Once, in the shrouded country of Thryndel, where the mountains split the sky and the winds whispered secrets to the trees, there was a kingdom ruled by a queen of radiant beauty but brittle heart: Queen Ilvenia. Her people adored her golden curls and alabaster skin, but few ever glimpsed the eyes behind the crown—eyes that burned with envy for youth, for innocence, for power untouched.
Beneath the castle, in the tangled, cursed wood of Murmureth, lived the witch Tharela, cloaked in black nettles and bound in silence by an ancient spell. It was said that once, Tharela had ruled the kingdom with spells as soft as lullabies and thorns sharper than steel. But Ilvenia, young then, had betrayed her, offering her voice to the old gods in exchange for the throne.
Ilvenia believed Tharela had withered in the woods, forgotten and powerless.
She was wrong.
For every spring since the betrayal, Tharela had stolen one thing from the world above—one child, one beast, one soul—and fed it to the roots of her forest. The wood grew wild and restless. Creatures walked upright at night, and the flowers spoke in dreams. She was weaving something. Preparing.
And on the seventeenth year, when Ilvenia’s daughter, Princess Elsinth, came of age, the thistles bloomed black.
Elsinth, who sang like silver and walked like light, was her mother’s greatest possession. Too great. The queen locked her in the Tower of Dawn, draped her in glass gowns, and forbade her mirrors, lest she ever glimpse her own beauty and learn the truth of it—that she was fairer than Ilvenia ever had been.
But the thistles called.
One night, a dark root slithered up the tower wall, shaped like a staircase of thorns, and whispered Elsinth’s name in the lost voice of her mother’s victim. She descended barefoot, blood painting her footsteps, not in fear, but in defiance—drawn by a dream she didn’t understand.
In the heart of Murmureth, Elsinth met the witch.
Tharela stood crowned in briars, her eyes like old storms. She touched Elsinth’s throat and gave her a voice not hers, but new—carved from wind and moss and vengeance. She spoke, and the trees bent to listen.
“Who am I?” Elsinth asked.
“Not hers,” Tharela said. “Never hers.”
In a circle of ash and bone, Elsinth was transformed. Not into a beast, but into a sovereign of the forgotten. Her skin became bark, her gown a veil of creeping ivy, her breath scented with decay and flowers. The forest crowned her.
When Ilvenia woke to the sound of thunder and rustling roots clawing at the castle stone, she understood: the witch had returned—but not alone.
The queen summoned her knights, but steel rusted before the gates. Her sorcerers chanted, but their tongues turned black with ivy. Elsinth entered the throne room barefoot, her eyes unblinking, her crown blooming with poisonous bells. Ilvenia’s voice trembled—then failed. For the daughter she had tried to bind now ruled something deeper, older, and wholly her own.
There was no battle. Just silence.
The crown of Thryndel passed not by war, but by forgetting.
They say now that in the ruins of that castle, thistles grow taller than men, and if you dare to sleep beneath them, you’ll dream of a girl with roots instead of veins and a voice that commands trees to kneel.
And if she speaks your name, you will never wake.
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