❝ The future was yet to be written, uncertain in every way except one: there will be fire.
When the dawn closed her eyes, she awoke in flames-a hellfire inferno burning as leaves on briar-thicket trees. A forest of thorns alight. A vision of the fut...
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inferno and poison
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IN THE NIGHT'S STILLNESS, a diabolical mare forced a young woman from troubled slumber. Residual shadow screamed a ghostly dirge, a firestorm's heat seared every vein, a skeletal grasp sightlessly bruised her flesh. An echo throughout the otherwise silent night in haunting distortion, but soon enough, infernal horror became nothing but a memory.
Cloudland, a utopia where dreams were meant to blossom and flourish as Eden, had been invaded by a darkness of the unknown. A darkness that beckoned a forest of thorns and dancing flames, spectral cries of suffering lament in her ear and the looming figure of a horned woman—one that always bled away into a monstrous form, wraith-like and vile. A creature of bone and shadow, donned in graphite robes so withered and worn, with bloodless eyes that could pierce through even the most fearless. She'd dreamt of forest fires as a young girl, but never like this. Truly and completely the incarnation of hell itself, and it found a home inside her head.
Though it was no more than a nightmare, her skin flared with remnants of the creature's touch and the razing of flesh and bone to ash.
Jade hues glanced through the window ajar, ingrained with stained glass and particles of dust, finding that the sun had slowly but surely began its ascent in the eastern sky. The nightmare evanesced sleep from her bones, a familiar rush of anxiety taking its place among the ivory, and Aurora Tyndale was left wide awake in a comatose world.
A sign tumbled past rose petal lips as she slipped out from beneath the warm sheets, changing from her nightdress into one more fitting for the day ahead. Aurora kept light on her feet as she traversed the sleeping house, careful not to wake her interrogative family or a rambunctious Rollo at the foot of the stairs. The wood faintly groaned beneath her weight a time or two, but the canine did not rouse. Stepping into her shoes and wrapping her cloak around her shoulders, Aurora headed off into the early, frosty-aired morning.
Her feet carried her along a blind path with no true destination, wishing only to pass the time and forget. The breeze whispering through her hair carried the blackbird's morning song, a welcome melody far more generous than that which her dreams mercilessly subjected her to. Their song brought forth one of her own—one she had known for years as her mother's lullaby, brought to life by Diane's enthralling soprano—and she gently hummed to herself as she wandered about, admiring the beauty of Camelot's dormancy along the way. It truly was the kind of kingdom that would birth myths and legends, passed down for many years to come.
