Abandoned

The Huntress

The air smelled like earth.

It shouldn't have been a bad thing. Everything came from Earth's loving arms, and everything returned to it eventually.

But this place shouldn't smell like a forest.It should smell like banquets and heady perfumes, like steel and sunlight and life. It should feel like a home and a sanctuary.

It was silent, now. No heels clicking on the floor, no sharp whine of steel. No laughter, flitting down from the next passage over. There was no murmur of servants, no hushed giggles from visiting ladies. For all the noise and joy this palace had once seen, the silence was louder. Heavier. It weighed in the air, daunting and sad. There used to be birds there, too, chirping merrily. Water used to trickle in the fountain. Horses would whinny as they were led into the stables, half-hidden behind the collapsed wall.

Plants had snuck through the cracks in the stones. The walls were crumbling, torn apart slowly by the plants that had been so lovingly tended. The windows were grimy with a decade's dust and grit. Plants grew wild here, here where mankind was all but gone, a tomb for the forgotten. The rosebushes had long since died, choked by hardier plants than them.

And the garden— the garden was a shade of the elegant courtyard it had once been. Vines crept along the ground, rising up to trip unsuspecting travellers. The marble fountain, cracked by the roots of the mighty oak growing beside it and stained black and brown by the passing years. Wildflowers blossomed, odd sparks of colour where beauty seemed out of place. Even the weeping angels had perished under the ministrations of time. Lonely were the statues that still stood, the tapestries that had survived. If statues could speak, what would they say? What stories could they tell, of the years since they had seen anything but plants and the occasional squirrel? This was no longer a refuge, no longer peace. Chaos reigned supreme here, the kind of perfect chaos that came with freedom and patience.

Sunlight filtered into the courtyard, set low in the ground and tiled with silver-and-gold-veined marble, bordered by walls that still stood proud and strong. Even here, they had not withstood the trials of time. Even here, there was dirt and ash and the odd flower petal. In the setting sun, the room was foggy, obscured by the dust motes that hung suspended in the air. Stale. It was still, frozen like a moment in photograph. But this wouldn't last forever, even if time... Well. Even if time no longer seemed to have a hold here, in this abandoned monument to the lost.

The huntress lay her hand on a pillar and looked around at her childhood home. Ten years had passed. Maybe more. Time was a hard thing to keep track of when you were out in the wilderness. She moved— soundless, reverent, nimble— among the crumbled walls and fallen armor. This wasn't how she remembered it as a child.

But then again.

Nothing was as she remembered it, not even herself.