calm herself down on the way out. Before she returned to Lurington to await the results of her actions.