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She sees the suns, two burning blue balls (no pun intended) for some obscure reason, bright up in the sky like the ones in Tatooine, except if young Luke Skywalker poured his blue mink over them, bored with having been made to drink it for most of his youth.

The clanking of the bell signaling lunch break back in elementary school somehow rings out of nowhere. She turns her head, trying to find the source of the sound, as well as a potential Ms. Marianne, the teacher always overseeing lunch breaks.

Nothing.

Wait, lunch?

Then she remembers how they agreed to go fight the mice in the morning, and that she herself was the one who changed it to that, from the previously appointed lunchtime brawl. Hysteria rises in her heart, which rapidly changes from its usual pitter-patter to an intense dum-dum-dum. Well, shit, she’s totally late, isn’t she, the fairy fucking queen herself? All her tens of thousands of alliances sent to help her would note her absence with great interest and assume that she is too busy sucking orifices or trainer dildos.

Why that thought even intruded into her slumbering mind, she cannot tell.

But what she knows is that she sure is in some deep shit. She tries to scream, to blow the steam off her stress, but no sound comes out. Kinda like that time she fell half a floor down the stairs and got the wind knocked out of her. Or when her cousin, the very one sent to the juvenile correction center a whole-ass time ago, punched right under her diaphragm.

That ain’t a nice feeling at all.

Every pops out from seemingly thin air, wearing his Dries Van Noten suit, which she remembers to be the same one long gone when he muscled up in the cave.

Shouldn’t it be torn into shreds by now?

No.

Something isn’t right over here.

On cue, she blinks her eyes open, abruptly awake to the world.

Two impossibly bluish-brown eyes bore down into her emerald one, along with a low mutter of “good morning” piercing her ringing ears.

“Shit, bro, you scared me,” she breathes, her head still processing the dream and its possible omen. Her man is shirtless, glass-cutting hard abs in all their glory. He is in the process of selecting the suit of the day to wear, slacks hanging low on his hips, unzipped and unbuttoned, exposing the V-shaped muscle that ninety percent of all male leads seem to have. A particular muscle which is exceptionally hard to cultivate in real life. Not even cutting dramatically on a diet of chicken breasts and broccoli could pull this feature out from most people.

Seeing his state of undress, Lily reassures herself that at least she’s not late for battle.

She goes to the curtain to check just in case, opening it to see the outside world. A whole glass screen of earth greets her, and she remembers that the whole palace is, in fact, below the ground.

Then an alarm sounds out of nowhere, quite similar to the clanking recess bell in her dream scenario.

CHAPTER 21: MEGAPHONE

“I think that’s all now,” Lily estimates, hanging around by a medieval-aged oxcart. On it is a lot of supposedly a thousand wraps of healthy, salmon-filled wholewheat sandwiches. Just the usual battle prep provisions here in Fairyland.

They may not have good militaries, not at all, but you can’t say they don’t have good food.

That’s basically the whole kingdom’s identity.

Life’s a bitch, but eating bland food names you as a witch.

As for the alarm this morning, it was a false cliffhanger, as it simply was a mandatory wartime alarm to wake all folks up, as to prevent the scenario in Lily-girl’s dream. No worries about that.

“Lils, you should count them,” her man tells her, standing by her side and not showing any clue of helping her anytime soon.

She shrugs. “I can’t count. You should do it yourself.”

“Guess what, I can’t count either.”

Lily pouts her lips suspiciously. Honestly, pretty much every emotional expression of hers can be summed up as a pout. “Then how’d you graduate university, Every? It was Harvard, wasn’t it?”

The young man, tall enough to rival youngling trees, grumbles and mumbles out. “I didn’t; I dropped out. No, actually, I was expelled in my third year of business management thanks to my failing maths grades. Lily, I know you wouldn’t believe it, seeing me so successful like this, but the GPA was so bad that time that even Papa’s bribes couldn’t sustain my seat there.”

“Actually, I can totally believe it.”