A/N: I own nothing but the plot. Enjoy!
The King of Eldoris fell to his knees, fatally wounded by the sword that had stabbed through his tattered armor. But King Perseus was determined to not die alone. Ever as crafty and villainous as his reputation stained him, the king summoned every last drop of his magic. Quick as a flash before the remnants of his life left him, he cast the vestiges towards not at the Crown Prince of Tynan who had stabbed his abdomen, but at the prince's fiance, the second princess of the Kiran nation and wielder of light magic.
Princess Alana raised her hands in protest but it was too late. King Perseus' magic spell exploded against the princess' hastily erected light barrier, ejecting the princess backwards thirty feet from where she originally stood. Finishing his nefarious deed, the King collapsed, the light in his green eyes finally expired after months of intense battle.
But his limp body was ignored by the other escorts of the princess. Crown Prince Jason was the first to reach the princess and let out a cry of anguish at her lifeless body. The renowned Lord Christopher, famed for being the strongest dark magic wizard lord in all the three nations, could not resurrect his savior. And in the worst state was the princess' escort who had accompanied the princess since childhood, whose expert swordsmanship could not save Princess Alana.
Princess Alana, her golden hair dyed crimson and bronze from blood and mud, looked up at the blue sky that was as azure as her eyes. She tried to say something, but her internal injuries were too great for her to heal herself. In the arms of her fiance and the company of the two other men who loved her more than their lives themselves, Princess Alana perished.
Annabeth yawned as she finally finished the last chapter of the manuscript her friend and writer, Clarisse, had sent her. It was late at night. She had promised Clarisse that she would give feedback on Clarisse's conclusion of her newest webnovel, "The Tragedy of the Kiran Princess."
What she hadn't expected was that this story was rated R-19 for both gore and smut, Clarisse's two favorite and most popular genres in her work. Annabeth had to quickly flip through a few chapters where the heroine, Princess Alana, had quite a few explicit scenes with each of the three male leads: the crown prince of the neighboring kingdom, the dark wizard lord, and the princess' personal knight.
It wasn't as if Annabeth didn't know much about those types of things, having had experience with prior boyfriends in the past, but the detailed and heavily explicit descriptions of Princess Alana's scenes with each of the male leads made Annabeth blush and look around to see if anyone else was around when she was reading Clarisse's manuscript.
And then there was the ending. Of course, she knew that it was going to be a tragedy given that it was in the title, but she had not expected Clarisse to kill off the heroine just like that. The most Annabeth had expected was maybe one or two of the male leads would die off, leaving the crown prince to win the princess' hand.
Not to mention, Annabeth sympathized just a little more with the story's villain, the king of Eldoris, over any of the other characters. He was described as a tyrant king, but the manuscript was too focused on the female lead and male leads to really explain why the king of Eldoris was a tyrant.
All the villain King Perseus wanted was for the kingdom of Kiran to uphold their bargain to either not cut off his kingdom's trade routes or to have their princess' hand in marriage in exchange for a political alliance. When the elder princess of Kiran was killed on the way to Eldoris, Kiran reneged on the deal and did not open trade routes with Eldoris. This caused the Eldorisian king to have to resort to war on Kiran on the behalf of his citizens.
Meanwhile Annabeth suffered through chapters of the female lead stringing along the three male leads in this harem story. Make up your damn mind, Annabeth thought to Princess Alana, and just tell all three you want to be polyamorous. When she brought this up to Clarisse, Clarisse shrugged and said her editors wanted all three male leads to have equal screen time because her readers stanned all three male leads equally.
Annabeth thought for a bit and detailed her thoughts in an email to Clarisse. As the night wore on, Annabeth found her eyes getting dimmer. Her body wanted to sleep, especially after the late nights she had pulled trying to put together her latest architecture project before the deadline. But something felt off. The computer screen was becoming blurrier.
Annabeth stood up, but her body wouldn't obey. Her legs swayed underneath her before they buckled.
"What is going on?"
She tried to reach for her phone to dial 911 but suddenly everything went black.
The apartment was eerily quiet and dark except for the bright glare of the laptop. Suddenly, the mouse on the manuscript flashed and words began to type by themselves...
When Annabeth woke up, she was no longer Annabeth Chase, a twenty-eight year old PhD graduate in architecture working in New York. She was the eldest princess of Kiran, an insignificant supporting character slated to die a horrible death in the first chapter of Clarisse's manuscript in order to drive the events of the story.
Annabeth only had one word on her mind.
"Shit."
King Perseus Jackson, affectionately nicknamed Percy by his mother, inserted a silver needle into his tea cup. When the needle came back out black as expected, he calmly instructed his aide and closest friend, Grover, to take care of the poisoned tea. Later that day, the kitchen maid who had cleaned the tea cups for the king's use quietly disappeared from the kitchen without a trace.
To the other staff of the royal palace, this was just a case when workers would quit over some insignificant reason or another. But to those who saw things more clearly, this was a situation where having two masters always ended up poorly. And so they bowed their heads even lower, keeping their noses out of businesses they shouldn't be poking into.
Percy switched to another cup of tea. In his past life, he had not been as careful and suspicious as he had been now and had actually drank this poisoned tea. While his body had built up immunity to most poisons, this strange poison had caused his body to suffer greatly. These three days had cost him dearly, leading to a war that his kingdom, Eldoris, would suffer greatly, torn to pieces by the neighboring nations of Tynan and Kiran who circled Eldoris like vultures.
During those three days, the bride Kiran had sent had been been attacked on route to Eldoris and passed away. Kiran demanded compensation for the death of their princess and started a war with Eldoris as a result.
Percy sneered as he thought of those bastards. It was only after the Kiran princess' death that he found that the bride they sent him was not Princess Alana, the famed beauty and wielder of light magic. Kiran had sent him their eldest princess, someone they had kept quiet about for twenty-three years. Princess Alana was not sent on the excuse that the eldest princess had to be married out first.
When he heard of the news that the Kiran princess had been attacked, she was still alive at the scene of the crime. The imperial physicians had tried their best to save her life, but she had passed away from her fatal injuries. Percy still remembered how her grey eyes had opened briefly. They were pale and lifeless. This young woman had given up on life a long time ago. Then those grey eyes never opened again.
After some investigation, Percy discovered that the eldest princess was not known because she was of illegitimate birth. The imperial physicians also revealed that the princess' body was littered with years of scars from physical abuse. It was only then Percy had realized that Princess Alana, who had claimed to be someone graceful and kind, held evil in her heart. Enough evil to suppress her poor older sister but keep her alive long enough to be used as a pawn in her nefarious schemes.
Percy would have dearly loved to never have agreed to the Kiran princess' hand in the first place, but he had not gone back far enough in time to prevent that from happening. When the battle against Tynan and Kiran had escalated to its climax, Percy had summoned the very last of his magic towards Princess Alana, but not to kill her. He was sapping her light magic to perform an ancient spell that if cast wrong would take his life. But since he knew that he was already going to die, it was his last ditch attempt. He was only quick enough to extract enough light magic to go back in time until this point.
The Eldoris King called for one of his trusted advisors, Sir Rachel, to enter.
The red-headed knight bowed.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Call for an imperial physician," Percy stated.
He pretended to dab at his brow at imaginary sweat drops. Sir Rachel looked alarmed and concerned as she saw a teacup lying on its side and put two and two together. Percy waved her off before she could ask any more questions.
"I will get the physician right away, Your Majesty!"
Grover glanced at Percy who just smiled at the man's inquisitive expression.
"It seems that someone has planned out a great play for me. How could I disappoint them?"
Grover looked as though he had more to say. Sir Rachel Elizabeth Dare was the only daughter of Marquis Thomas Dare. She had grown up with Grover and Percy since childhood and was considered to be Percy's most trusted confidant after Grover. So Grover could not understand why Percy would pretend to be sick and not inform Sir Rachel of the truth.
Percy brooded in his thoughts. In the last few battles with Kiran, he had a feeling that he had a traitor in his midst, as Kiran evaded all traps set by Eldoris. Only someone high-ranking and in his inner circle would do so. He figured this was most possibly linked to Rachel, as she had mysteriously disappeared during the last battle.
Her father, Marquis Dare, had supported Percy until Percy revealed his plan to take a foreign princess for a political marriage. It was not as though Percy didn't know that Rachel's father wanted him to marry Rachel, and that Rachel had feelings for him in return. In the last few months before Percy died, he'd found that Marquis Dare seemed to have gained ownership of a sapphire mine that had last belonged to the dowager queen.
That had been suspicious to him. Percy needed a partner who did not have ties to the Eldoris court and therefore could not control him like his stepmother, the dowager queen, was trying to do. Sir Rachel was an unfit partner.
Percy had already eliminated Grover from his suspect list since Grover had died in Percy's arms after giving up his life to protect Percy. Grover had stayed faithfully by Percy's side, never abandoning him even when it was clear the tides were against Eldoris.
Percy hated thinking that he had been betrayed, but he was already gathering evidence quietly that a few of his advisers were involved with his stepmother, Dowager Queen Amphitrite, including Sir Rachel's father. He had lived in a web of lies, but this time he was determined to be the webmaster.
"Don't worry about it. Quietly select a group of the ten best shadow guards for a mission. We leave this afternoon after I am 'sick' in bed. No one else is to know but you and the guards. Understand?"
Grover still had a questioning look, but he obeyed. Perhaps he was thinking it was strange for Percy not to let Sir Rachel know, but maybe it was because King Perseus wanted all the people around him to think that he was truly poisoned.
Percy closed his eyes and drummed his fingers on the desk. Last time, he had been ill so that he did not know about the attack on time. Well, this time he would let his enemies believe that he had fallen into their trap. And enemies, he had quite a few.
He had inherited the throne of Eldoris at the age of twenty-one. He was born from the first queen. When his mother died, King Poseidon took the first queen's lady-in-waiting, the beautiful Lady Amphitrite as the second queen, as Amphitrite had some similarity to the first Queen in terms of looks and bearing. Queen Amphitrite bore the king a second son, but this son was sickly in health. The crown prince title remained on Percy's head.
Although Queen Amphitrite was loving to Percy on the surface, Percy felt that his stepmother was the one who instigated his mother's death, though he could not find proof as much time had passed and Queen Amphitrite had killed most of those who may have had information. And because her own son was ill in health, Queen Amphitrite tried to control Percy's tutors, companions, and marriage to insure her grip on power.
It was too unfortunate for her that Percy had reversed time with the knowledge of the future. He was going to pay back everything he had received, starting with keeping the eldest princess of Kiran alive.
"Let's go," Percy commanded. "It would be bad manners if I didn't personally pick my bride up, no?"
A/N: Hi, hi, hi, welcome to my newest PJO-only story. Last time, Annabeth reincarnated in "Revenge of the Duchess", so this time Annabeth has been transported from our modern world to a historical one where she must adapt to survive (isekai trope!). Meanwhile, Percy has reincarnated and is like, frick, I need to keep this princess alive.
I would say this is also the darkest story I've ever written, so the genre is mainly dark comedy mixed with some fantasy. Just a heads up! Percy and Annabeth have gray moralities compared to the canon PJO universe, but that's also because they have to do so to survive in this world. After all, Percy is the "villain."
There's also going to be a lot of subtext in this story. Thus, I hope you all brushed up on your English literature analysis skills (*insert evil laugh)! But if there's anything that is confusing, drop it in the reviews, and I'll explain in the author's note of the next chapter updated every Wednesday.
As always, see you my lovelies!