Marmalade's Love Potion

Chapter 18 Part 3 - A Gown of Flowers & Starlight

Penelope sat quietly in bed in that hour before dawn listening to the hushed rustle of wind through the Faewood's canopies.

She had long spent her tears and was contemplating the day ahead, the same anxieties circling her mind over and again.

As she listened to the crickets chirping in the darkness beyond her window, her frayed attention drifted towards the forest.

Even here, she could feel the distant hum of the Darkwood's anguish, as though it were reaching out for her, beseeching her. Yet the brush of its grief was laced with something more turbulent. A current of wariness. Mistrust.

The pressure of its wordless fury, its lament for help, for retribution, ached within her bones.

Penelope longed to help the forest. She wanted to stem the tide of its hurt, which she felt as deeply as though it were her own sorrow. Yet she didn't know how.

Could she entreat with Grimwood at the Dark Moon Ball and ask them to stop their assaults? Penelope scoffed at herself. Would they even listen? With the way those Rangers had moved, with such deliberate and determined precision. Such practised ruthlessness... Penelope doubted it. Would her parents allow her to undertake such a campaign besides, if it disrupted whatever plans they might have for her?

Make them stop... the woods seemed to whisper across the fabric of night. Flashes of dreams from nights past, hazy half-remembered nightmares, invaded her mind. Visions of herself dressed in a gown of thrashing vines and poisonous flowers curled within her mind's eye. Echoes of a crown of blood-tipped thorns adorning her head. A veil of burning mist enshrouding her shoulders. Make them...

Penelope shuddered, her mind disordered and heart heavy with apprehension and sleeplessness. The refrain plucked at all the strings of resentment stretched taught within her. Resentment at her family for their abandonment, their silence. Resentment at Ivy and all those like her, resentment for being shunned by the world of her birthright. At the ceaseless humiliation of rejection and poverty, the cruelties of false hope and unkept promises. At having all things taken, taken, taken.

She had buried these pains deeply within herself, quelled for years beneath the darkest earth of her heart with each effort to please. To prove herself worthy.

Now the bones of those hurts rattled under the swell of the Darkwood's distant cry and the sting of newer wounds. They clamoured to rise in the face of her parents' demands of her, and the implied threat to those she loved if she failed to meet them. To the Sisters' honour and standing. To her own future.

The unfairness of it all burned in her veins. She resented the sheer enormity of power they had over her, the power she had been wrested of the moment she had been sent away.

The power she could claim back. If she were to only answer the invitation to do so...

Bloodied vines and trailing thorns... these weapons would be yours, Daughter...

Penelope shivered and drew her blankets around her, warding against the predawn chill and a rising hunger for violence.

She clenched her teeth against the urge to gnash them, curling her fists until her nails cut crescents into her palms.

You have bridled yourself too long... Unleash!

Overwhelmed, Penelope pressed her hands to her chest, trying to mute the burning tide of the forest's rage. Of her own. She grounded herself in the question that had surfaced so often these past weeks.