The first day of the fourth month, twenty-seven minutes past the toll of the eleventh evening bell, year 1001 (twenty years in the past).
Court Alchemist Magnus ran up the stone staircase. He was rushing to his queen, desperate to tell her about the unnerving scene he witnessed earlier—Paracelsus, an apprentice alchemist, had just performed forbidden alchemy. The shock of it all was still fresh to him; he had no time to process it yet. His only thought was to get to the queen as quickly as possible.
He had been running up and down winding staircases in this dark castle for an hour. His long robes slowed him down, his lungs burned, and his legs ached as he struggled to catch his breath. He was an old man, and all his years spent in the laboratory had not acclimated him to physical exertion.
"My Queen," he called out tenderly and out of breath when he reached the top. Yet there was no answer. The queen's maidservants were not in the room, even though they should be. The queen had given birth earlier that evening, and it was suspicious that the room was empty at this hour.
The night was moonless and dark. There was faint light coming from a few candelabras, but what lit up the room was the lightning cracking outside the castle walls, illuminating everything momentarily in a cursed purple light. He did not hear it at first, perhaps because of the lightning or perhaps because of his still-lingering shock. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw the queen lying on the floor in a circle of blood, dead. But, before he could determine what happened to her, his eyes turned to the tiny figure in front of her, and that was when he finally heard it. It was the newborn princess, still coated in the protective vernix caseosa from birth. She was shivering in the cold room and screaming her lungs out.