Alora
Alora woke to a gray morning. Not cloudy, simply colorless. The room was still. Her gaze immediately fixed on the mirror. She rubbed her tender eyes as she sat up and lit a candle. Shadows danced on the walls, shifting like a couple twirling across a darkened sky.
Head full of dreams.
Had she imagined the voice last night?
Yet her skin buzzed with the memory of phantom fingers and a voice that should not exist.
She touched the twisted lock of her hair.
No. He was real.
That thought alone made her bones grow cold. Alora stared at her reflection, hands trembling in her lap. What had she done? What had she awoken?
Alora clutched her doll, seeking comfort from a childhood that had long faded. But she wasn’t a girl anymore. She couldn’t afford to be.
Tucking the doll away, Alora rose from her bed. She’d woken well before her ladies would arrive, so she dressed quickly and wandered out into the hall. The morning was spent familiarizing herself with the castle again. The walls were paler in the daylight, stripped of all warmth.
Every corridor was too quiet. Every hallway stretching too long.
Alora walked slowly, trailing her fingers along the stone as she passed, frowning at the blue banners clashing with the green mantle of Argyle.
Queen Delphi’s royal banners. They were woven in a deep ultramarine silk, like a twilight veil between realms. At its center were a stalk of delphinium blooms,rendered in vivid indigo and violet tones. The blooms were entwined with a lattice of silver thorns. Delicate in appearance, but symbolic of pain wrapped in beauty.
Alora retorted under her breath, “A perfect representation.”
Much like the poisonous flower she was named after, Delphi had killed all charm in the castle. The rich wood panels had been painted over in pale gray. The floors scrubbed to a marble-white gleam. Everything was cold and sterile. The warmth that used to fill these halls was long gone.
Everything she knew was erased.
Alora paused at a corridor where portraits once lined the walls, including her mothers. Blank nails were all that remained. The back of her eyes stung with anger. How dare they erase her.
A sudden distant sound of a child’s laughter echoed in the hall.
Alora gasped and turned sharply, but the dark corridor was empty. She waited, searching the dim corners. No more laughter followed. Goosebumps prickled her skin.
Rihan.
He would have been eleven now.
The feeling of being watched coiled around her again. Alora shuddered. Sacred Seven, the castle must be haunted. Or perhaps it was a draft, playing cruel tricks on her.
Because she refused to give what happened last night any weight.
Only a song.
Alora pressed a hand to her chest and kept walking. A dark form moved in the corner of her eye, and she bit back a yelp.
Delphi emerged like a shadow from the opposite corridor. Midnight-blue silk clung to her frame, her dark hair drawn back beneath a black coif shaped like a crown of thorns. Pale, unreadable, her presence cut as sharp as frost.
For a moment Alora barely recognized her. Delphi was glamored to pass as human, porcelain-skinned and youthful, though her pointed ears and violet eyes still betrayed her.
Alora had seen her true skin when she was a child, the shade of deep blue of midnight. Why change it now?
Vanity, she thought bitterly. Delphi would make herself hardly resemble her subjects while still clinging to her fae beauty.
Two fae males stood at her side, their white-and-bronze attire marking them as Calveron advisors. They were out of place in Argyle’s dim corridors, like sunlit figures forced into gloom. Why were they alone with her? Yet Delphi gave no sign of unease. She moved as though their presence were expected, her violet eyes narrowing when she found Alora.
