I remember the feeling of waking up from a sleep that lasted a century. It was almost like being born again; the forgotten sensations of feeling my skin around me, curls pressed against my face, breath in my lungs, all as if for the first time. Sunlight spilled into my eyes, blinding me with its golden hue. Later, Roland, Count of Bastony, home of the fabled and feared Briar Hill, would describe the room as perpetually half-lit, as if bathed in twilight, even though the event in question took place near noon in May, and my curtains were thrown open. Roland is the one who found and woke me, and the omnipresent twilight was due to the briar roses that had blanketed my turret’s windows during my century’s sleep.

Once my eyes had finally adjusted to the half-light, I saw a man hovering over me. I observed him silently through heavy eyelids before deciding he was flesh, at which point I loosed a dusty scream. He didn’t seem to hear; his eyes were glazed over, their icy blue penetrating my own.

“You’re beautiful,” The intruder murmured, sounding like the story book princes of my childhood. I screamed again as his intimate gaze probed. I pulled the covers up to my chin, unable to understand why he wasn’t afraid of my guards bursting in at any moment.

“Guards!” I finally screamed once enough sense filtered down into my drowsy consciousness. It only made me shout louder when he started laughing. “Do you know who I am? I’ll order your head off your shoulders before you know what happened to you,” I promised in a hiss. His laughter finally stopped when my palm made contact with his face, and his eyes flashed soberly to the floor.

“Forgive me, your highness,” He began, a hint of sarcasm in his tone. Later I identified the emotion as pity. “Your kingdom is now a province in a much larger kingdom. Your family, your people are long dead, and you have been asleep, under a curse, for the past hundred years,” he informed me, at which point I promptly fell back asleep—or, as Roland would later claim—at which point I fell into a dead faint.