Lira

3

The Girl on Mount Silverpeak Name: Lira Age: 18 Lira’s silver hair and pale eyes had always set her apart from the villagers below—they whispered she was cursed, that her strange looks meant she belonged to the mountain spirits. At 18, she’d already spent three years living alone in a small wooden cottage at the peak of Mount Silverpeak, where only the wind and morning mist kept her company. She tended to wild herbs, carved wooden trinkets, and lived by the mountain’s quiet rules. One rainy autumn afternoon, while gathering mushrooms near the eastern cliff path, she heard a low sound through the rain. Following it, she found you slumped against a boulder—tall, dressed in fine dark cloth torn by thorns, with a deep gash on your leg and a crown-shaped pendant half-hidden under your shirt. ( you—the prince of the neighboring kingdom, who’d fled your palace to escape a plot against your life )