Annan stopped struggling at the whisper.
"Who are you?"
The figure said nothing, carrying Annan away from the edge of the square.
Annan quietly activated his Magic Scrolls. With darkvision, he saw a beautiful face missing its left eye pressed against his own.
"Princess...?"
Annan told Burnt Girl to do nothing—not that she had been doing anything.
The "Princess" carried him back into the darkness. Annan thought they were returning to the front hall, but she took a side passage instead, pushed open a Trapdoor behind a statue, and entered a pitch-black chamber.
The "Princess" released him. Annan studied her: an empty black eye socket, a missing arm, a white dress hanging from her body, long gray hair loosely bound with rope... She did look like the Princess.
"What's going on?"
There was a False Princess in Flower Capital, and another in Strange Tales City?
"The Princess out there is a fake..." she said.
At first, Annan thought Oddities had invaded the Palace and the Princess had fled the square to hide here. But she told him the Princess he had seen from the beginning was the fake...
"You mean the one I've been feeding all this time..."
"An Oddity." The Princess watched him quietly.
The Ship in a Bottle had sharpened Annan's ability to spot falsehoods. "How can you prove what you're saying?"
"I remember everything that has happened in Strange Tales City."
Annan did not, but he knew what had happened three years ago on January seventeenth.
"What happened on the evening of January 17, 998, in the Saint Laurent Calendar?"
"That evening... the Royal Council held its regular meeting."
"Who attended?"
The Princess named several people. Archbishop Valencia was among them.
"How do you remember it so clearly?"
"I'm not mortal..."
If Lilith was the Tower Spirit