FULL NOVELXO Song of Sorrows and Fate: Chapter 1
Do you know what it’s like, Little Rose?
A glow of red broke through the dust and grime of tall, gabled windows. With the rough tip of my center finger, I strummed a taut string on a golden lyre in the corner of the hall. The room was too spacious and too suffocating all at once, a place where ghosts danced to haunting tunes of a dream that seemed as if it would never be.
A dream where she’d want me the same and scour the earth to find me.
Do you know what it’s like? I closed my eyes against the pain in my skull. Frustration and despair collided like a knife dug through the soft tissues behind my eyes. Blades against my face were a sensation I’d never forget. That cruel swipe of his sword helped twist me into . . . this creature in the shadows.
That was all I was now. A creature. A phantom of darkness. A memory nearly forgotten.
Do you know? I gripped the lyre by the edge and flung it across the empty corridor, chasing away the ghosts and their wretched songs.
“No!” My voice echoed against the walls. Dust fluttered off tattered drapes in a cloud when I ripped them open, eyes on the moon. “No. You don’t know anything.”
Crimson painted the moon, a sign of fate twisting our world again. A sign we should’ve long ago been prepared to face, side by side. Now, she would fade again. That was how I’d been taught it worked. Leave a tale unfinished, and it would fade, along with anyone in it.
Already, the heat of the song between our two hearts began to flicker, as though a flame struggled in the fury of the wind.
I couldn’t . . . not again. I couldn’t watch it again.
I thought the wait would’ve ended; I thought she’d never resist the consuming draw. The pull to her crushed me day by day. For her? I was nothing, hardly a whisper in the dark.
I was wrong about it all. She refused to see through her own fears.
The shadowed horizon in the distant seas seemed to loom closer, a constant reminder foreign shores had survived wars and battles. Long ago, it should’ve been our turn to face our fate, but we remained locked in nothingness.
Yet, something was coming. A panic, a tension, grew relentless in my chest. It had become a constant weight and burden that these quiet lands would not remain.
With the bloody moon overhead, his darkness was here, returned to cause havoc and pain. Gods, was it too late? Had we waited too long to find the bond lost so long ago? By my sides, my hands tightened into fists.
He was coming, but I had not endured everything to watch him take her away.
“I won’t!” I pointed a finger at the shadows in the corner. They never responded. With an arrogant smirk, I pulled away from the corner and returned to the window. “I won’t watch it. I won’t.”
Perhaps she’d resist when I destroyed her false sense of solace. I didn’t care. Not anymore. She wouldn’t have a choice. Waiting. Wanting. Watching. I was finished with it all. I could not take another moment of the darkness flowing like a slow drip through my blood. It was time for freedom.
Let me be your darkness, but let me be yours. Anywhere she went, I now planned to go. Damn the Norns. Damn fate. I would not go another turn, not another damn moment waiting, wanting, and watching.
Do you know what it’s like, Little Rose?
There was no time to wait. Not anymore. The truth was in the sky—we were about to watch our world burn.