The Rope Snapped Tight

They hanged her at dawn.

Princess Elara Thornwood, third daughter of the Blood Crown, convicted of conspiring with the Kingdom of Valethis to destroy the empire she was born to serve. The courtyard was full. The nobles had brought their children to watch.

The rope snapped tight.

She remembered thinking: I didn't do it.

Then she stopped thinking, and the empire continued without her.

---

She woke screaming in a servant's bed.

The candle on the nightstand was half burned. The sheets were rough wool, nothing like the silk she had died in. A girl — twelve, maybe thirteen — was staring at her from the doorway with wide, frightened eyes.

"M-my lady Voss?" the girl whispered.

Elara Voss. Not Thornwood. She was in a different body, in a different province, in a different year — she could feel it in the weight of the air, the slight wrongness of everything. She was fifteen years before her execution.

Fifteen years before they killed her.

She pressed her hands against her face and breathed until the screaming stopped.

"Bring me a map," she said when she could speak again. "And something to write with."