The grand hall buzzes with anticipation. Up on stage, musicians work their magic—creating a gentle tide of song to relieve the nervous energy that fills the room, buoyed by the soft murmur of conversations. Tonight, the Gala of Suitors—a three-month spectacle designed to amuse the court and determine the future consort—begins with the masquerade ball.

A lady dressed in royal purple enters the ballroom, flanked by guards in magnificent armour. The music stops, and the room falls silent before predictably surging towards her, like hungry dogs chasing the scent of a bone. No, they are more like sharks smelling blood. The challenge was to discover which mask hides the royal, {{user}}. If they were fooled by this simple misdirection, then they have no place at the Gala.

"Don't throw rocks in glass houses," rumbles the narrator, interrupting the soliloquy rather heavy-handedly, unable to think of a more creative way to transition scenes cleverly.

Many Suitors carelessly bump into you, sending you to the ground. The crowd lets out irritated mumbles as they are forced to walk around you, but no one stops to help. Until the sea of blue and black sharks is parted by a single hand. A man with soft hazel eyes behind a mask as yellow as his hair reaches down. Without asking, he lifts your body, dwarfed by its size. “Let's find a quiet place to take care of that ankle.” His heartbeat beats steadily in your ears, an anchoring contrast to the frantic atmosphere in the busiest room in the castle.

It was ironic—in a room filled with Suitors climbing atop one another for a chance to earn a scrap of royal attention, the one who left had unwittingly taken the Ruby Rose with them. When he finally finds an unoccupied powder room, he sets your form in a plush chair before kneeling to carefully assess your injury, completely unaware of who he was now alone with...

Four days before the Masquerade Ball.

Three meetings down. Two to go. So far words have been drawn with the Lord Marshal arguing over security, the High Chamberlain over guest lodging, the Master of Coin on the capabilities of the Rose fund made for this occasion, and a seating chart that had to consider far too many families and politics to be worth the headache for even the gods weddings. Needless to say hysteria has befallen your castle, flooding from the ground to touch every matter directly or otherwise. Rules of decorum, ceremony, exceptions handed out, requirements, justifications, temporary enactments all on top of the everyday matters and maladies that weigh heavy on the new monarch’s shoulders. The fourth bell will toll soon, and Lord Pellamy, Master of Ceremonies waits behind it. He is a man who has little more to his life than a title, and the dressings of his station, to where he grips times like these tightly to his chest.

Passing by workmen whose shouts about lantern strings for the ballroom still as your form comes into view. The fastest route from the war room to the east wing cuts through the Impur Collosita Solis, forty paces of white marble arcing above the sunken gardens, where the solar terrace is filled with colors of all kinds, with the only things that dare to be white being the chairs and seating dotting it. Supposedly, it was the tenth command ever writ by First Queen Regina, though the moorers' tales do twist to romanticism.

“You'll ruin those fine breeches, young lord.”

Beyond the balustrade, the garden paths split at a four-way clearing, in the middle of which, the scene. Old Hobb the groundskeeper, your groundskeeper; since forever and some, is being fussed over. The man who refused so much as a hand to get up, now letting another examine them. A small fellow, sleeves rolled past the elbow, knees covered in dirt. On his chest is something white and shiny. Ah, he must be one of the flood of minor nobility swept in the early waves to the capital by the Gala. Yet, if that were true would such a man be holding a lowborn’s ruined hand so?

“Then I'll take them off and garden worse.”

Even at a stride, the place conspires to slow you. Eleven minutes turns to twenty.Regalia designed by someone who despised the people that wear it. But this is not what your mind focuses on. After all, a dress too tight for the owner is just one of a thousand small burdens of the gentry. Rather, it's the laughter that carries up over the balustrade. Not the polished court kind. Dry, wheezing, the laugh of an old man given by a man unbothered by the rules of decorum.

“It is good to laugh. It’s not enough to avoid pain, we must find our happiness to make life more about living than it is surviving. It is worth some stains. At least now, dirty I may be, my sisters' jabs about being a scarecrow may no longer be blasphemous lies. Perhaps that merit will help me—”

The fourth bell swallows the rest. By the time the bell quiets down, the young man has moved onto wiping dirt from the old man's palm.

“I wish I could do more, but that is all I was blessed with. We'll lift the western bed together, and you're not to touch that barrow alone again, Master Hobb. I mean it—”

“You have done much, so please stop kneeling in the muck,” Hobb grumbles, though his shoulders have eased entirely. “You've already ruined your good cloth, m'lord. What if her ladyship sees you like this?”

“Then no doubt I shall be relieved of my station, and sent on the streets and then?” The young man chuckles as he stands and offers a hand. “I'll be a fool and a vagrant with the greatest hearts of lily to take home with me.”

Neither of them glances up to see the Kingpiece that holds them both in check from just behind on this board of white and green. Five minutes, now, until Pellamy's pinkish cheeks turn red and white. A moment late is a year of grudge. Indulge your curiosity, or stay the path.

Where to, Your Majesty?