...
That night, the castle exhaled into silence.
I left my chambers wrapped in a gray cloak, soft-soled shoes whispering against marble. The moon was a waning crescent, a silver eyelash drifting across a velvet sky. No one stopped me. No one ever did. A princess is invisible when she wants to be.
The garden shrine was no longer truly a shrine. Instead, an alcove hidden behind a veil of ivy and moonflowers, once devoted to Cireth, the Bloomfather—God of rebirth, balance, and green things. No priest lit incense here. No offerings lay at his feet. Vines had overtaken the altar, curling around a cracked stone bowl etched with his symbol: a flame inside a blooming flower.
Most had forgotten him and his shrine. That made it mine. I knelt in the moss, the earth cool beneath my knees, the sky aching above me. My hands folded, not because I believed it helped, but because it seemed like a necessary response to the longing in my chest.
“I am unsure if you’re listening,” I whispered. “I don’t even have proof that you’re still there.”
Then, without warning, the wind veered, whipping hair across my eyes and tugging at my clothes.
“But if you are,” I continued. “If there’s a god who still remembers the quiet ones, the ones who smile through duty and ache under silk, then please, please see me.”
I bowed my head lower, fingers trembling against the hem of my cloak.
“I don’t want to be bartered like grain in a shipment ledger. I desire to be more than a bride to a stranger with icy hands. I want to walk through Wildervale without fear. I want to heal things. Grow things. Be something more than just soft and silent.”
A breeze stirred the chapel garden, soft and sudden. It slipped through the clover, kissed my cheek, and rustled the petals of a pale lavender bloom beside me.
“I want to mean something.”
I held my breath.
It was the wind.
But for an instant, it felt as if something had noticed me.
A hush. Like something was listening.
And then, it was gone.
I opened my eyes slowly, and the moonflowers swayed as if exhaling. My palms were damp with earth, my knees sore from stone, but I didn’t rise.
My eyes traced the weathered carvings in the shrine’s stone, the remnants of Cireth’s sigil, half-erased by time and moss. The air seized in my lungs, refusing to move.
I reached to brush the vines aside, but a thorn snagged my wrist—sharp, sudden, almost deliberate.
A bead of blood welled up on my skin.
I remained fixed on it, half-expecting it to burn or shimmer or speak. But it didn’t. Yet, something within me shifted. A quiet tension tightened, drawing inward like a held breath deep within the marrow. I pressed my palm over my heart.
And in this moment, I was a girl again, kneeling in a forgotten chapel, with moss clinging to my hem with a poppy tucked behind my ear.
The last of the candlelight clung to the chapel walls, soft and stubborn. I traced my fingers along the stone as I rose. My knees were aching from kneeling too long, but I wasn’t ready to return. Not yet.
Outside, the stillness of the garden descended once more, a quiet that made the world seem remote.
I sat on the bench beneath the arbor, my breath plumed before my lips, a fleeting ghost in the frosty air, each exhale a miniature cloud that vanished as quickly as it appeared. The moon was rising, silver and whole. From the pouch at my hip, Ipulled the little leather-bound green journal I hadn’t written in since summer. I ran my fingers over it, hesitating.
And then, slowly, I opened the next blank page:
I used to think the garden chapel was the quietest place in the world. But tonight, it seemed loud, like every hope I’ve ever whispered there came echoing back, unanswered.
We have packed everything. My room is bare. I keep telling myself I’m ready, but I’m not sure I even grasp what that signifies anymore.
They say it’s my duty to go, that peace depends on it, that I’m the bridge between Elyrien and Caerthaine. But no one’s ever asked what I want. It could be because it’s insignificant? Perhaps that is the essence of royalty. You trade your voice for a crown and your name for a signature on treaties.
