Power and The Queen

Chapter Twenty-seven. 🟢

"Find me," a sensuous voice echoed in her head as she forced her eyes to adjust to the amount of sunlight it was receiving.

They hurt so much. Her body ached in several places and her skin felt so dry. She struggled up the soft bed and her eyes swept through the room she was in. It was completely disorganized. She must have done it while she cried. She wanted to forget, wanted to behave as if it had never happened, but how could she?

The only person to ever truly care for her since her birth is dead, gone forever. She would never get to see him again.

Cora broke into a fresh wave of tears. She did not know how long her grief would last. Every fibre of her being told her she needed to get home. Her mother would be alone with her brother, Damiel. How would they cope?

It annoyed her even more that the one person she should turn to betrayed her, or did he? He was keeping her here against her will in the name of safety. What could go wrong?

She forced her body out of the bed. Every single move hurt more than it should. She knew what would heal her and give her strength, but she was too tired to do anything. Taking one step after the other, she moved slowly towards the mirror in the corner. She avoided stepping on broken things.

The room was vast; bigger than her entire house, to be exact. However, it did not take long for her to reach the mirror. It sat in a corner far away, almost adjacent to the window.

The mirror was broken, something she was used to. They had only two small glass pieces at home which she and her mother used to look at their reflections. She looked at her frail form visible in as many cracks in the mirror. She looked broken, just like the mirror.

She felt shattered inside out, and though she felt the tears coming, she pushed them back. Her father would not want her to cry for long. He would want her to live, to survive and move on, to find a way to provide for her family; with him gone and there was no way she could do that crying.

The Queen possibly has her brother Tivo in camp with the other boys as if they have not taken enough from her and now she has no idea how her mother and Damiel were fairing. She had to find a way to get word to them if she was not allowed to leave the palace.

She did not know how long she stood there plotting everything she would do, trying so hard to keep her hurt, grief and disappointments down but the door of the room opened and two women and a girl walked in the girl she noticed, was about her age.

They moved closer to her, their hands together, and bowed their heads. She did not turn to face them, she only followed their movement from the broken mirror. She saw their eyes widen at the state of the room and noticed the sullen expression on the face of the girl her age. It made her feel guilty because she knew they would suffer by cleaning up her mess.

They moved about the room, picking up things that survived. One of the two ladies held a dress different from the one she wore the previous day, the dress made from the material as the dress in her dream. She remembered telling her mother how much she loved the material and her mother scolding her, but that was a long time ago before she started having the dreams. This new dress was blue but a darker shade, making the gold embroidery to gleam.

The woman placed the dress at the foot of the bed and went about picking things up, not uttering a single word. Cora wondered why they brought her a new dress. Nothing happened to the first one; she made sure of it. She wore another lighter garment to sleep.

The girl her age came out of a room that seemed to be in her room. She only went there when she needed to relieve herself; it seemed that was the purpose of the room, but she never had such in her home. The place itself was more than half the size of her house.