The Cursed Door

Grief

Adalyn screamed and lunged at General Gloom as he and a few of the soldiers tried to move her brother's body to the place. Adalyn hadn't felt Esther's arms wrap around her to hold her lunging body back from attacking them.

"Let me go!" Adalyn screamed at Esther, flailing and tugging at her arms, crying out for her brother.

"Let me go!" She repeated stuttering at the end as she stared at the soldiers picking up and carrying Owen's body in the direction of the palace.

"Let go." Adalyn stuttered out quietly as she started to sink to her knees sobbing as Esther followed her hugging her. Not that Adalyn noticed her eyes trained on the retreating forms of the soldiers.

....

She didn't notice when she moved or who moved her or how she fell asleep but when she woke up, she noticed that she was in her room. She hoped what happen was just some twisted nightmare. That Owen wasn't the Shadow King, that her brother actually died in the battle for Northhaven and not by her own hand.

The hope quickly died a swift death when she got up from her bed and walked over to her window and sat down on the soft window seat to look out her window towards the South-Side Bridge. Hoping to see the undented stone and the guard tower where the Reavers and her friend, Tyran Frostfell, worked to protect the palace and surrounding town. But that's not what she saw, what she saw was the bridge littered with holes and gouges both large and small and the once-proud guard tower was reduced to rubble that was strewn across the bridge and into the river.

When she saw that she knew that the previous night was not some twisted nightmare dreamed up by some sadistic god that she somehow slighted. She really did kill the Shadow King. She really did kill her brother.

Something in her broke at the realization that she killed her own brother and she sank into the window seat with her head resting on the window and her eyes fixated on the bridge. She thought back to the day she and Owen were cleaning out her Grandmother's old house. Wishing that her grandmother had warned them about that spirit's cursed door so maybe they wouldn't have opened it. So maybe they wouldn't be a part of this bloody war. So maybe she and Owen were still in their own mundane world where she was fixing cars instead of leading an entire kingdom during wartimes, where her brother worked part-time at dead-end jobs, complaining about them instead of leading creatures of shadow and death against her and her people.

She missed who they use to be.

She missed her brother.

And most of all, she wished she could go back to that god's-cursed day and warn Owen and her past self to just sell that damned house without going into it. Or to not go into the attic where that cursed green door was.