You want the first bit to match the second. So - upset and righted (as deb suggested) or shattered and reassembled.

That was my original take on it; "reassembly" is a highly physical mechanical term, not pairing properly with "upset". Plei said, upset as in apple cart, I imagined upset as in a sandcastle kicked over accidentally by a heedless passerby. Either way, though, reassembly is something one does with bits and pieces. So matching the two, somehow? Yup. Needs to happen.

I like Fay's suggestion, as well. But there's a certain simplicity to "righted" and the sentence itself, as Plei crafted it, is very clean and unfussy.

poisoned by the apple that was Fred and never awoken with a kiss from a prince.

So right now we have "Theirs was a fragile peace, upset by Fred and never fully righted."

Plei, that works. It might work even better (harking back to "upset" in the sense of it having more than one shade of meaning) if you take "righted" and make it be "put right."

Theirs was a fragile peace, upset by Fred and never fully put right or "...really put right".

edit: damned floating quotation marks....

Plei, that works. It might work even better (harking back to "upset" in the sense of it having more than one shade of meaning) if you take "righted" and make it be "put right."

Hee. Great minds.

I was going back and forth on it, though leaning in the direction of "put to rights".

We are Great Minds! Hear us roar!

I'm going to post a description I just wrote (not fanfic; from the new novel).

Just because I want a take on it.

This unpleasant blurb was accompanied by a reproduction of what looked to be a cheesy bit of Pre-Raphaelite pornographic art, showing a hideously malformed shape, swooping down upon a buxom sleeping woman with an improbable mane of curls and a faint anticipatory smile on her face.

And "put to rights", BTW, is about perfect.

I'd change it to something like:

This unpleasant blurb was accompanied by a reproduction of something I'm assuming is cheesy Pre-Raphaelite pornographic art. A hideously malformed shape swoops down upon a buxom sleeping woman with an improbable mane of curls cascading from her head and a faintly anticipatory smile plastered on her face.

There's a bit too much there, Deena, for me stylistically, anyway; the key of the picture is that faint anticipatory smile, which is why they think it's porn, and the fact that it's that coy sort of Vic faux porn would be watered down a bit by giving the woman herself too much importance, which is what would happen if I got too detailed about the curls. The text with the picture is a dictionary definition of "incubus".

Mostly, though, wasn't looking for edits (waaaay early in the process for that). Wanted to see if it brought up a nice clear picture of the cheesy Vic stuff.... Also, not present tense or first person voice. Narration; this series of novels is straight narration.

edit: hey! it double-posted....