RETURN OF THE CLEVER PRINCESS

To keep speaking of my Ever After High fics, here is a recap of the character arc of the character that I based Sophia Eleonora, my avatar/heroine (though a supporting character in the original tale), on:

"There once was... a very clever Princess who has read all the books in the world. For
years she longed to be married, but she wanted a husband as clever as herself. She
put advertisements in the newspapers and the news quickly spread all over the
realm. Any young man could come and speak to the Princess, and the one who
spoke best would become her husband.”

“Ravends of young men came, but none of them were successful. They were all lost
for words, and repeated the last thing the princess had said. It was as if they fell
under a spell in her presence.”

“For two days the suitors arrived at the palace. On the third day, a young man arrived
on foot, dressed in shabby clothes.”

 “When he walked into the castle, he was not lost for words. He spoke so beautifully 

to the Princess that she immediately chose him to be her husband.”

 At last they came to the bedchamber. There were two beds, one was white, and in
this lay the Princess... (and the other was red)

In the end, the heroine inquires what has become of them:
Gerda asked after the Prince and Princess, and the little robber girl told her they had
gone abroad.

In my version, the realm is called Lilienstiel (German for "Lily Stem"), and it consists merely of the baroque/rococo castle-palace of Schloss Lilienstengel (once a Saxon- or Viking-style hall on an artificial island in Lake October, now in ruins., before the war of independence) and its wooded environs, dotted with cozy villages, parish-churches and fortresses (Sophia's mother Christina Ulrika the Queen Dowager, once the Lady of Lilienstiel, i.e. the umpteenth Clever Princess, is locked away from court by the regents in one of them). Its coat of arms features the famous white lily and the red one on a golden stem, with a shining star in the middle, against a purple and blue background. Lilienstiel borders not only on a vast Dark Forest populated by wolves and highwaymen, like in Andersen's original tale... but also on Feuersbrunst, a similar realm inhabited by humans (minority, outgroup) and Drakharin/weredragons (Katla being its sole heiress) and on the great power of Wonderland: a sworn enemy of both nations, that claimed the life of the Queen Dowager's consort Karl (the only one for her, for whose sake she lost her reason) on the field of battle...
The motto of both the household and kingdom is "Truth and Rarity".
Historically, Lilienstiel was a hinterland province of the Kaiser's Realm and then independent, and then ruled by Wonderland, before its rulers claimed independence, leading to a revolution and a successful war of liberation, the decisive battle won at a great prize: the untimely death of Lord Karl, an event that has marked international history in-universe.