Once, the throne room had been kept spotless. Every jar aligned by purpose, every book by season, every flower pruned to exact obedience. The queen had always said that love was best tended like a garden: Disciplined, deliberate and never left to its own lonely wilderness. But time, as it does, began to loosen its laces.
No one remembers the moment the first vine crept up the shelf. It wasn’t rebellion—it was longing. At least that's what she thought. "The roses were not growing against her will, but toward her absence," that they reached for the space she once filled with her voice. They curled around the shelves, searching for her warmth. Even now, their thorns lean toward the empty chair, as if still trying to protect what’s no longer there.
The throne itself sits as though listening. The cushion bears the faint indent of her body, preserved by memory more than use. The crown above it gleams in quiet defiance, not of loss, but of forgetting quiet betrayals cloaked in pretty words.
At the foot of the dais lies the ledger—the Book of Beautiful Betrayals. It once held every vow spoken in that room, every oath whispered between heartbeats. Each name written in her hand still hums faintly, like a chord struck long ago.
But tonight, the book lies open, a wound of paper and ink. The bottle overturned beside it has bled its contents into a spreading pool of crimson. It looks almost deliberate—a heart split across the page. The words beneath it blur into unreadable shapes, as though even the ink refuses to hold what it has lost.
They say she left mid-sentence.
The quill had paused above the page, trembling. A word half-written. A name half-saved. And then—nothing. The stillness after the breaking of something holy. Not rage, not ruin—just the quiet collapse of what could no longer be sustained.
The scent of her still lingers here. Not perfume, but something deeper: parchment, rose petals crushed underfoot, a trace of warmth that refuses to die mixed with something that smells like lies whispered in an ear over candle light and promises unkept.
Visitors sometimes claim they hear her sigh when the chandelier sways—soft and tired, like the exhale of someone who has finally stopped pretending not to ache. Others say the flowers bloom brighter on the nights when it rains, as if the room itself remembers how to weep.
No one dares to close the book.
It feels wrong to end a story she never did. Maybe the story wasn't worth the ending it begged her to bleed for.
So the ledger stays open—its ink still bleeding, its heart still split. A mirror of what was done to her perhaps, or evidence left of what was done in silence.
—
Undone
It wasn't rage that followed betrayal, but a hollowing. A cruel emptiness, as though someone had re-written not only her world, but her body, her breath...just to see if they could. And when they were finished she wasn't broken, she was undone.
It was the grief of being unmade by someone who once loved her and knew exactly how she was woven, and then pulled the threads apart on purpose, just to watch her unravel.