Epilogue
Morgana
Her hands were shaking. They were always shaking these days, though. She couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t shaken.
The shackles around her wrists burned. The iron in them was meant to keep her magic quiet, and it did. But it also made open sores burst open through her flesh, and the red welts there would soon blister. She'd spent her entire life in this prison trying to keep herself from dying from infection.
Still, she did the same thing she did every single time she saw a ray of sunlight bursting through the slats of her door.
She couldn't see much of the light. It was somewhere else, but she could see the illumination stretching for her.
Reaching. Knowing that the sun wanted to kiss her skin, as it hadn't for so many years.
Morgana turned her back to the sun every morning, and she went to the wall. The wall was so covered in tiny marks that she was close to needing to start on the next one, even though this was the biggest wall in this prison.
The stone in her hand was one of many she had pried out of the floor. Precious to her, because they were the only thing sharp enough to mark all the time that had passed here.
"One more day," she whispered.
One more day of living in this hovel in the ground, hoping and dreaming that someone would come and rescue her. Because she certainly wasn't going to do it.
There were so many marks on the wall. Countless. On days when the dread picked at her brain as it always did, that long nail of terror scratching at her sanity, she would sit and count them all. Thousands of them. Over seven thousand now, all of them made by her own hand.
At some point, she worried that she'd made a mistake. Maybe she had missed a day in her fevers from the iron, or maybe there were days when she had been so tired that she hadn't realized she'd slept through an entire one. But in the end, it didn't matter.
She finished etching the pale white mark on the wall, placed her back against it, and slid down until she was seated on the dirt floor.
There wasn't much in this room. A cot that had been her bed since she'd been a child. A blanket and a pillow that were regularly changed out by the guards that came into her room whenever they wished.
Once they'd brought her paint. Entertainment, they'd called it, throwing the buckets into the room and then leaving without a word.
She'd used it to turn her room into a meadow.
All the greens and blues and yellows used up until the three free walls had been flooded with color.
Those were all faded now. The years had peeled the colors and faded them until it was all a memory for her.
Nothing and no one was coming for her.
Not even the little boy who haunted her dreams. The child with charcoal skin and bone-white hair.
She'd thought him a ghost the first time she'd seen him. And then she’d called him a ghoul when he’d interacted with her, rude thing that he was.
Morgana had learned to like him a bit. He’d been fierce and proud, and he’d seen something different in her that few people noticed.
He'd been one of the few people not to be frightened of her powers when they had finally emerged.
He'd seen the death and destruction she'd wrought with such ease, and he had simply shrugged.
As though it was inevitable that someone with her abilities would cause harm before she healed.
A wind swirled around her, toying with the dark ends of her hair. Reminding her that she had been the exact opposite of that boy. He had dark skin and white hair. She had ghostly skin and the blackest strands. People used to say she looked like a banshee, and maybe she did.
She quite liked being a banshee, though. It made people frightened of her.
They should fear her.
That was why she'd been locked up, after all. She couldn't control herself. Wasn't trustworthy.
Monsters ended up behind bars. And that was what she was.
The jangling of keys echoed in the hallway leading to her cage. She didn't move or even look up as the door opened and the clacking of heels echoed. At least until they hit the dirt floor of her room, then it was just a muffled thud.
Golden fabric touched her dirty feet. Morgana's gown was little more than tattered, threadbare cotton that had long ago turned the same gray as dirty dish soap. But this fabric was silk. Stunning, beautiful fabric that could only belong to one person.
A heeled slipper appeared from underneath the hem of the dress, nudging at her. "Get up. We have work to do."
Morgana looked up at the golden princess and sighed.
"Work," she whispered as she struggled to her feet.
This would only end in blood.