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The world tasted wrong.

Damp. Unclean. Like wilted lilies crushed underfoot by something that did not know their worth.
The ground was too cold. Too soft. Beneath her. She had not laid down there willingly.

She rose slowly—legs long and trembling, unfamiliar hooves sinking into moss and mud. The ache in her limbs was not pain—it was indignity. Her breath left her in pale ribbons, curling upward like incense without altar.

C’est une erreur… she murmured, voice delicate but hoarse. Zis is not my place. Zis is not my body.

Her ears flicked instinctively at the sound of silence—thick and eternal. No courtiers. No lutes. No fanfare. Just the creak of trees that did not bow, and a dawn that dared arrive without her.

She stepped forward, unsteady, shoulders stiff with refusal. Her coat caught the light—faintly—and for a moment, she pretended it was the shimmer of a sun-kissed gown. It wasn’t. She was no longer draped in silk, but in fur.

Then, she saw him.

The figure stood among the mist like a statue that the forest itself had shaped from grief. Dark. Massive. Antlers like shattered crowns. He grazed slowly, reverently, a ritual she did not understand. And when a raven cried above him, he did not even look.

She looked around, a queen displaced in a kingdom of ghosts and bark, her eyes half-lidded against the dawnlight filtering through the pine.
A crownless monarch. A reflection with no mirror.

She approached, unsure for once in her life how to handle this predicament she had found herself in.

What world is zis… that greets me not with fanfare, but fog?

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