1705. Luck had never been on Eleanora Finley's side. After her father died in a tragic fire, she was left at the mercy of her domineering and abusive mother, being deprived of all love and affection.
Truly, who would have thought that the simple red...
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1715, The Town of Lynchens
A week had passed without a word from the castle, and Eleanora could take it no more. She could never step foot there again-- they had told her if she showed up again, this time they would throw her into the dungeons. Worse still, she had lost one of the rings that Nicholas had given her, likely at the castle. At this rate, she would never get it back.
And so she waited patiently, hoping that perhaps he would regain his consciousness and come looking for her. Each day, she waited at the teahouse, hoping that Miss Tilly would arrive with a letter from him, but Miss Tilly never dropped by.
Perhaps he never did wake up, or perhaps, he did wake up, but he never came for her. Eleanora did not know which one was worse.
That day, she decided that she could not remain cooped up in her room any longer. The longer she stayed there, the more it felt as if her mind was corroding, as if it were crumbling to dust. With only a sketchpad and a lump of charcoal wrapped in newspaper in her hands, she trudged out into the snow, not caring how cold it was, or how the stray snowflakes stung her skin like rabid bees.
She simply wanted to leave, to release all the heat and anger that she had kept suppressed all this while. The snow crunched under her boots like sand on the beaches of Vitale, and as she approached a vast, plain meadow, the snow thinned out, giving way to patches of brown grass that grew sparsely all over the plains.
Eleanora sat down, her sketchbook in her lap, charcoal in hand. This was the first time she opened her sketchbook in ages, and she had specifically come here so that she could have a peace of mind and create something worthwhile. Ironically, she discovered that she could not draw a single thing. It was not that she did not have any ideas-- she did, but they were shrouded by a cloud of trouble and worry, making her unable to produce a single thing.
There was only one person in her mind, haunting her both in her dreams and in her waking hours. She still remembered how she first met him, on that rainy day at the palace gardens. She had never expected to meet him, and definitely not under such circumstances. But they did. She fell, and he caught her.
Eleanora recalled being so fatigued that she could hardly differentiate between dreams and reality, to the point where she barely remembered a single thing about their first encounter. All she remembered was the first time she looked into his eyes, and his eyes were so dark that they were almost black.
She picked up her charcoal and got to work. Eleanora needed no references to draw him-- she could easily draw him from memory. His heavy-lidded eyes, thick and low eyebrows, his firm lips, even the curls of his hair, Eleanora could remember it all.
