The Lost Heir's Crown

Long afterward, I would still sometimes dream of that street at dawn. There were no crowns in the dream. No snowfields, no burning towers, and none of the faces I would later be unable to forget. Only a broken streetlamp. A canvas bag split open on the pavement. And scattered across the wet sidewalk: lab notes, keys, a charging cable, and a novel with a footprint smeared across its cover. If someone had told me that day that bending down to pick up that book would cost me my name, my world, even the right to decide whom I loved and whom I trusted— I probably would have laughed. At the time, I had just come out of a spectacularly failed relationship. More accurately, I had been dumped. He told me, in a beautifully decorated café, that we “weren’t suited to keep going,” because I was too busy, too rational, too used to taking everything apart until it became a problem that could be explained. By the time he said it, the ice in his drink had already melted halfway. I looked at him and realized, suddenly, that I did not want to cry at all. I only wanted to know how long he had spent practicing that breakup speech until it came out so smoothly. So I nodded and said, “All right.” Then I took my unfinished coffee and left. My best friend found me that night. She burst into my apartment with a huge bag of snacks, excavated me from between my lab reports and a chaotic pile of biochemistry textbooks, then solemnly slapped a novel down in front of me. “People who have been dumped need to read love stories that are even worse,” she said. I glanced down at the cover. When the Crown Falls. A fantasy novel set at an aristocratic academy. A black castle on the cover was ringed by a blizzard, with a cracked golden crown above it. The blurb promised a crown prince, an old dynasty, conspiracies, f*******n love, and a string of names that sounded suspiciously like European nobility. “Are you serious?” I asked. “Completely.” She tore open a bag of chips. “The people in there have it much worse than you do. At least your ex is not going to send you into the snow for a throne.” “That does not sound comforting.” “It is comparative therapy.” I had not intended to read it. But that night, lying on the couch, I turned two pages, then ten more. By the time I realized it was three in the morning, the heroine—or rather, the woman I thought was the heroine at the time—was standing beneath the academy clock tower, catching Crown Prince Lucien Veyre exchanging secret letters with a mysterious stranger. And a minor character named Avery Vale died in the Winter Trials. A death without meaning. The book gave it only a short paragraph. The blizzard sealed the roads. His horse bolted. By the time the search party found him, he had frozen stiff in the valley. I had frowned and commented, “That character’s death is such an obvious plot device.” My friend laughed on the other end of the phone. “You are still reading?” “I just cannot sleep.” “Then tell me when it gets good. And do not forget to go back to the lab tomorrow. Your report is due Friday.” I agreed without much thought. And I did go back to the lab the next day. I just did not know it would be the last night I spent in my old world. That day’s experiment produced several more rounds of data than expected. By the time I finally shut down the equipment and packed up my notes, a pale wash of dawn had appeared outside the window. The campus was almost empty. Wind passed through the vacant corridors, and even the hum of the vending machines sounded unnaturally clear. I slung my bag over my shoulder and left the lab building. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was her. “You did not pull another all-nighter, did you?” Her voice was still fuzzy with sleep. “Where are you in the book?” Standing at the crosswalk, I could not help smiling. “That bastard young lord died. Avery Vale. He died in the Winter Trials.” There was half a second of silence on the line. “Why do you sound like you are reading out an experimental conclusion?” “Because the author wrote it that carelessly.” The light turned green. The dawn street was far too quiet, with hardly any cars on the road. As I crossed, I listened to her complain indignantly about the author wasting a character. Then someone slammed into me from the side. They were moving fast; their shoulder scraped hard against my arm. “Sorry—” Before I could see his face, my canvas bag had slipped from my shoulder and hit the ground. My notebook, lab records, keys, lipstick, and When the Crown Falls scattered everywhere. “It is fine,” I said automatically. The person did not stop. I crouched down and gathered everything back into my bag, one item at a time. A damp, icy wind blew in from the intersection, flipping open the final pages of the novel and stopping precisely at the chapter where Avery Vale died. The pages rattled in the wind. My phone was still pressed to my ear. “Are you all right?” my friend asked. I was just about to answer when the piercing roar of an engine came from somewhere in the distance. Close. Too close. I looked up. A black sedan tore out of the empty intersection, moving so fast it seemed not to see the red light—or me, still crouched in the middle of the crosswalk. The headlights stabbed into my eyes. For one instant, the world became nothing but white. I did not even have time to be afraid. I only had time to remember that weightless line of narration from the novel. —Avery Vale died in the Winter Trials. The next second, the car struck me. And I fell into snow so endless it felt like another lifetime.