She has been keeping that secret in her heart for years and years, risking her every relationship. She has been accused. She has been hurt. She has been scarred. But she never defends herself because that means she has to reveal her dreaded past. So...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
He tried to get a few hours of sleep, but the only thing that followed him were dark feelings of suffocation. He showered, changed, and left the room to lurk around the hallways. People of the palace were around from here to there in haste of the dinner. The palace was comparable to a maze. He was beyond lost skipping from one hallway to another, finally ending up in what looked like a secluded garden.
He heard a soft melody rippling through the frosty breeze. The music was soft and almost crestfallen. He followed it around the trees that were planted to be blooming during the frostbite of winter. When he found the path around the magnolia tree, the moment he stepped beyond the tree, he froze in his path.
Under the pink cherry tree, she was sitting on a bench with her eyes closed. Holding the violin with one hand, her other hand was moving in rhythm creating a doleful harmony. The wintry wind swept past him. branches shivered along with it, making the blushing cherry flowers sprinkle on her. Oh Lord, he'd never seen something so ethereal than the Princess sitting there in her wonderland.
Something resonated with him in that melody. Like a pang of suffocating guilt that needed to be acknowledged, perhaps even be screamed out loud. However, it clashed with the rueful conscience of his, was his guilt of survival valid? What right did he have to complain about his privileges? He should be thankful that he didn't suffer like his siblings. He should be grateful that he didn't become a victim of his family's fate.
The blue of notes of the violin stopped so did the spiral of his thoughts. Clearing the haze of his thoughts, his gaze fell on her. She had stilled midway through whatever she was playing, staring at him, blinking her wide eyes.
"Sorry!" He whispered. "I just needed to breathe a little, but I got lost." He wasn't sure if he was making any sense.
"I know. Sometimes I think I even get lost in this labyrinth." She gazed at the palace with lost eyes. Why did he feel like she wasn't talking about the palace but the life of it?
She put the violin on the side of the bench. She moved a little on the bench, leaving space for him to sit, letting him know that his presence was not an intrusion. He sat on the other end of the bench, leaving quite a gap between them.
"You play that beautifully." He pointed at the violin.
"Thank you. I want to play for Baba at dinner tonight. He loves it when I play violin." An innocent smile reminisced on her lips as she talked about her father. There was a fiber of grief within him that no matter how much his father favorited him, he could never talk about him with so much as even respect let alone love.
