The Secret World of Briar Rose

Author’s note:
This story is inspired by my experience with depression and suicidal ideation. If you find the subject matter to be difficult to read, please take care of yourself first.
3
Chapter 1

The last words Elly said before she disappeared were “I hate you.”
To Corin, the sentiment was nothing new. Saying “I hate you” was a universal language between sisters, and their tongues spoke it fluently.
Elly yelled it whenever Corin stomped over her chalk drawings and wiped them off the concrete. Corin hissed it whenever Elly hummed songs in the middle of her sleep and woke them up. They went to bed angry yet huddled for warmth every night. After the warplanes destroyed their homes and soldiers seized their family’s belongings, the only thing they had left was each other.
But this time was different.
This time, when Elly said “I hate you,” Corin knew she meant it.
Her sister had vanished as swiftly as any other resident come sunrise. Anyone living within the dilapidated buildings or rubble-­filled streets of Gyldan knew their home wasn’t forever. There would be a few years of normalcy and routine, if their factions allowed it, before the rumbling sound of bulldozers came to tear down the walls. A century-­long turf war between rivaling countries­ meant constant itinerance: new military, new flags, but never any warnings for the families who lived in Gyldan. Houses were simply strategic locations to be secured, and people like Corin and Elly were just collateral damage, about as insignificant as roaches that were crushed to death if they didn’t move out of the way.
As Corin wandered through the city center in search of Elly, she could hardly imagine these same streets bustling with trade and people a century ago. Her grandparents had risked their lives seeking refuge in the prosperous kingdom surrounded by forests, but those dreams were quickly dashed when the royal family abandoned its people, leaving an ungoverned country to descend into chaos. Warring groups divided into territories, and with soldiers patrolling the borders, Corin knew Elly couldn’t have left their faction­.
She pasted posters with her sister’s likeness around soup kitchens, town squares, even shops that had closed their shutters, like the burning bakery she had looted for bread after the last round of warplanes came. Her stomach rumbled with hunger by the time she circled back to the marketplace, a deserted area with ramshackle storefronts and stragglers sorting through trash. She approached a few of them to ask if they had seen the girl on her poster, but their eyes glazed over the image, or they muttered a non­committal response, or they cursed her out, which always resulted in her cursing them back.
Mostly, though, she was ignored, like another body rotting on the street.
Her appearance probably didn’t help. Hunger had whittled her limbs to bones and hollowed her cheeks. Swaths of crow-­black hair stuck to fresh bruises across her face. Tattered pants and ripped sleeves revealed grime and mud, the stains blending with her dark skin and old scabs. At eighteen years old, she already looked dead.
She nailed her last poster onto a wooden pole and took a step back, examining her work. She had recreated Elly’s face in charcoal with all the details she remembered. Every freckle on her dark skin, every birthmark on her long limbs. Her short, choppy hair, which always curled behind her ears. She had a small, rounded nose, wide cheekbones, and two large pools of eyes the color of summer soil after it rained. While Corin inherited their father’s broad shoulders and strong nose, Elly carried their mother’s features, soft and feminine like a black-­eyed daisy.
The longer Corin stared, the more she hated the drawing. The sketches were too crude and badly smudged. They looked like Elly but couldn’t capture her. They didn’t show what it felt like to hold her hand, to feel the stickiness of her palms from all the times she broke dandelion stems and marveled at their white milk. They didn’t show the light in her eyes whenever she heard a new story, the cuts on her fingers from plucking weeds in the cracks of sidewalks, the dirt under her nails from digging into soil and shouting that there was another world underneath that they couldn’t see.
“She’s still asleep down there,” Elly would insist in rushed breaths, “the princess from long ago—­”
Corin shook her head, dispelling her sister’s foolish enthusiasm for fairy tales. Even at the age of twelve, Elly still latched onto bedtime stories she’d heard as a child when they had lived with other artisans. Corin thought leaving the commune last year would, at least, let Elly outgrow childish interests and forget their friends. In the end, it was only Corin who wanted to forget them.
Before she dwelled longer, the sound of footsteps approaching made her reach for her belt. She turned to flash a dagger at the stranger’s throat, then pulled back as the elderly woman before her gasped.
“I’m sorry,” the stranger stammered, her voice frail and light. “I wanted to see your poster.”
Deep wrinkles etched the woman’s face like a crumpled plant. She wore a faded shawl that thinned above her wrists, showing a wedding ring that glinted from her finger. Corin handed her the crinkled paper and watched the woman squint at the drawing of Elly. Her lashes nearly brushed against the charcoal as her face pressed closer to the parchment. White clouds that surrounded her pupils shifted, her eyes straining to scan every detail.
“The shading on the girl’s face is excellent,” the woman murmured. “You’re very talented.”
Corin counted her breaths to restrain herself from cursing at the stranger. She felt foolish for hoping Elly would be recognized and angrier that the woman would waste her time by prattling compliments. She was not here to show off her technical skills in some pitiful act of panhandling. But why would anyone care? Even if people knew Elly had been missing for a full day, they would assume she was simply another street rat who faced the early mercy of death.
But Elly wasn’t dead. Corin knew this, because there was no body. She had checked the usual places her sister loitered: the soup kitchens filled with lines of gaunt figures, the root cellars they hid in to shelter from rain, even the riverfront where their old friends had built their commune, a now-­destroyed home that she swore she would never return to again.
No, it wasn’t that Elly was dead. It was that she was nowhere to be found. As if she had disappeared into thin air.
“You remind me of the artists that lived by the river,” the woman observed. “People only remember the insurrection, but before then, I used to see them paint and build. Tragic, really, what happened to them.”
Corin steeled herself to shut out the sound of bullets, the smell of burnt flesh, the muffled scream that burned in her throat whenever she imagined that day. It had been a year, and still the scene came to her in nightmares and woke her in sweat and tears. There was no point in picturing how even the autumn leaves died that night, crumpled like the bodies strewn over the debris. She had not been there, after all. She needed to focus on the opportunities in front of her, here and now.
“Are you an artist?” she asked.
“Yes. But it’s difficult now, as you can see.” The woman’s disfigured hand gestured to her cloudy eyes. “My husband used to describe a scene to me and I would draw it. Before he died, we drew so much together.”
Corin imagined the woman and her husband, hunched over an easel, splatters of paint dripping over the canvas edges. Their voices were soft murmurs, an echo of her own parents’.See this, Corin? Her mother’s hand steadying Corin’s fingers over a brush. A round smear of orange paint, bright like apricot, messy like juice.You just made the sun.
“My parents were artists too,” she said. “My mother was a painter. She taught me everything.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. And your father?”
“A sculptor. He liked making pots, the tiny ones you grow plants from. I’m better with a brush, though, so sometimes I’d paint them after he finished.”
The woman cracked a smile.
“You must keep painting, then. Sometimes art can be the only refuge in this world. These soldiers take our loved ones, but they cannot take this. That’s how we keep a memory alive, even if it’s gone.”
Corin thought of patchwork quilts stained with paint, clay pots drying by the window, a tiny cottage made of lime-­washed brick, and a roof so low she could kiss the thatch. Her father’s calloused palms, her mother’s belly pregnant with Elly, the low hum of a song they’d made up. She could paint the memory into permanence, proof that there was once a home where love overflowed.
She took the elderly woman’s hand. This was someone left with no family, just like her, searching for a way to bond with another human being. Corin would give her that connection. She would let the woman know that, despite their despair, at least they had crossed paths with one another.
“Thank you,” she said. “I won’t give up on my dreams.”
The woman crinkled her eyes and nodded with conviction, as if her heart turned a little softer from their brief connection with each other. They bid goodbye, and Corin watched the woman leave before dropping her smile. Her hand dug in her pocket, where the edge of a wedding ring pressed against her palm.
It was smaller than she would have liked to barter with, but she could still make some decent money from it.
Maybe it took a mind deteriorating with old age to fall for a trick like this, believing in the dreams of a starving artist. But the truth was that dreams were never enough. Her mother died when she was ten, her paintings and clothes discarded by leering men who wanted to put their own marks over her body. Her father changed after that, stewing in liquor and regret until he finally gave in to his darkest desires and drowned himself a year later.
No, if Corin painted a memory, it would be this: A raging river that took three bodies. A baby wailing as the water drowned them. A girl who only had the strength to carry her sister, not the weeping man who brought them there.
It would be a portrait of survival, because in the end, that was what mattered. Not the fleeting love of a mother gone too soon, not the strength of a father who’d lost too much. Not even a makeshift home that once opened itself to an orphaned teenager, only to disintegrate before she turned eighteen.
She had no capacity to focus on something as meaningless as art. After the insurrection took her friends, there was no one else but Elly and her.
Now, there was only her.
Because even as she kept searching, Elly never returned.
3
Corin woke to the sound of soldiers seizing her home. It wasn’t much of a home to begin with, but she had depended on the deteriorated building as a roof over her head, even if that roof was composed of wooden boards and cobwebs.
Troops barged in clanking metal and heavy guns, stomping up a creaky stairwell that led to an alcove blocked by a rotting wood door. When they kicked it open, she’d barely made it out of bed. Their eyes fell upon the pile of burlap and moth-­eaten sheets, their noses wrinkling at the rotting odor of trash and unwashed clothes. She felt naked under the gaze of these strangers, like a roach found belly-­up in a sticky trap.
“No squatters,” one of the men yelled. “You’re on our turf now.”
The distant roar of bulldozers made the floorboards rumble. The walls trembled, as if they could tell another man-made machine was coming. Her pulse raced as she rifled through her bags and fished out crumpled documents.
“I rent under Woodbine,” she spat, as if the name of a rich landlord meant anything. Her pointer finger stabbed the bottom half of her papers where both of their signatures were scribbled beside last year’s date. She had recalled the day she met the old man with as much regret as getting talked into holding a knife, even though she’d never made the cut. His pale eyes had locked onto her first, sensing her desperation even from across his shop. His smile had chipped incisors, like a wolf baring its teeth at his next prey. She knew she’d made a mistake shaking his hand and it had haunted her ever since.
The only consolation from their deal should have been the new roof over her head, even if it was in a decrepit building. But the soldier barely glanced at the document she presented. His disinterested expression felt like a rock sinking in her stomach. She understood, even before he spoke, that any prior agreement she’d made was for nothing.
“Woodbine sold ownership of his land and left Gyldan. Demolition orders call for any illegal housing to be claimed under Zilar military.”
The soldier stamped the Zilar flag, a striking blue marked by an eagle and a coat of arms. He raised the pole high enough to puncture the boarded rooftop. She watched the flapping cloth in the sky with shaking anger. Her curled fists wanted to smash Woodbine’s pallid face. He’d put blood on her hands the day they traded favors, and the desolate excuse for a home she was about to lose had not been worth her sacrifice.
The barrel of a gun pressed into her back, forcing her to move. She couldn’t even walk a clean path to the door as hordes of men swept the home for valuables. Metal detectors crawled the floorboards like mechanical spiders, hunting for hidden gold from a once prosperous land. She sneered at their pointless search. Greedy men who already had everything always wanted more. Her family had escaped Zilar for refuge in Gyldan, only for their home to be stolen once again.
If they had asked, she would have told them there was nothing to seize. She’d sold Elly’s old toys and baby clothes for a pathetic amount of bills after her sister outgrew them. She’d already thrown away palettes and brushes when she gave up on art. At least when they took her parents’ home, there was furniture to overturn and memorabilia to destroy. Old paintings and cracked pottery and things that could have mattered if she still had a family.
They couldn’t take from someone who had nothing left now.
Yet something floated behind a tattered sheet, small and round and strung by a metallic chain nailed to one of the scorched beams. Instinct crackled her heart and made her lunge for it. The sudden movement caused a soldier to knock his gun into her head and force her knees to the ground. He pressed a boot to her back and grabbed the chain. The pendant, a hollowed ring where a gemstone should have been, dangled between his narrowed eyes. He let out a snort, dropping the necklace to the floor where her cheek pressed against wood.
“Worthless,” he muttered.
He was right. Her grandmother’s pendant held no monetary value, the lack of gemstone turning the necklace into nothing more than a misshapen copper band. There was no practical reason for Corin to keep it like a family heirloom. And yet, his disgust at the ornament, as if it were as insignificant as the rest of her ancestry because they weren’t gilded by fortune, made something snap inside her.
She snatched the chain before standing.
“You’re wasting your time,” she spat. “There hasn’t been gold on this land for centuries. The only thing you’re digging up are the graves you’ve made yourselves.”
She had already braced herself for the soldier’s retaliation when his gun barrel swung down, metal crushing against her eye.
Chapter 2
103 years ago

Princess Amelia did not believe in true love, but her faerie godmothers thought she did.
The three of them floated behind the painter, who had been toiling over the royal family’s portrait for hours while Amelia sat with her father and stepmother. One faerie pressed her fingers to both corners of her mouth and flashed sparkling teeth.
“Think of the true love you’ll meet someday,” she said, “and how excited you’ll be to fall for him.”
Ah, yes. A handsome man to provide reason for her to smile. This was the motivation to keep living, despite the curse that promised she would sleep forever when she turned eighteen. Clover had granted the gift of true love’s kiss to break the curse, so of course the godmothers believed in it. Their entire credibility depended on the cure, lest their reputation be tainted.
Amelia forced her lips into a smile. The godmothers clapped for her like she’d performed a magic trick.
Still, she felt nothing.
She possessed a face that every painter loved: bright eyes the color of sea glass, waves of golden hair rolling past delicate shoulders, porcelain skin with blushing apples on her cheeks. Her face had the symmetrical shape of a heart that pinched to the dainty point of her chin. The smile she wore highlighted the pink blooming from her lips. People compared her to roses, even though she never cared for them.
The painter could add as many shades as he wanted, but she was still a blank palette behind the face her godmothers had gifted her. Only a pastel dream of a girl to soothe people’s ideas of what beauty should look like.
If she had any ugly, gnawing thing inside her, no one would ever know.
3
The portrait hung as a centerpiece in the castle’s grand hall. Dark oils streaked across the canvas, the paint bleeding together to make three figures.
The first thing Amelia noticed upon its undraping was the gold glittering on her father’s throne. He sat tall and broad-­shouldered in his chair, casting a wide shadow on its crimson velvet and lacework. A gold finish had been added to the crest rail, and his crown glinted under the light like a halo. Either the painter took creative liberties, or King Victor had ordered it himself, for a crown made of gold was impossible. Throughout the kingdom of Gyldan, not a single ounce of gold existed in clothing, furniture, or jewelry. The mineral had been wiped from the land for centuries, so rare it had become nearly extinct.
Instead, the only remaining gold lived in the royal family’s blood.
She grew up with the story retold to her several times, a teaching tale for why her family was extraordinary. Gyldan had once been nothing more than barren land isolated by surrounding forests, where wild faeries and creatures attacked any human that trekked through the foliage. That changed when her great-­grandfather, King Samael, found an orphaned faerie named Oleander­. To display his gratitude for the king, queen, and their son, Oleander enchanted their blood with gold so that Gyldan would become prosperous for the rest of their ancestry’s rule.
Oleander was the only faerie who possessed the ability to create gold, but he limited his magic to one family so that their exclusivity would hold power. Still, rumors swirled throughout the land that he’d hidden the last treasure in a secret place within Gyldan. People climbed mountains surrounding the river valleys, traveled to other colonies for clues, even fought with wild faeries in the forests to excavate trinkets from tree hollows. They failed to discover any hidden fortune, and would never receive the answer from Oleander­, who crossed death as an act of loyalty when King Samael died.
Amelia glanced down at her wrist. Beneath pale skin, the faintest hint of gold shimmered in her veins. The ancient magic still worked, but the bloodline wouldn’t continue with her. She was fifteen now, a ticking clock set to stop working in three more years. Her father deciding to marry was understandable. Broken parts should always be replaced, therefore King Victor needed to produce a new heir. Preferably a son, but if not, at least a girl who carried a stronger legacy than sleeping for the rest of her life.
She just didn’t expect the new queen to be so young. Lilith looked more like an older sister than a stepmother. Barely eighteen years of age, the woman had married Amelia’s father only yesterday. This painting finally allowed Amelia time to observe her.
Lilith didn’t have the pretty and delicate bearing of most noblewomen. She was strong-­jawed and muscular with dark olive skin and a sharp aquiline nose. Her long hair was tied into neat, knotted locks, streaming down her back like rope. A set of pearls wrapped around her throat like a choke hold.
“The pearls simply ruin the whole thing, don’t they?”
Her godmother’s voice made Amelia startle. Iris had sneaked behind her like a shadow, so quiet that even the flap of the faerie’s delicate robe barely made a sound. She gazed at the portrait and shook her head in disapproval.
“She didn’t listen when I told her they wouldn’t match the wedding theme. Some nonsense about wanting to keep a piece of home with her.”
“Which home would that be?” Clover chimed. Thick coils of blond hair bounced as she entered the hallway. Faeries were known to be lively spirits, and as the youngest sister, she embraced that reputation with a spritely voice and natural sunny glow.
Amelia couldn’t blame her godmothers for their distrust. Being fiercely protective of the royal family was their job, and having a stranger live in the castle introduced too many risks. Especially when that stranger came from disgraced nobles and carried a reputation for spending time at brothels.
“I overheard her trying to convince King Victor to set up camps,” Iris whispered. “More places to take in runaways from Zilar. Danger­ous criminals who would eagerly stab the king for a fraction of his golden blood.”
“Madness!” Clover cried.
“Why he chose a woman with friends from whorehouses, I’ll never know.”
“Well, you are the company you keep—­”
A new voice interrupted their hushed conversations. “Enough with the gossip, ladies. Let’s have a little more tact, shall we?”
The two sisters parted, making room for their eldest. Dahlia wore a ruby gown with a high neckline that accentuated the sharp point of her chin. She tucked a curl of brown hair behind her ear and turned to Amelia with a practiced smile.
“Welcoming another woman into the castle must be difficult. You miss your mother very much, don’t you?”
Amelia didn’t respond, because she couldn’t miss someone she never knew. Her mother had died giving birth to her. She held no animosity toward the new queen, nor did she react with any of the tantrums that one would expect from an adolescent. Instead, she felt about the situation like she felt about most things: indifferent.
Where her mind often wandered as her godmothers gossiped was a different road entirely. One far away from ancient castles and limestone towers and talk of golden bloodlines, demons’ curses, even true love.
“Godmother Dahlia,” she murmured, “will I still become Briar Rose?”
She waited for an answer as the faerie pursed her lips. Long ago, the godmothers discussed plans to disguise her as an orphan. They feared that the demon Malicine would visit the castle and trick her into pricking her finger on a spindle. It might be easier, they suggested, if she lived as an ordinary girl among the other forest nymphs. A girl by the name of Briar Rose.
“No, my dear,” Dahlia said apologetically. “Your father didn’t think it would be a good idea.”
Amelia held her breath so that her chest would not deflate. Hiding­ her disappointment, she bid the faeries goodbye and retreated to her bedroom. For the rest of the evening, the godmothers would likely chatter about the new queen or potential suitors who could break her curse. They wouldn’t know that such matters were far away from her mind.
In her head, she had already envisioned this life they planted long ago, watered the seeds and watched them grow into a cottage nestled deep in a far-­off forest. It would be a fraction the size of the castle, but there would be a garden of sunflowers, a front porch where she’d share tea with forest animals, and windows that let sunlight cast in sideways.
In another life, she would rise with the sun and sleep with the stars and never feel alone.
She would be happy, rather than someone only pretending to be in their portrait.
Chapter 3

Cold water stung Corin’s skin as she splashed her face beside the river. Fat bruises the size of berries bloomed on her cheeks, and her left eye was swollen shut after the soldier had beaten her. But she was used to looking like crap, and really, she was more concerned that Elly had nowhere to return. If her sister tried searching for their ramshackle house behind the railroads, she would find only a mountain of rubble and an army of soldiers who would sooner protect land than their own people.
When most of the blood and grime washed off, Corin limped down the rocky path by the river’s edge. The water had turned to a muted gray, reflecting the dull clouds of a washed-­out sky, though most of the riverbank was covered in dead leaves and weeds that grew along the edges. Autumn should have killed her memories of this place like the trees, yet reminders lingered on every corner. The soft murmur of stream that once lulled Corin and Elly to sleep in their tent. The patch of grass where their friends lay freshly washed clothes to dry under the sun. The gritty pile of rocks that children collected to skip across the water. That time felt like the closest thing to peace, which was why she shouldn’t have expected it to last at all.
She passed by the area where she had last seen her friends, marked now by churned mud and shattered stone. The commune moved their tents along the river trail throughout the seasons to avoid capturing soldiers’ attention, but she remembered the place she’d visited the night she left for good, the gentle slope of wildflowers her boots had crushed to death when she fled under the moonlight. A year was enough time to turn her friends to dust, but she couldn’t stop smelling charred flesh as if she’d been with them.
She quickened her pace to leave them behind. Dryness thickened her throat like the scream she swallowed every morning after waking up. When she thought it would come up again like bile, she steadied herself at a wooden pole. Her blurred gaze fixed itself to something simple: The mud on her boots. The scattering of gravel. The curved lines of chalk on the rocks’ surface.
The familiarity of it struck her. Most of the drawings had faded from rain, but she recognized the rough scribbles of white and the uneven bumps of paint. She had taught Elly to soak chalk in water to create a paste and seen her sister cover sidewalks with drawings. The day before they left the commune, despite Elly’s protests, she had stamped them out. At least, she thought she did.
She knelt down to turn over the rocks. Each drawing revealed underside was a tiny stab of betrayal. There were ruffled petals colored in white, as if in mid-­bloom, and broad circles that spiraled around a stem like full moons. A few of the stems turned into wavy lines, which she guessed were locks of hair, a childish depiction of a flower crown worn by a girl. Except, to Elly, these were not ordinary flowers, and this was not an ordinary girl.
Anger pulsed against her temple as she kicked the rocks into the river. She had told her sister to stop listening to fairy tales. That stories were shared to placate and distract from reality, but they would never be tools to survive in it. All this time, she feared Elly would die in the crossfire of soldiers, be snatched by men with leering eyes, or keel over from hunger and poverty. But she hadn’t lost her sister to any of those things.
In the end, the girl had run away to chase the most dangerous thing of all: hope.
3
Sunset bled into the mountainside by the time Corin reached Gyldan’s borders. She understood then why a castle had been built here centuries ago. The rocky terrain overlooked the surrounding forests, and if any god had favored her to make her born in wealth, she would have wanted her windows to oversee the towering trees and changing leaves as well. But the castle was long gone, rumored to be buried with its sleeping princess, and the only sight left was dead foliage and patrolling soldiers. They stood along the border with rifles and sharp eyes, as keen to pull the trigger if they spotted her as they would be for any animal.
She stayed away from walking trails, ducking behind a boulder to evade a passing military tank. Once the roar of the vehicle faded, she continued stalking along the mountainside as she had for the past hour, tearing down vines that wrapped around the rocky walls and rubbing mud over her clothes for camouflage. Thorns ripped holes in her gloves, and her palms prickled with splinters.
When she thought her chafed skin couldn’t handle more, her fingers dug into a rock crevice that finally felt different from the rest.
Cold air wafted through the small cracks. The change in temperature raised bumps on her skin. She cut through the thick vines with her dagger, shearing the tendrils that twisted around each other until a gaping black mouth opened before her.
She stepped back, staring into the darkness. The wind whispered around the rocks like a secret. She thought about the ones that would never be uncovered by the world, lost in time.
A century ago, refugees from Zilar dug tunnels connecting to their neighbors in Gyldan while evading the dangerous forests that surrounded the kingdom. Her grandmother had been one of hundreds who survived traveling for miles by foot. But monarchy dissolved into war after the royal family died out, and as neighboring kingdoms fought to take over the land, military forces found and demolished several passageways. Now desperate travelers used the remaining network of tunnels for a different purpose: to find the princess who fell asleep one hundred years ago.
She knew the story well, because it was Elly’s favorite. The other artists from the commune had told Elly about the legend, and she loved repeating it to Corin. On rainy nights when they hid inside their tent, Elly would whisper in Corin’s ear the tale of a princess cursed by a demon. As midnight struck on the princess’s eighteenth birthday, the girl pricked herself with a spindle and fell into eternal slumber. Her faerie godmothers gifted true love’s kiss as a cure, yet when time came for the prince to kiss her, she never opened her eyes.
“That’s why Gyldan is so terrible now,” Elly had whispered.
“Because some princess pricked herself with a spindle?” Corin remembered saying. “That’s stupid.”
Elly had shaken her head. Her face had been tucked in the crook of Corin’s neck, her hair tickling under Corin’s chin whenever she moved. Corin had retaliated by tickling her stomach. Elly had shoved her elbow into Corin’s face with a huff.
“There were people who visited her tower before the castle was buried. In all their drawings, she wore a crown of moonflowers. Those only bloom every hundred years, and they did on the night she fell asleep.”
“Is there a purpose to this story, or are you just rambling to annoy me?”
Corin had known the flowers were Elly’s latest fixation, their concrete surroundings etched in clumsy chalk recreations. She didn’t like the way the story clung to her sister like false hope.
“I counted the years. They’re going to bloom again in three days’ time,” Elly had said, wide-­eyed and breathless. “What if that’s when the princess will wake up?”
Corin had diminished her sister’s beliefs by stamping out her chalk drawings and reminding her of reality. No one could fall asleep for centuries, let alone be the savior to a kingdom overthrown by war. Desperate travelers who ventured inside the tunnels­ chased after a fantasy, where skies were filled with magic and faeries instead of warplanes and smoke. Not only were these ideas foolish, they were also dangerous. Despite hundreds of people attempting to find the princess, no one had ever made it out of the tunnels.
Corin stared at the abyss and pictured Elly walking into the darkness, motivated by inane stories and imaginary flowers. As she rolled up her sleeves, gripped onto the rocks, and climbed down into the hole, she thought about how she’d underestimated the gall that a child of twelve could have. She would not let her sister pay the price of stupidity with her life.
The tunnels turned colder the deeper she traveled. Goose bumps prickled her flesh even as she massaged her arms with muddied gloves. She tried marking each turn she made with lines of gravel, but there were other stones in each corner, trails left behind by those who’d inevitably become lost.
“El?” she called out.
No one responded but her own echo. She inhaled a deep breath and gritted her teeth.
“When I find you,” she called again, “you’re going to be in so much trouble.”
3
She did not find Elly.
Corin lost count of the hours, her awareness of time ebbing and flowing like the wash of a tide. Blisters oozed between her toes, each step in the endless tunnel laced with pain. Rocks cut through her gloves and scraped her skin.
At first, the excitement of following Elly’s trail had propelled her forward. She’d recognized the chalk drawings of moon­flowers on the walls and the clumsy scribbles that could have only been etched by her sister’s hand. But as the hours stretched along endless passageways and wore down her body, she wondered how Elly could have survived this far. She dreaded turning a corner where the chalk no longer remained and finding her sister’s body instead.
A jagged stone cut her back as she leaned against a wall. Even breathing was difficult, the stale air thick with dust and dirt. She wanted to give up and cry. Not because she was tired, but because she could only imagine Elly walking this same path, her body hollowing from the inside out until she was nothing but bone.
“We can’t survive without each other,” their mother had told her when Elly was born. “You have to protect your little sister.”
And she’d tried, hadn’t she? After their parents died, she’d kept Elly out of trouble, steered her away from open streets when the warplanes came, traded favors with other artists from the commune so they’d look after Elly while she looted shops during air raids. She threw herself into destroyed homes and threw fists at strangers who gave her broken ribs and black eyes while calling her a low-­life thief.
That was what eldest daughters were supposed to do. Their survival was her responsibility, because she was born first.
“Hmm . . . I don’t think that’s the full story, Corin.”
A familiar voice echoed through the cavern walls. A young woman with a greasy ponytail sat on a rock beside her, the stray strands of her chestnut hair strewn over her sunken cheeks and black eyes. Her skin was summer brown, and her mouth set in a hard line, the way Corin remembered her a year ago. The woman picked at dirty nails through her fingerless gloves, a matching pair to the set she’d gifted Corin when they first met.
“I don’t remember you being so responsible when I found you,” said the woman. “Or have you already forgotten?”
Great. Corin was so hungry she was hallucinating the dead. She clenched her jaw, trying to shut out Harlow’s figure, but ended up drawing the memory closer instead. Corin was barely a teenager when the artists found her beneath the bridge that spanned the river, her body curled around a shadowy recess where concrete jutted over the ledge. They’d tried getting her attention, but she couldn’t lift herself from the ground to tend to the dirty child beside her, couldn’t even bother responding to Elly shaking her shoulders and whining that her head was itchy from their filth.
They’d carried Elly across the river, while Corin had to be dragged like a corpse. They’d cut Elly’s hair and massaged soap into her scalp. After, they’d ripped pieces of bread and hand-­fed Corin while she sat blank-­eyed and silent.
She was twelve, and her parents had been dead for a year, and she couldn’t muster the strength to try anymore. It was easier to tune out Elly’s crying and pretend she was no longer a person, but a ghost.
“You were a wreck,” Harlow said. “Maggie told me your body was there, but your mind wasn’t.”
Corin hadn’t bothered learning everyone’s names those first few months, because they didn’t feel real. She saw herself living among them as if she were a distant entity, watching from above. There was her body, carrying tables along the riverbank, washing berries to share with the others. They were a group of ten to fifteen vagrants, some young, some old, and a few came and went throughout the seasons. Memories of her new beginning and acquaintances were a blur. They didn’t crystallize until the morning she woke to Elly and Harlow’s laughter, the two of them skipping rocks down the stream.
Seeing Harlow’s gentle gaze toward her sister, Corin had realized it wasn’t that she resented her parents for making her the eldest daughter. She just wasn’t cut out for it.
“I’ve thanked you countless times for everything you did,” she muttered to the empty space beside her. “But I’m better now, and I don’t need you anymore.”
She forced her aching bones to move, if only to ignore Harlow’s ghost. The flame on her torch was nearly dying, but she saw enough of a path ahead and touched the rocks beside her to feel the wide artery of granite. The passage covered with Elly’s drawings turned lower, forcing her to crawl. A rotten-­egg smell struck her face, rank and pungent. The longer she crawled, the stronger the stench of decay wafted in the air.
She dragged her match across a rock and lit the torch brighter, raising it to the ceiling to illuminate the rest of the path, only to discover she was no longer alone. Skeletons lined the narrow passage, draped in yellowed bones and ragged clothes. Her nostrils flared at the foul stench thickening the air, as if death had been sealed in a jar for years and she had twisted the lid open.
She buried the back of her hand against her teeth and muffled the urge to scream, letting it die in her chest. None of these people had made it. They could have been her. Or Elly—­
No. Corin’s eyes scanned the dead, searching for details to identify her sister. The shape of her body, the jut of her bones, the fabric of her clothes. They did not match the bodies here.
“C’mon. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” Harlow drawled. “Oh, wait. You weren’t there.”
Corin fought the urge to vomit as her imagination brought forth familiar bodies strewn across the rocks. She had not been there, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t picture it. Their hands tied behind their backs. Maggie howling like a feral animal whenever she was threatened. Rowan using his broad torso to shield the women. And Harlow, that damn, stubborn rebel who had planned everything, shouting at the soldiers until gunshots silenced her forever.
Corin knew, logically, that this was not the same passageway where her friends died. The army had sealed the tunnels after their capture. She didn’t know what was worse: if she had been a rebel foolish­ enough to join her friends and die with them, or being the coward who abandoned them to save herself instead.
She paced in the tunnels, frantic eyes searching for familiar relics to identify her sister. Dehydration and hunger overshadowed her senses, turning her vision dizzy as darkness closed in. She kept seeing it. The wet mess of Harlow’s open skull. The white sheet of Maggie’s sunken face. Rowan’s stiff limbs, unable to shield everyone from the bullets. She stopped at someone’s foot and cursed the memories that kept flooding to her mind, warping the bodies in front of her. The tunnels shrank, the walls caving in from the corners. She couldn’t breathe. Faces blurred together, strange and familiar. Blue lips, sallow skin, maggots crawling beneath eyelids, digging into her skin.
She had told Harlow not to go to the tunnels. It wasn’t enough. She had warned Elly not to chase after fairy tales. Now she would lose her sister too.
The weight of her grief became too heavy. It forced her to her knees and made her give in to her hallucinations. Crying, she bent over a body and let the small shape fit itself in her arms. She kept saying she was sorry, so sorry, as she rocked back and forth, despair consuming her like a tidal wave. Her head pulled back too far, and then she felt the wet patch of rock, the hardthud of her skull against the low ceiling, the loss of gravity in her limbs.
Her body tumbled backward. Darkness took her like the bite of teeth. Even as she disappeared, she was still screaming.
Chapter 4
103 years ago

A scream came from the library. Amelia burst through the doors to find Queen Lilith standing on a table. Their eyes met, and the woman pointed a trembling finger toward the bookshelves. Yellow scales covered a thick length, and three lines of dark brown spots ran down its body. A common garter snake, Amelia­ recognized, likely one that had wandered in from the greenhouse.
She picked up the snake and cracked open a window, letting the animal slither outside. Meanwhile, Lilith’s legs continued trembling atop the table. Amelia reached a hand to help her down. In her grip, she felt warm skin, lean fingers, and a sweaty palm that, surprisingly, had calluses. Their proximity made her notice the freckles on Lilith’s sun-­kissed cheeks, the birthmark on her chin, and the gleam in her wide brown eyes, one slightly smaller than the other whenever the woman winced or smiled.
Amelia became aware, then, how her presence had its own ab­sence. She herself had no crooked features or unusual birthmarks. Her gift of beauty was a blank slate. She didn’t shine the way Lilith did.
“Thank goodness,” the queen sighed with relief. “I was about to whack it with a book, but that would’ve been a waste of good literature.”
Amelia examined the array of tomes splayed over the table. Handmaids dusted each shelf to keep the books pristine, but she had never seen anyone read a single page. EvenThe Book of Samael, rumored to have been a journal left behind by the late king, was just for show, its contents completely illegible.
Lilith’s collection looked different. There were cracked spines, pages flipped open, scribbles of ink across dense notebooks. All bookmarked and carefully curated even amid chaos.
“What are you doing?” Amelia asked, following Lilith as the woman pushed a rolling ladder down the aisle. Books wrapped in leather and cloth spilled from floor-­to-­ceiling cherrywood shelves.
The queen fiddled with her pearl necklace, her eyes scanning the room before they stopped and lit up. She climbed the ladder, plucked a book from the top shelf, and tossed the tome to Amelia to catch.
“I’m drafting a proposal to open Gyldan’s borders and establish resettlement programs. I figure the king will listen if I dress it up in more formal language. People in high positions love to use lengthy words for such simple things, don’t they?”
Amelia pictured her godmothers’ disapproving faces. In council meetings with her father, they had stressed the importance of maintaining the kingdom’s borders and protecting Gyldan from invasion. It didn’t matter that their neighbors in Zilar were fleeing persecution. Foreigners brought diseases, stole jobs, and took resources away from natural-­born citizens. When a nobleman was caught having an affair with a migrant woman from Zilar, Lilith was the babe who had been born from scandal. Amelia assumed the woman would distance herself from her family’s reputation when she married the king. Instead, she was doing the opposite.
“Why should we welcome outsiders? Is it not better to take care of ourselves before risking our safety for strangers?” Amelia parroted her godmothers’ words, for this was the code that the faeries followed. If Gyldan had not offered them wealth and status, the Fae never would have mingled with human affairs at all. She wondered how quickly they would disappear from the human eye if they no longer had such enticements.
Lilith pursed her lips, which were no longer painted dark like her portrait. She looked more vibrant now that her face was stripped to natural colors. This, Amelia thought, was what the artist should have drawn.
“When I was a child, my mother told me about how Gyldan used to be nothing more than sand. Before it turned to gold, the land was a barren desert that stretched for miles. I liked that idea: that something can be made from nothing.”
Her heels clacked against the patterned wood as she slid down the ladder. The momentum made her rush to Amelia with such smooth speed, it was almost as if she was floating.
“I think people can do the same,” she said, “and we start with each other.”
Up close, Amelia could see how the dark hues of Lilith’s eyes flickered under the sunlight like wine. The queen was not pretty in the delicate way in which the godmothers had blessed Amelia to be. Yet there was something radiant about her: the strength in her jaw, the sharp point of her nose.
Perhaps this was supposed to be what beauty looked like, Amelia thought. To care so deeply about something, it brought life in you.
3
Sunflowers bloomed when summer arrived. Amelia kept a fistful of seeds in her pocket. She liked to pluck them from the greenhouse and replant the flowers in glass jars around the library. When sunlight hit the windows and spilled through the jars, the flowers turned their heads and looked up at the sky, following the sun like admiring children.
She mimicked their behavior when it came to Lilith as well. They spent slow afternoons in the library, occupying the space as if it were their private oasis. She learned phrases in different languages from beautiful countries that were torn apart by war. She listened to stories about Lilith’s mother fleeing to Gyldan through secret tunnels and working in brothels to survive. Every time, she stared at Lilith, watching the pages of books flutter between her slender fingers, the furrow in her brow, her soft pursed lips.
One day, the queen didn’t visit the library until late evening.
Amelia had curled into an armchair and fallen asleep waiting for her. She dreamed of a cottage house, clean sheets drying in the breeze, and a garden of sunflowers that germinated in late spring. The cottage was made of misshapen stone. Forest animals visited the porch for warm tea and nonsensical conversations. It was a silly dream, quick to dissolve as she awoke to Lilith shaking her shoulder.
In the candlelight, shadows appeared beneath the queen’s puffy eyes, as if she had been crying. “I didn’t think you’d still be here,” she whispered.
Had Lilith wanted time alone in the library? Strands of dark hair drifted loosely from her knotted locks. Amelia wanted to brush them away from her face. “Are you all right?”
The woman’s gaze was distant, too complicated to discern. A moment of deliberation passed, as if she were evaluating her words carefully.
“Amelia,” she said, “do you think I am capable of deception?”
Amelia stared at her, trying to make sense of the puzzle in Lilith’s expression. She could not fit the pieces together. She decided it didn’t matter. “Of course not.”
Then the doors flew open, and she soon realized that whatever she believed didn’t matter either. Heavy feet stomped across the room, and candlelight flickered with seething rage under a new presence. Lilith turned around in time for King Victor to strike his palm across her face. Her hip knocked against one of the tables, its legs scraping the floor with an ugly sound that made Amelia wince.
“How long were you going to keep this a secret?” He pronounced each word with a hardened voice and a spray of spittle.
Lilith placed a hand on her bruised cheek. Her jaw was clenched, and in the crevices between her fingers, Amelia spotted tears. “I’ve told you before,” she said. “This time, I didn’t want to make you angry again.”
“And did you think the midwife would hide this from me as well?”
As they argued, the candlelight grew too bright in Amelia’s vision. Wooden shelves stretched and blurred in every corner. She tried to tune out her father’s voice, but it was too loud, as if he could shake the books with volume alone.
“The godmothers were right. You are nothing more than a grifter vying for the crown.”
“That’s not true,” Lilith protested. “I want to build Gyldan together. You know that.”
“Your barren womb will help me build nothing.”
Lilith drew back, as if his words struck harder than his hand.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “Your father was my closest friend. I did him a favor by marrying you so that you wouldn’t be left in disgrace after he died. I at least expected your fertility to be as rampant as your whore mother.”
Pieces of their conversation scraped Amelia’s ears as she put together the ugly truth. Lilith was never supposed to be her stepmother, nor a proper queen for Gyldan. She must have known this too, as shame warmed her cheeks and made her fists bundle the fabric of her dress into a white-knuckle grip.
Victor’s shadow grew taller under the candle flames. “I can tolerate your overzealous ideas, but I will not accept you lying to me. For your deception, you will be exiled from Gyldan by dawn.”
The threat knocked the weight out of Amelia’s body. Fear charged her forward, the bright reality of Lilith snuffed out like a flame. “No!”
She jumped between them and splayed her arms wide, standing like a shield. Despite her shouts, her voice still trembled, hardly a buffer against the looming figure of her father.
“Please, Father. There must be another way.”
His blue eyes crinkled as they settled upon her. The ex­pression only deepened the wrinkles on his face, the sagging skin that betrayed the time he fought so hard against. Gray hairs had spread across his beard, and he could no longer hide them.
“The prosperity of Gyldan rests on its ruler having our blood. If they do not have it, the kingdom will be doomed.”
She swallowed hard. She thought about the gold that shimmered in their veins, how she had to strain under the light just to see faint traces of it. Their family’s lineage was too fragile. Her father was growing older, his coughs sounding sicker. He was running out of time.
Then again, so was she.
“I will marry a prince,” she declared. “Before I turn eighteen, I will find someone to rule after you. He will be brave and strong and smart. I will give him a child, so that the next heir will have our blood.”
She steadied her breathing, counting the short future ahead of her. Her mind suppressed the image of a swollen belly, an entire life bursting inside her while she was robbed of her own.
“I will do all of this, but only if Lilith remains queen.”
Lilith tugged Amelia’s arm, urging her to stop. It was too late. Since Amelia’s curse at birth, her fate kept being sealed, over and over again. She stared at her father and silently pleaded with him to give in. He ran a hand down his black hair, stopping where the streaks of gray ended.
“It’s not that simple. There needs to be consequences.”
“Please,” she begged. She wanted to argue that Lilith was good for their kingdom. That no matter how many princes she met, it was Lilith who she thought was brave, and strong, and smart. But according to her father, trust had been broken, and she knew such pleas would be ignored.
She knew, too, there was another thing the king cared about.
“I want her to stay, because she’s the only mother I’ve ever had.”
The lie tasted foul on her tongue, but she needed her father to believe it. If Lilith could stay, Amelia was willing to pretend that the only reason she wanted the woman beside her was due to familial attachment. There would be no other explanation, no deeper feelings she could have explored. Nothing that was complicated or wrong.
She would bury the truth so that it would never see the light of day.
King Victor’s crinkled eyes turned sympathetic. A long sigh hissed through his gritted teeth. After a tense silence, he turned to Lilith. His hand raised like a threat before she could speak.
“You are lucky my daughter cares for you. But mark my words: If you deceive me again, there will be a steeper price to pay.”
Lilith squeezed Amelia’s hand, a silent thank-­you. Amelia could hardly feel it. Her whole body had turned numb. The candles surrounding them burned too hot. Her mind lifted away from the wax and drifted to the edge of the room. Beyond the windows, the night was pitch-­black. She thought of sunflowers perched on sills, the way they stretched toward the sun, as if aspiring to become stars themselves.
But there was no future where things could be different. Darkness always came, and the sunflowers would never become what they dreamed of being. Her feet stayed rooted to the ground. If she tipped any farther, she would sink below the earth.
Chapter 5

“She’s trapped below the earth,” Elly often insisted, her ear pressed to the ground. As a toddler, her tiny fingers would claw garden soil, dirt caked beneath her nails, all in search of a girl who the world was uncertain ever truly existed.
Corin said that even if the fairy tales were true, sleeping comfortably in a big castle was no nightmare for a princess. Still, Elly believed the castle remained underground. On the eve of the princess’s eighteenth birthday, the queen brought hired men into the kingdom to assassinate her husband and stepdaughter. The invaders murdered the king while the princess escaped into the forest, only to cross paths with the demon who had cursed her as a baby. The demon tricked the princess into pricking her finger on a spindle and doomed her to eternal slumber. Among the roaring flames of their battle, the prince killed the demon and saved the princess. He brought her back to their castle, only to find it was too late. Even with true love’s kiss, she remained asleep forever.
Despite being the successor to the throne, the prince was so consumed by grief that he asked her faerie godmothers to bury the castle underground. He would sink alongside the walls, so that he would never live in a world without his true love. Even when rivaling kingdoms tore down Gyldan’s borders and erupted into war, they would never be seen again.
A hundred years later, Corin would disappear with them.
She woke with a scream clawing at her throat, as if she’d emerged from a nightmare. But she hardly remembered her dreams, and soon enough she forgot what she’d seen.
Sharp rocks stabbed her spine like tiny knives as she lay flat on the ground. Dust particles stung the back of her eyelids, as if ants had crawled through the slits and were nibbling the skin underneath. Her eyes were so dry they burned, like she had been crying. Yet all she remembered was the darkness taking her when she fell.
Yes, that was it. She had fallen. Slipped over debris and slid farther underground. Her head had slammed against a rock, rendering her unconscious for what must have been hours.
She rolled over to her side, but the movement shot flashes of pain down her back. Her neck and shoulders had been locked in the same position for too long. A gagging noise burbled from her parched throat. She hunched over, trying to vomit the invisible sand that piled in her mouth, but there was nothing to heave from a hollow stomach.
There was nothing left inside of her. She was empty.
And she was going to die.
She had imagined herself dying before, pictured hundreds of gruesome deaths in her mind, but nothing like this. Stranded after wandering endless miles, buried beneath stagnant air and soil, it seemed too uneventful.
Harlow’s laughter echoed through the tunnels. “No, compared to your eighteen years of living, it’s too gentle a way to die.”
Corin groaned. Even in near death, she couldn’t escape Harlow’s ghost. She supposed Harlow would have loved the irony. By the time their commune busied themselves making posters and protest materials, Corin had distanced herself from the artisans out of self-­preservation, complaining to Elly that these efforts only made them look like criminals putting themselves in harm’s way. They’d wanted to send a message to the army, but there was no point risking their lives for a war that would never end.
Now here she was, dying like the rest of them.
Darkness engulfed her in the tunnels. Her coiled body shivered in the cold as she waited for death to wrap her in its box and tuck her away. Surrounded by dust and debris, she would become part of the ground, a skeleton whose bones didn’t deserve to be unearthed.
The last words she’d hear from Elly would be a simple truth.
I hate you.
For a moment, there was nothing. Then a new thought emerged from her drowsy haze, like a dim light peeking through the dark clouds of near-­death. Her hand roamed over her chest, fingers twitching for the ghost of an object. After her palm came up empty, her fingers jammed into the soiled pockets of her trousers and sifted through dirt.
Her necklace was gone.
Panic triggered her body to roll over. Splinters bit into her palm as she found the broken half of the torch that had slipped from her hand when she fell. She sucked out the splinter, blood dancing on her tongue. Bitter, it tasted. And alive.
She lit the last match in her pocket and held it to the cloth. The small flame radiated an orange glow over the walls. A shadow stretched above her head, inviting her to turn around and meet a skull staring straight into her eyes. The black grains that stripped the skull’s translucent skin looked like rotten sand had washed over his corpse. Nausea swirled in her stomach. Flashes of bad memories, blue lips, maggot trails. A familiar body in her arms. An echo of a scream.
She bit back her bile and focused on one point of clarity. The skeleton’s brittle finger glinted in the shadows and dangled her necklace, which had been caught on bone. She snatched the chain and wrapped it around her neck. Her palm pressed against her chest as she counted the rapid beats of her heart and wiped the flashbacks from her mind. It was easier if she could focus on the cold metal against her sweat, the smooth touch of her mother’s hands when she’d given Corin this pendant, the story she’d told about Corin’s grandmother crossing these tunnels to Gyldan.
The necklace was the only reminder Corin had that a future was possible. And she couldn’t picture any future without Elly.
She pressed her palms flat on the cavern walls as she crossed deeper inside the tunnels. The torch’s dying flame turned fuzzy in her blurring vision. Perhaps it was better she couldn’t see clearly, so she could avoid staring at bodies draped over the jagged rocks. She wouldn’t think about Harlow or how she’d let her other friends die. She would leave them behind with the rest of the corpses in the tunnels, shutting them out, like her mind did with everything else.
By the time the bodies whittled down in numbers, the sour smell wafting under her nostrils died down. A new scent permeated the air, musky with mildew and notes of copper. Then came an invisible spark, something alive and tingling. The shift in the air remained even as she reached a dead end, the path stopping at a dirt wall that appeared to be a landslide.
It seemed too sudden, too abrupt of an ending. Dizzy from dehydration, she rocked back and forth and deliberated what to do next. When she looked down, she was shocked to find a torn piece of cloth stuck to her boot. Her fingers snatched the maroon cloth so she could inspect the bright blue stitching that clumsily ran along the inseam. She recalled how the needle had pricked her fingers, her annoyance at Elly for tearing a hole in her pants, forcing Corin to practice her shoddy sewing skills before Rowan called her hopeless and fixed it himself. The stitching was an exact match to the clothes Elly had worn when she ran away.
Elly was here. More importantly, she was alive.
Corin dropped to the ground in a panicked frenzy and started digging, searching for traces of her sister to follow her path. A stone floor exposed itself beneath the soil. The concrete had to be paved somewhere. She stared at the dead end of the tunnel, then grabbed the wall, clawing her way through the dirt. Her hands dug for several grueling minutes until the fabric of her gloves thinned to strings and her skin turned raw. She searched until, finally, she found a wooden door on the other side.
She stepped back in disbelief. People came and died searching for a buried castle, waiting to be stirred awake. She couldn’t explain what stood before her, how the stories could have possibly been true—just as Elly had said.
3
The castle from the fairy tale shouldn’t have existed. At least, not in this condition. Most of the structure remained intact, but large, gaping holes peppered the sepia-­washed wallpaper, as if gnawed by a monster. Velvet drapes had turned maroon from old age, covering cracked windows. Corin tried parting the curtains and coughed from the dust. Outside, the glass revealed dark soil surrounding the castle.
Surely, she was hallucinating. Hunger could do that to a person. Yet the air tingled with something peculiar, like a cold wind that had trapped itself inside and now howled in mourning. Goose bumps prickled her skin, and she clutched the torn cloth tight in her fist. No, it didn’t matter how this relic came to be. What mattered was that she needed to find Elly.
She pictured her sister walking through the castle, imagining what might catch Elly’s attention first. In answer, watercolors jumped from the hallway. Corin crossed the faded carpet that unfurled rows of paintings along the wall, where kings and queens of Gyldan’s past sat decorated in gold. Their bloodline was supposed to prove they were special, untouchable. Yet here they were, strings of parchment hanging off the edges of their destroyed features, every portrait slashed like an open wound.
She stopped in the middle of the hallway where one person remained unscathed. A tall woman sat next to an elderly king and a blond child. White pearls clasped the queen’s neck. The bloodred fabric of her gown brought the same color from her pursed mouth. Her auburn hair was tied in knotted locks, and her sharp nose pointed to the air. She looked like someone posing to be royalty, resulting in a stiff upper lip and a set of unsmiling eyes.
Corin pressed her palm to the bumps of paint, drawing a line between the stiff queen and the blond girl whose face was destroyed. She kept hearing her sister’s stories about the royal family, doomed by curses and wicked stepmothers, and how this fate had brought them to ruin.
“El,” she murmured, “what if you were right?”
Light shone through the door from where she’d come, followed by a crash. She stomped out her torch and tossed it aside. Shouts echoed through crumbled walls, forcing her to scramble toward the opposite end of the hallway.
She burst open doors to an empty ballroom and scanned for a hiding place. Dusty chairs had broken down and lay crooked, bleeding beige filling and feathers over the cracked marble floor, but there was a long sofa that still stood on four legs. As footsteps came closer, she rolled to the ground and ducked behind the sofa’s tapestry.
A group barraged the ballroom, stumbling over the marble.
“Ezran! You need to sit down. You can’t move too quickly after a ritual.”
She peered behind the sofa’s tapestry. A limping man barreled forward, followed by three women dressed in satin robes and laced veils. Light sparked from one of the women’s fingertips as an armchair mended itself together and stood upright to catch the man when his knees buckled over.
Corin held her breath, forcing her body to freeze like a statue so her shock wouldn’t give her away. There’d been rumors that faeries once existed in the forests surrounding Gyldan, some even holding positions of council among the royal family. But since the monarchy’s collapse, no faeries had ever been witnessed by human eyes. To Corin, this meant they were never real. Now she couldn’t explain the sight before her. Chairs did not move on their own, and ordinary people could not create light from their hands.
If faeries were real, and they had chosen to leave behind a dying kingdom after it no longer served them, there appeared to be at least one human who had convinced these faeries into providing him aid. The man named Ezran struggled to keep balance over the chair, as if the room were spinning and he had just landed in it. He looked pale and sick, the color of his skin matching his steel-­white armor and cape. A breath hissed from his lips.
“We need to visit the tower now. The moonflower’s going to bloom.”
“We still have time before midnight,” one of the women said. “You need to preserve your energy before you cross over. We don’t know what will be in her subconscious until we arrive.”
The others nodded. “You’ve waited a hundred years for this. What’s a few minutes more?”
Ezran looked at them, jaw clenched.
“It’s a hundred years and a few minutes more without her.”
A heavy silence hung in the air. One of the women placed a hand on his cheek. Color slowly filled his pale skin, as if fighting for its place.
“You protected her when she needed you. Tonight, she’ll need you more than ever,” she said. “We will bring her back. I promise.”
“You know how I feel about promises, Dahlia. I don’t break them.”
Corin strained to make sense of their conversation, but none of them mentioned seeing a child. Either they hadn’t crossed paths with Elly, or they already caught her. The fear of that paralyzed Corin, preventing her from escaping even as the strangers left for another room. Elly was always good at hiding, but Corin didn’t know what these people were capable of.
She waited a few minutes after the room cleared before following their path. The door where they’d exited opened onto a winding­ staircase. She pressed her back against the wall, allowing her to glance in both directions in case more people came, as she climbed sideways along the stairs. The next floor revealed a shorter hallway filled with bedchambers.
She rummaged through each one in a frenzied rush, tossing aside sheets, opening every wardrobe, checking beneath bed frames. Every turn, she found nothing but dust and disappointment.
“Damn it, El,” she hissed, “where are you?”
Footsteps came closer from the hallway. She swiped a sharp toothcomb from the vanity before climbing inside a wardrobe. Her hand gripped the tool so tightly she could almost see the whites of her knuckles in the darkness cloaking her.
The door creaked open, and she held her breath. There only came silence. Yet, if she strained hard enough, she could sense a presence on the other side.
His voice spoke, a low sound made of lilting ink that seeped into her core. So smooth and calming that if she could taste it, she wouldn’t even realize it was poison leaking down her throat.
“Let me guess what you are,” he said. “A peasant hoping to wake up the princess so she can fix your miserable life. A thief scavenging for whatever treasure you can find in old ruins.”
The wardrobe felt too small, restricting her breath and closing in on her. His footsteps clacked louder, closer, and suddenly there was too much dust inside her space, too many cobwebs hanging­ from corners that itched her skin and taunted her to make a sound and betray her hidden fear.
“But I’ve lived in this castle longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve searched every crevice, every place, and still the treasure cannot be found. Which leads me to one conclusion: Amelia has hidden it in her dreams. And I made a promise that I would protect her treasure with my life.”
The sound of a sword being unsheathed sliced into her ears.
“She won’t be sleeping for long,” Ezran said. “But you will.”
His sword plunged through the wardrobe as Corin jumped to the side and barely missed the blade. She kicked the door open to Ezran’s chest and lunged forward, slashing his face with the metal handle of the comb. She felt like she’d cut hard marble, some precious art that had been preserved for centuries, one so valuable that her life would be taken as penance for tainting it.
Blood spurted from his cheek as he reared back, buying her a fraction of time to escape the chamber. She ripped off the door handle behind her and jammed the comb into the hole to trap him inside.
At the staircase, she glanced back and forth between both directions, her mind screaming to make a choice. Go downstairs and run away. Go upstairs and find a sliver of a chance that Elly would be there.
She chose when Ezran’s sword smashed through the door.
Spiral steps spun in her dizzying vision as she ran up the stairs. Her body was failing her, too weak, too starved. Ezran’s boots slapped against concrete, charging close. His sword slashed her heels when they reached the top. She let out a cry as she rammed open a wooden door, the entrance bursting under the weight of her collapse. The three women inside the room gasped at the stranger bleeding before them, as if uncovering a malformed creature lunging from the dark. Corin had bruises and open sores everywhere, blooming like ripe plums over a wretched face. She looked worse than an intruder. She looked like a madwoman.
Maybe she had gone mad after all. Because as she looked up, she swore the girl sleeping inside the tower was the princess herself.
Satin sheets tucked the girl’s pale body in a billowing mattress. Blond hair spilled over pillows and lace, while a vine of flowers wrapped around her head like a crown. The flowers were the color of bruises, wrinkled and small and yet to bloom, too ordinary of an accessory compared to the extravagance that surrounded her. In contrast, a garden of roses covered the wooden frame of the bed like a blanket. The largest one bloomed on the left side of the girl’s chest, bright red like bloodstain.
Everything was alive, while the girl looked like she was already dead. Her skin was ashen, her lips more gray than pink. One of the women had lifted the girl’s arm, and at the tip of her finger, a drop of blood gleamed under the light. Instead of dripping down her hand, the bead floated in the air as a small, swirling orb of red.
Corin’s attention snapped to Ezran as he grabbed her by the collar. The slash she made across his face had already disappeared. She didn’t understand how marble could restore its cracks, while her broken body retained every wound in permanent memory.
His pristine face came closer to her broken one. His breath was cold as he snarled, “You don’t belong here, thief.”
Ezran swung his arm back, his sword ready to plunge into flesh, as she braced for the pain. It came not as darkness, but a blinding white flash. Instead of a blade puncturing, her skin tingled under light. The sound of a distant bell shook the tower, followed by the crackle of air being torn apart.
A hole opened like a glowing mouth. Not on the floor, or the wall behind the bed, but in the empty space above the girl’s head. The flowers in her hair lifted in bloom. Their purple bruises washed away into pure white. Petals swirled in the air, the smell of florals mixing with blood.
Then, from the other side, Corin heard her sister.
Elly’s voice came from inside the hole, breathy and far away. It reached for Corin’s skin, gripping onto her bones, tugging her veins like invisible string. She could recognize that voice anywhere, even as a distant echo. Her sister was there. Somehow, she was inside, calling for Corin.
Suddenly nothing else mattered. Not the cluster of women shouting, not the tightening grip of Ezran’s hand on her collar­. He tried pulling her away, but she would not let him take this from her. She swung her fist and barely felt the hard crack against his face or the dent in his cold skin. Her legs sprinted forward, chasing Elly’s voice, as the tether between them tightened. She leapt to the opening and let light swallow her body. Ezran’s presence dissolved behind her like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass. The sleeping princess vanished. The women’s shouts turned to echoes. The room spun in a blinding blur. Her vision filled with white, burning so brightly that she could not tell if she had met or escaped death.
As she crossed over, Elly’s voice turned clearer.
She’s real, Corin.
Corin could have sworn she heard her sister laughing.
I told you so.