Euphrosyne, Goddess of Delight, Laughter, and All Things Cheerfully Troublesome, sat upside down on a crescent moon, legs suspended where the sky should be and curls of starlight woven into her hair.
Mortals didn't pray to her with seriousness. They prayed at her—giggling before holidays, whispering her name when kisses were stolen in dark corridors, or when something so ridiculously tragic occurred that it swung all the way around to a joke again. She enjoyed that. The ridiculousness. The flouting of order.
Fate was incredibly dull. All somber lines and deliberate conclusions.
But then she appeared.
Charlotte.
Euphrosyne had seen her in her previous life, little more than a mortal blur in the corner of some third-rate story. A couch potato with sarcasm and ramen for everything. Utterly forgettable. Absolutely divine.
"She mocked death," Euphrosyne had said to her sisters. "She laughed at her own life. Who does that?"
Aglaea rolled her eyes. Thalia said leave it be. But Euphrosyne wouldn't listen. She never listened.
She pulled Charlotte's thread from the Loom of Fate and concealed it within a joke. A very good one. The sort that only strikes three lives on.
And Fate? Oh, Fate despised that.
They caught on in the end, sure enough. Pulled Charlotte's thread back in life two, attempted to sever it for good. But the harm was done. The laughter had rooted. The girl had begun to count. Not in a "chosen one" sense. No—she was worse. A background character who became loud. Inconvenient. Sticky.
Now, she was on her third life. Born poor, unloved, bruised but not broken. Plotting with a wee brother whose soul had once donned a prince's crown. Still laughing when she shouldn't. Still daring to care.
Euphrosyne looked down through the veil that insulates gods from mortals, sipping comet fizz from a teacup. Below her, Charlotte was stealing apples again. Plotted small disorder. Convinced a boy once a prince to believe in magic once more.
And somewhere—just on the far side of that odd, stitched-up world—a knight was stepping across. A man with a sword that no longer required a crown blessing, only her voice.
Fascinating, she mused. The knight recalled.
That was never intended to happen. But the fun goddess had discovered something early on: tales prefer to break their own rules. You merely have to nudge them in the right direction.
She stood on her moon, arms outstretched, allowing the stars to dance around her.
"Let's see what you do next, little thread," she whispered, smiling like a mischievous child planning to wreak havoc in a porcelain store. "You're not a heroine. You're not a villain. But you're the punchline in a joke that Fate still doesn't get."
And in her laughter—bright, wild, insane—an empire awakened.
A name long buried for consideration whispered across two worlds.
Charlotte.