[RGBKnights]

When the Dark Queen's peaceful daughter claims the throne, her mother's winter follows her into the thawing world, and the monsters sworn to keep her alive interpret mercy through her mother's murderous expectations. The Queen They Knew is a new, non-canon dark fantasy of about 3,400 words in which that inheritance drives the crisis and the cost of recognition.

Snow surrounds her domain, accompanies her journey and flight, settles over the defended city, and remains at dawn despite her humane choices. The wider land still begins thawing. The complete request, including the later winter direction, and supplied original are preserved beside the provisional outline, editorial memory and Teen classification. Four separate character sheets, three winter setting paintings and a reference-based cover complete the package. Existing universe facts and other story packages are unchanged.

The monster crisis, defensive choices, damaged affection and bell ending were developed through independent Codex and authenticated Claude discussions. An independent whole-story contextual reading checked the winter revision against the complete updated request; its one surface-continuity finding was repaired and rechecked. The familiar key-holder remains a deliberate convergence along the shared road and open gate, rather than a requirement of the rescue.

Validation: saved art pixels inspected; all seven WebP references verified at 1536×1024 and the JPEG cover at 864×1536; the media selector includes exactly eight accepted exports and excludes the supplied original; whitespace checks pass. The three revised location references were accepted and inspected before the cover edit. This draft PR is for review and has not been merged.