You did not sleep another blink that night and as morning comes, you find fresh, clean clothes for you, neatly folded and stacked on the sofa in your room, something you didn’t notice throughout the night because your head was too full of questions for you to think clearly.

‘Bathe then wear these.  –Q’ A note on top of the stack says.

Following it, you enter the bathroom and bathe necessarily, not bothering to dry your hair and putting the clothes Q gave you on. 

You look at yourself in the mirror and see how the clothes are very much unlike you.  Long, sky blue skirt, printed with flowers and a sleeveless, plain white top. 

“Baekhyun, it’s like you never knew me at all,” You shake your head as you pull your hair into a low ponytail.

As your hand hovers on the door knob, you frown.  The sleeveless top and the long skirt.  Without the sleeves, there’s nothing to cover your knife straps.  And the skirt limits your movements to just enough.

“Ah,” You nod at yourself as you figure out the fact that the Kingdom has not fully trusted you.  “Gives me a chance to be a girl for once, anyway,” You shrug, opening the door.  Time for you to do some exploring.

The housekeepers of the castle bow at you as you walk by, staring at you like you’re the weirdest person they’ve encountered as you reply to their bows with one of yours. 

The castle is a castle.  You’ve never seen anything like it.  The gardens bloom with blinding colors, the sparkle of the white, marble statues that pour water into the fountains beautifying as the sun shines on them.  Gardeners here and there keep it tidy in their grey uniforms.  Exploring the inside of the castle doesn’t even cross your mind.

And then you find the—for lack of better words—coolest thing you’ve seen in your whole personal castle tour.

“A labyrinth,” You gasp, smiling to yourself as you venture out across the garden to enter it.

Made up of plants, the labyrinth is like what you’ve read in the story books you’ve snuck a peek at in the city’s library.  You see nothing but what it is made of and turns.  Turns to the left, to the right, forked paths, cross turns, things you giddily encounter as you explore the maze to your liking.  Keeping your left hand on the wall, like some maze explorers have suggested, sounds completely boring to you.  You walk right in the middle of the paths, following your instincts on where you should go, where you should turn.

Coming across dead ends, turns that bring you back to where you’ve started, and turns that actually bring you somewhere else either outside the labyrinth and inside, you imprint the labyrinth’s layout in your mind, drawing more paths as more of it come into your view.

It must be huge, because as you find yourself realizing the time, you notice the sun beginning to set. 

But you’re almost there.  You’re about to find the labyrinth’s center.  Taking two lefts, the right path on a forked one, and turning 90 degrees counterclockwise in a cross path then going straight, you smile as you come to an oval gazebo, its pillars wrapped in vines, tinges of flowers here and there.

Touching it with your hands, you smile at yourself and the fun you’ve had, but it disappears as your eyes fall upon someone on the gazebo’s bench. 

You’re not the only one here, it seems. 

“He’s the prince what do you expect, Amara.  You’d think he knew the castle better than you,” You speak to yourself, pulling your eyes away from his face, whose eyes he covers with his arm.  You sit on the gazebo’s floor and lean your back on the bench Luhan is sleeping on, careful to not disturb him. 

“I wasn’t aiming for revenge,” You say to Luhan.  “Why am I talking to you when you’re asleep,” Rolling your eyes at your own stupidity, you continue, nevertheless.  “Or avenging my mother’s death.  I though it was a reason, or it could become a reason for all the chasing, the killing, the things I’ve done, but thinking twice, that’s not it.  I don’t kill if the person I kill did nothing wrong.  I reason with their cases then decide what to do with them.  This man from the Rebellion killed my mother for something I don’t know.  I hate to be subjective so, for now, the reason I take for chasing down the Rebellion would be clarity.  For clarity.  I need to know why.  At least, for the moment,” Your voice fades out and you stay silent, watching the distant sun fall deeper into the horizon. 

“What did you mean, Luhan? What did you mean by saying that I was the same as the Queen? Why did you look at me like that?” You whisper to yourself, this time.  You look at your hands and shake your head in regret for thinking for a second that revenge could be something you consider a reason.  You remember Luhan’s hard eyes, a look you’ve never seen him use, and the way his gentle hands turn cold in yours.

You stand up and dust your skirt, glancing at Luhan before turning to leave.

But you stop as you feel his hand on your wrist, anchoring you to him and him to you. 

“Stay for a little bit more,”