Her Gift, Her Curse

It had just been a normal day. Nothing to do, nothing to worry about.

Nothing outside of the norm, at any rate.

Princess Winter had celebrated her thirteenth birthday the week before, a splendid little party thrown in her honour, with her few friends gathering together to laugh over some cake, including her best friend, and childhood sweetheart, Jacin Clay. He had given her a beautiful necklace as a gift, and she was wearing it now, a chain of silver with a single charm shaped like an apple, made of rubies and a lone emerald for the leaf at the top. It was the most precious thing she had ever owned.

However, not everything was as happy as she wanted. The one person whom she'd hoped would come to give her love and celebrate had not shown her face at all that day. For years, Winter had yearned for her warm touch, to be held in her motherly embrace just like when she was a young child, before her father was killed and everything fell apart at the seams.

Queen Levana, her stepmother.

Winter loved her dearly, the only mother figure she had in her life. It broke her heart when she watched her sink into evil and darkness bit by bit, day by day. Levana never smiled anymore. She never laughed, never told a funny story or a bad pun, was never happy. Always sad and depressed. It had been years since Evret Hayle—her father and Levana's husband—had died, and although Winter had foolishly hoped that she would get better, that time healed all wounds, Levana only grew cold and distant, isolating herself as much as she could.

Now, she only ever saw her stepmother at meals, and even then, she never spoke, just ate and left. Every year on Levana's birthday, she would go the queen's bedroom door, singing her a special song, and would always leave a piece of chocolate cake, Levana's favourite. She would come back around several hours later, saddened when she found the cake to be untouched. Every time she would tell herself that maybe Levana just didn't like birthdays, or maybe she forgot—it seemed like everyone else in the palace had forgotten that the queen even had one of those.

Her stepmother's sadness and misery always made her feel low, when she had so many friends and Levana seemed to have none. She must've been so lonely. Winter wanted nothing more than to cheer her up, keep her company, but whenever she tried, the queen would brush her off or blatantly kick her out. It almost seems like she enjoyed being alone, with no one else but herself, her own thoughts. Winter wondered how she could stand it. She would probably tear her own hair out if she had to be so alone for so long.

As she continued to walk down the halls, she hummed a soft tune under her breath, a song that she remembered from her early childhood, one that her father would sing to her whenever she had a nightmare. Her footsteps echoing softly though the vast halls, the cream skirt of her dress whispering around her legs, she wandered on past the vast doors of the ominous throne room, which she usually preferred to avoid. The bloodstains painting the walls and the eerily strange faces of the Lunar court had always freaked her out.

The aura of calm and peace that she had wrapped around herself was suddenly shattered by an ear-piercing scream that echoed from down the corridor.

The shrill sound was like that of death, of pain, of torture. Winter's blood iced over and her heart nearly stopped beating, fear creeping up on her like her shadow and nearly choking her. She broke into a sprint, racing down the hall to the room where the sound was coming from, the screams only getting louder as she came closer to the source. She skid to a halt in front of a blank, wooden door, the bland piece simple and dull in contrast to the rest of the palace's splendid doors of gold and regolith.

She shivered.

Jacin had always told her to never open one of the wooden doors. He said that once you went in, you saw things that would scar you for life, that you could never wipe from your memory. He made her swear to never even go near one.