A work that sadly exists only in the overactive imagination of Solandra, waiting patiently for when she isn't completely consumed by college work to be put into actual words.
Rachel Gracelyn is a nice but socially awkward girl who just can't seem to fit in with her peers, no matter how hard she tries. Her one friend since elementary school, Aurora Davidson, is even more painfully shy and quiet than her. By her senior year, Rachel's all but resigned herself to her loner existence.
Then she takes a wrong turn on the school's football field and finds herself in a Magical Land of beautiful, kindly elves and charming fairies. Amazingly, she finds that she can communicate with them on a level that she was never able to achieve with her classmates. Soon, she discovers that she is the long-lost princess of the magic races and is prophesied to be the one to bring eternal peace to the land by defeating the hideously ugly and slimy orcish races that have been oppressing her subjects for centuries.
Rachel must learn how to lead her people in an epic battle that will determine the fate of the magical realm, whether good or evil will triumph, and if she has finally found the place where she truly belongs. Things get even more urgent when Aurora unwittingly stumbles into the magical land too and is kidnapped by the orcs.
...Or is it? Did you really think that a troper was going to play a Wish-Fulfillment Changeling Fantasy completely straight? Subversions and Deconstructions abound halfway into the plot, especially the part where Rachel learns that her "fantasy come to life" has actually been an elaborate lie set up by a Chessmaster to trick her into fulfilling the terms of the prophecy to finally bring about total domination of the magical land. The elves and fairies are actually the bad guys (with the ones unwilling to follow the Chessmaster having been Brainwashed instead), and the orcs are the actual oppressed races. In fact, the "orcs" are a human-like race deliberately uglified by a glamour spell cast by the vain elves, and their alleged crimes were either wildly exaggerated or fashioned out of whole cloth to convince Rachel that they're Evil with a capital E. Oh, and Rachel is actually a member of the "orcs" kidnapped by the fairies to be bred into their eventual puppet on Earth, and the Chessmaster was sadistically planning to drop the bombshell on her after her eradiction of them just to relish the sight of her Heroic BSOD. Just to top things off, the Chessmaster turns out to be none other than Rachel's long-time friend Aurora, aka Aurora Estelle Davidson, aka the Morningstar.
Fortunately, Rachel is intelligent enough to pick up on subtle signs that something isn't right about her situation, and it's her attempt to make peace talks (against her races' wishes, for obvious reasons) that enables her to fit the pieces together just in time to confront Aurora. Everything ends relatively Happily Ever After, though Solandra still has to work her way up to that point realistically.
This work contains examples of the following tropes:
- Always Chaotic Evil: Used to describe the orcs. It isn't true.
- Black-and-White Morality: Deconstructed.
- Changeling Fantasy: Rachel discovers that she belongs to a non-human race. Just not the one she believes at first.
- The Chessmaster: Aurora, who became Rachel's friend only as part of her plan, so she can also be considered a Manipulative Bastard.
- Chess Motifs: The title is a reference to Rachel being "promoted" to powerful royalty (though technically a princess rather than The High Queen). What Rachel doesn't know until later on is that it also alludes to the fact that she's the main player being pushed around in the game set up by the Chessmaster, to be sacrificed at the right time.
- Defector from Decadence: There are some elves and fairies who didn't like the Big Bad's plan for their races (even if it offered them power) and tried to avoid becoming part of it. The Big Bad brainwashed them, but they join Rachel when she manages to free them of their brainwashing. Intended to show that no race here is Always Chaotic Evil.
- Evil Plan: Aurora wants to dominate the magical world eradicate humans in it.
- Fantastic Racism: The elves consider killing animals and plants to be inhuman, but show no qualms about killing orcs in cold blood. Likewise, the fairies want to be treated equally to other races, but treat the orcs with barely-disguised contempt. Rachel actually notices this and it's one of the indicators that causes her to suspect that she may not be on the right side.
- Magical Land
- Meaningful Name: Aurora's middle name is Estelle. It isn't until the climax that Rachel realizes that "Aurora Estelle" can be translated to "Morning Star".
- Medieval Stasis
- Naïve Everygirl: Rachel
- Our Elves Are Different: The elves are gorgeous, highly intelligent, and possess powerful magic in healing and combat. They're also bloodthirsty, power-hungry, and obsessed with keeping themselves perpetually frozen in a state of unchanging beauty.
- Our Orcs Are Different
- Prophecy Twist: Turns out that there's more than one way to read the prophecy that allegedly predicts that Rachel will be the main factor in defeating the evil in the land.
- Shrinking Violet: Rachel to a degree; Aurora even more so. It turns out to be an act for the latter, however.
- Spanner in the Works: Sort of inverted, as Rachel foils Aurora's plans by being smarter than Aurora thought she would be.
- Villainous Breakdown
- Was It All a Lie?: Rachel asks this question when Aurora shows her true colors.
