She had no intention of meeting him today.
Careful not to make a sound, she slipped away before anyone else spotted her and rushed down the quieter halls in search ofsomething familiar and a safe place to hide. The deeper she went into the castle, the darker the halls became.
Alora picked up a lantern from the servant’s quarters and continued. Her mind whirled with the memory of that dark, unearthly voice from the night before, sometimes catching the echo of a child’s laughter. She ignored the chill on her skin and continued into the abandoned part of the castle. Her feet carried her almost on instinct through the winding corridors until she found a door carved with intricate details of vines and flowers.
Her mother’s old workroom.
Alora turned the brass knob, and the door creaked open slowly.
It was as she remembered, but now dim, dusty, forgotten, but full of remnants of a life that had once filled the castle with warmth.
The large room was dark, heavy velvet green curtains drawn. It smelled of dust and lavender, long faded. Alora coughed as she stepped in, shutting the door behind her. The lantern’s glow spilled across shelves stacked with brittle parchment and jars of dried herbs. No one had entered this place since her mother’s death. The air itself seemed preserved, caught in a breath that had never exhaled.
Rolls of parchment and dried roses in a vase were left forgotten on a side table set beside a moth-eaten settee. Books lined the walls, many of them herbal guides and celestial maps. The table was still littered with open pages and dried ink, their surfaces curled and yellowed. A single teacup sat untouched, now ringed with time.
Alora trailed her fingers along the desk, brushing away cobwebs before landing on an old, leather-bound journal stamped with her mother’s emblem of a harp laced with vines. She carefully flipped through the pages. They were full of neat, flowing script, sketches of flowers, and notes on various herbsand plants. One page caught her eye with a delicate drawing of an unusual flower with thin spindly petals, annotated with notes about its origin and properties.
Something slipped from between the pages of the old journal, fluttering down. A dried red petal that matched the sketch.
Alora carefully tucked it back into the journal and continued skimming the pages, her heart aching with a mix of longing and sorrow. Her mother’s elegant handwriting had become erratic over the years, the letters smearing, words twisting with madness as the illness took her. The last pages were splattered with ink and torn where the quill had pressed too hard. Alora could only distinguish four words.
When the moon bleeds, the bloom must sing.
Alora’s vision watered.
Her mother had unraveled at the end. Taken by an illness that had no cure. What had she been trying to say in her last entry? Perhaps a plea for magical healing. Her mother wove magic with songs but could not sing in her last year.
The Blood Moon came every five years, a time when magic rose from the land. The flowers shone and the fairies sang, rejoicing in renewing power of the Midlands. Her mother must have wanted to go home.
Would that have saved her?
No point in wondering now.
A faded green shawl rested on the settee. She brought it close, hoping to find a trace of her mother’s scent, but smelled only dust. Sighing, she wrapped it around her shoulders and continued exploring the workroom.
In front of the drawn windows, rested her mother’s old spinning wheel, draped in a heavy cloth. A basket of cotton and wool lay at its side, coated in a thick layer of dust. An odd habit for a queen, to spin her own yarn, but she had always made Alora the most beautiful dresses.
This place was once vibrant with her mother’s laughter and the fragrance of blooming flowers. Now it was a tomb of memories.
It was once her favorite place, because of one thing.
Alora yanked aside the large curtains over the windows, swirling motes into the air.
Light spilled through stained glass, casting a pattern of brilliant colors of across the floor. Alora’s throat tightened. Her mother used to sit by this window, humming songs while working on her many projects as Alora twirled around the room as a little girl.
She missed that brief moment in her childhood.
Where she knew nothing but joy and song.
So Alora stepped into the sunlight, eyes fluttering shut.
Her lungs expanded with a deep breath, a smile rising to her lips and she hummed softly. Her voice echoed in the workroom, reverberating through her soul. She swayed in the dust with an invisible partner, letting the colored light sweep across her closed eyelids. The phantom arms curled around her, guiding her steps in an old, forgotten dance.
And she sang the lullaby her mother used to sing to her to sleep.
Deep in the forest where shadows weave wide,
A mother whispered to the stars, her guide.
