Two armies rush towards each other. They do not stand on a battlefield, not a proper one. They come together in the city, the Lussa City. The fight here, shamelessly. One side defends the city, the other defends its royalty. How could the police have come to oppose the royal family?

Outside influence. The promise of power. Chloe was absolute on these two points. She gained a lot useful information from one of them before he realized what she really was. Chloe was member of the Solune royalty, a direct blood relation of the Sollussa, and therefore part of the Lussa royal family. They were to be enemies.

And now, she watched herself rushing towards him, a subtly curved, singe edged sword in hand. The police had iron riot shields. They were defending themselves against jitzer incendiaries.

Chloe realized that she might be leading a charge of some sort. Her enemies were the uniform uniformed police. Her allies appeared to be both the rich, and the poor. She had no idea why a majority of her group were rough looking citizens, but she also had no idea why she was leading an army in the first place.

She watched herself closely. Her sword drew sparks from shields, her left arm rending them from the grasps of their owners and launching them into the opposition. Around her, a crowd rushed for the opening, others continued to throw incendiaries that shattered across the steel walls of buildings.

Chloe studied her duel against that man, the unwary informant. She appeared to be talking to the man, but she couldn’t make out her own words, and they did not lie in her memories. This was not a vision of the past. The man shouted back in a fury of parries and blows. Chloe noticed that, while she was clearly overpowering the man in both skill and strength, she didn’t seem to be trying to actually hit him.

And then, just as things got interesting, just as the tides might have been shifting, Chloe awoke to a knock at her door.

Soren stood at the open threshold. She held two sheathed sabres at her side, clasped between her stiff forarm and her hip.

“Come, youth, it is time to practice.”

Chloe sat up. If what she had dreamt really was a vision of the future, then she was to improve her abilities, and by quite a large margin.

Every once and a while, you write a few thousand words into a first draft and then realize that you’ve constructed a giant mess, full of contradictions and useless plot lines. Worse, the foundation plot has no clear resolution, even in your, the writer’s mind, and you wish it didn’t exist at all.

For me, that story was the Solune Prince, the story of Chloe’s first experience outside of the Solune Kingdom. The problem is, I knew that I would have to return to it at some point. The Solune Prince is an important part of Chloe, it’s her transition from a ditzy genius to a ditzy genius conqueror. She follows in the footsteps of her mother. This is to be either the next, or next next project; The Solune Prince.

This novel is already underway! You can try reading it here.

Daniel Triumph.

This project is an indirect sequel to Evidence.

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