#FictFBFeb17 Day 1: Introducing Her Royal Highness Clara Winterburn

Fictional Flashback February 2017 – day 1 – introduce your character

Princess Clara Winterburn

When her parents are murdered by an insurgent intent on putting himself on the throne and enslaving her and the magical skills she will soon develop, Princess Clara Winterburn chooses to escape to another country, her mind altered so that she can escape both him and the painful memories. But as his grip tightens on her kingdom and she begins to come into her powers, the time comes for her to face her destiny and take her place as the rightful monarch.

She is helped along the way by members of a magical order known as the Aligarian Mages, who remain loyal to her even in the face of cruel punishment and risk of death. In particular, there is Max Drosslemeier, a Mage around her own age, with whom she forms a strong bond. She doesn’t know it, but he and his aunt provide her with utmost protection during her exile.

Thelidon is a small Kingdom and the reigning monarch’s magic is all the protection the people need. The monarch makes a pledge, known as the Vow of the People, to protect them. But the magic only passes to the first-born child, so when the previous King died with no heir, the throne passed to his brother, Clara’s father, who had no magic of his own. While the Aligarian Mages were able to provide some protection to the Kingdom, it was still vulnerable to attack, something General Josef Bauer took advantage of.

By the time she returns to Thelidon with her memories once again restored and in control of her magical abilities, Clara has become a hardened Queen, angry at Bauer for murdering her parents, at herself for running away, and for her people, who have had no one to fight for them. She’s more than ready to take her Kingdom back.

Clara is one of the protagonists in my current WIP, Operation Sugarplum, the title of which may soon be changing to something like With Magic and Memory. If you’re a regular on my WIPpet Wednesday posts, you would already be familiar with her and Max from the snippets I’ve shared over the past few months. Over February, I will be sharing little outtakes from Clara’s point of view, as part of the Fictional Flashback February challenge, designed by my friend, Faith Rivens. Some of them will take place before the actual story, while others will be “missing scene” type ficlets.

This is challenge in the vein of those 30 Day challenges, except it’s for February, so it’s only 28 days long. The idea of Fictional Flashback February is to use each of the prompts to create a memory for your character to reminisce on, thereby getting to know your character better. I haven’t really done one of these challenges before, but I wanted to give this one a go! As I said to Faith, I make no promises for consistency or quality of my contributions, as they will be written on the fly, but before uni really starts back would be the best time for me to try doing a challenge like this, so here I go!

Here are the rest of the prompts: