The sun beat down on the stone courtyard, shadows cast by the high palace walls slicing the light into geometric fragments. My father stood beside me, posture regal, face unreadable—he’d perfected the look of indifference over years of courtly boredom. I mirrored him, arms behind my back, expression carved in marble.

We arrived early. Diplomacy demands punctuality, and this marriage—this treaty dressed in lace and silk—was nothing if not diplomacy. I had never met the girl. Her name, repeated a thousand times in briefings and scrolls, meant nothing to me. I did not believe in love, nor in the theater of pretending to. Marriage was a transaction. Like trade, like war.

We stood before their throne room, in stifling silence, our guards forming a polite perimeter. Her father arrived shortly after, rotund and sweating under his ceremonial armor, apologizing for her absence with that awkward chuckle common to men who feared they had failed as parents. My father made a sound that might have been a laugh or a cough—it was hard to tell.

And then she entered.

There was no trumpet, no curtain of golden light, no sparkle on silk.

She shuffled in.

Barefoot. Hair a tangled, absurd mess. Eyes squinting against the sun like it had personally offended her. Her pajamas were wrinkled, oversized, hanging off her like a ghost had picked her outfit in the dark. She looked more like someone’s rebellious little sister than a princess of any kingdom.

And it was 1 PM.

She yawned. Loudly. I watched a courtier twitch.

I stood perfectly still, expression unchanged. But inside, something faltered. Cracked. A crack so small it was almost imperceptible. But there it was, nonetheless.

This was the girl they wanted me to marry?

This... gremlin?

No speech. No apologies. She just stood beside her father, her hair pointing in every direction like she’d lost a fight with a broom closet.

She looked at me like I was a vending machine that had eaten her coin.

I hated her.

Or maybe not her. Maybe I hated what she represented—the chaos, the insolence, the complete dismissal of everything I’d built around myself. Discipline. Coldness. Order.