As a child, I’d spent days, months, and years mentally building a library that mirrored the one on the top floor of the palace.
Step two: memorize.
Every day, my tutors would ask me about the contents of random pages in books I’d read. If I couldn’t remember, I’d read the book again and mentally reshelve it.
The one time I still couldn’t remember, my tutor had hit me. Hard.
I hadn’t cowered like a princess was supposed to; instead, I’d hit him back harder.
He’d beaten me bloody and dragged me to Mother, who’d gladly lit me on fire for hours.
I’d never forgotten a book since.
When I’d turned ten, recalling was no longer sufficient for my tutors, and they’d demanded I start applying what I’d read to hypothetical situations.
There was a reason I could expertly give a detailed examination of the elements of a problem.
It wasn’t nature.
It was nurture.
Brutal. Fucking. Nurture.
With me being tortured at night by cold flames, pushed to mental limits during the day by emotionless tutors, my childhood had been horrific.
But the lessons were effective.
Now, as an adult, inch by painstaking inch, I meditated and rebuilt my old memory palace under the spray of a cramped shower.
Time warped.
I blinked back into the present.
Luka cut up fruit and gave it to his twin as the kings glared at me in the dining hall. We were having another meal.
John hand-fed me fruit.
I tried to smile at him in thanks, but I was too deep in my mental library.
For some reason, the section I’d read at fourteen years old was blurry, the spines and words much fuzzier than the rest of the mind palace.
“Something is wrong with her,” Malum snarled. “We need to bring her to the medical room.”
Luka shifted in front of me protectively but didn’t respond.
John said, “She said she’s fine and that she just needs to think. Just let her do what she needs to do.”
“She’s not fine, she’s fucking catatonic,” Scorpius exploded. “She’s barely breathing.”
“Leave her alone,” John said harshly and shielded me with his body.
I blinked.
Time warped yet again.
I was lying on top of the covers in a narrow bunk bed that was cramped to discourage fraternization between soldiers. A distant part of me recognized that I was back in our new room, and it was night.
Mentally, I grabbed books off shelves and opened to their cover pages. I’d gone through thousands of books.
I opened The History of Rare Fae Beasts.
I closed it.
I opened How to Cultivate Plants.
I closed it.
I opened The Enactment of the Official Peace Accords.
I close—
Finally, I found what I’d been looking for. I flung open the book and devoured its contents. It read,
Thousands of years ago, an endless army of human soldiers set out to conquer the realms. In response to the invasion, the High Court mandated all able-bodied men and women eighteen years and older fight and defend their respective realms.
Millions were conscripted and fought in battles that spread across the realms.
The human soldiers had the strategic advantage.
Towering catapults flung flaming boulders across the horizon, and long pointed poles and swords skewered, as the armor-clad humans shot flaming arrows off the backs of powerful horses.
In contrast, the realms of the High Court had never developed weapons, because individual powers had always been sufficient in eliminating invaders.
It was a grave miscalculation.
The armies of the High Court were slaughtered.
When it seemed like complete annihilation was inevitable, the sun god took matters into his own hands.
Midbattle all the realms’ suns unexpectedly burned fifty degrees hotter.
The god of light boiled the lands.
All the people, plants, and animals were decimated, and anything that didn’t have a natural resistance to high temperatures died within a few hours of intense heat exposure.
The humans tried to flee back to their realm, but most dropped dead from dehydration as they ran for safety.
The sun god followed a few humans back to earth in order to identify the location of portals. Guards were subsequently stationed, and by all accounts, the human species have never tried to set foot in another realm since the war.
Smugglers who have illegally traveled through these portals tell tales of the sun god punishing the earth realm with extreme heat. They claim humans live in perpetual fear of annihilation. None of these reports have been substantiated.
After the High Court won the war against the humans, there was a consensus in the realms that the price of victory was too high.