HOLLOW

A Ghost Princess

Reverie had been dead for five hundred years, but she hadn't cross the veil to the realm of the forgotten. Her only wish was for her time on Earth to be over. Reverie wanted to leave, burn this final bridge between her and the palace. She was no longer living and she didn't belong. But she didn't know how.

Her chest contracted. Her broken ribs ached with a ghost of the pain she was no longer allowed to feel. Her lids forced themselves open, but it was her heart that weighed on her. A heart can only carry so much longing and grief at the same time for so long. Reverie lowered her gaze at her hands.

The possibility of touch had become a lie since the day she died, but Reverie took one hand and brushed her fingers along the putrid window frame, absently minded. She couldn't recall what wood felt like.

Around her, the eternal silence ran to hide in the shadowed cracked corners of the palace so the restless melody of life outside could fill the haunted bedroom. It was a constant lullaby that began with the first ray of the sun by east and did not sleep when night fell.

It was as though she was trapped in the loneliness of everything changing but one's life. A different branch cracked. Another bird spread its wings for the first time to feel life run through its feathers. Some creature dying by the riverbanks leaving this life and meeting what was next.

As Reverie should have.

But here she was. Not knowing why.

Shortly after she died, Reverie believed this was next. We were to die and remain on Earth as ghostly presences forever, she thought. But Reverie saw many die after her.

Her puppy was poisoned to ease the pain, after a long life. Her cousins. One by hanging, as punishment for treason to the Crown and the other of old age. The servants she knew by name perished in numbers during the great famine that destroyed her lands after her passing. The kingdom that became no more. Hiraeth was the most painful death to deal with...

Only she stayed.

No. Her, her parents and sister.

Despite them, everyone else's deaths made Reverie realize her inital thought was wrong. Surely, the others could be somewhere else, wandering, but why would they? That was a theory, one she fed her mind for the longest time. But her dead heart knew better.

She knew there was more. She knew this was not the end. Reverie knew she was stuck. And she did not know what to do. So she watched time run its course, living her biggest curse. Loneliness was the motive she had done so many of the things she had, and now it haunted her again.

Through the window, life and death blurred around her as people started leaving the city and a lot more were gone after her parents' deaths, to the point that, centuries after, the wooden houses turned to skeletons of a story that ended tragically. The few who stayed after her passing did not leave the fallen kingdom until centuries later, making historians write about her people with fear and pity. Reveries' old blood would have burned in anger if it could.

No one wanted to live in a place like fallen Kalopsia. Haunted and under their once biggest ally's command.

She watched it all happen. All through this very window. Reverie didn't have a say in anything but she would find herself involved, until there came a day when silence was all she spoke. She lived dead. She watched Death taking the life of the place, until the ruins were all that was left of the fallen kingdoms.

Reverie understood why things had turned out the way they had. It still hurt, stung to the point she cried and felt none of the pain she was supposed to.

Reverie watched the invisible tears not run on her cheeks, fall to her exposed collarbone, or dry and turn stingy when the pain was still too present, but her body could produce water no longer.