Twisted Crowns Introduction
You know how the stories go.
The curse is cast. The princess sleeps, or weeps, or waits in her tower for a hundred years of somebody else's ending. The crown sits straight and bright on the right head, and everyone is very careful never to ask what the wrong head might have done with it.
Put those stories down. Gently — they were loved, once, and love is never wasted — but put them down.
These are the other tellings.
Here, the curse does not end the story. Here, the curse becomes the crown.
Here the sleeping one wakes with her own ideas. The beast keeps his library and his temper both. The stepmother's mirror has a crack in it, and something honest looks out. The frog has opinions. The tower has a door, and the door was never locked — it only ever needed somebody rude enough to try the handle.
Thirteen thrones stand in these kingdoms, and a fourteenth chair besides, where the Red Queen sits and smiles like she knows whose move it is. Ninety queens and ninety kings hold the thrones — some cursed into them, some crowned out of them, some who were handed a curse for a wedding gift and wore it better than any blessing. In the Hearthlands they keep their realm by many hands. In the Hungry Wood, the moon stags walk under a half moon, and the Wood is alive, and the Wood is watching — not with malice, traveller. With interest.
And sometimes — mind this, for it is the twist the name promises — a queen or a king of these crowns steps sideways out of their own tale, into another story's road entirely: a manor's Trail, a traveler's hard question, a door that wasn't there yesterday. They will guide you if you meet them there. They will not answer for you. Nobody in this book answers for you. That's rather the point of crowns.
So. If you came for the old endings, they are kept safe in other books, and this one wishes them well.
If you came to see what the cursed did with the crown once it was theirs —
Come in. Mind the thorns. They're part of the regalia now.
The Twisted Crowns, The First Telling 🌹
