Continuum (Reylo AU)

Safe Haven - Part 1

"Whenever I hear old chronicles of love,
it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past,
in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star
piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever."
— Rabindranath Tagore, Unending Love

Thick, golden brown hair shimmered under the thin rays of the burning tangerine sunlight. The young woman pushed her long hair in their natural curly ringlets behind her shoulders. The same tangled mop of hair which she didn't dare attempt to make a fuss with before she made her way from her bedchamber outside to the grounds of the royal palace.

Designing hair was a servants' jobs, a servant which was fast asleep in the servants quarters. The young woman was provided with her only a few days ago when she first arrived to the kingdom of Vardamos as she was royalty.

And not just any kind of royalty.

She was a queen.

Queen Rosalyn Damaris of Therra.

Although, this queen couldn't blame her servant's absence. Nor her ladies.

It was dawn after all.

A yawn came over the Queen, her body screaming in protest against her restraint from sleeping last night. Because there she was, awake in the quiet, early hours of the morning. She didn't earn a wink of rest from her obnoxious, tumultuous mind which kept her from resting.

That's when her obnoxious, tumultuous mind circled back to the reason why her mind couldn't rest. She could only replay that very moment from two nights ago. That very brief, appalling moment in time which felt long and slow-paced. As though it stopped time. A bomb dropped on her chest, a dagger to her heart. That terrible moment she witnessed in one of the many dark and vast empty corridors in the west wing before she made it to her bedchamber to do the very thing she couldn't do.

Right before her very own eyes, the man she sat next to all evening at the feast with, was with another woman. Or better yet, snuck around with. The King of Vardamos, Balthazar, with some fortuitous commoner.

The Queen and him talked and danced at the party yesterday which was held in her honor as the guest of the kingdom she was currently visiting. She couldn't have wished to be anywhere else but there with him. They were after all. . .betrothed. Him and her arranged to soon to be married. The reason she was there in the first place. To be married. To become joined king and queen of their two respected kingdoms.

She was silly enough to think they could actually get along. She was naive to think their arrangement could blossom into something. . .romantic. . .into something more than titles.

Those were just fantasies from stories she read as a girl. Stories devoured like sweet wine where the main protagonists fell in love and lived happily ever after with consequences. The Queen fantasized a fairy tale such as that would happen to her. But they were merely fairy tales.

And this was reality.

Her reality.

No, he and that wretched women were close. Intimate. Much more than the King and her were at the feast for sure as they shared mere, tedious conversation. She saw for herself there was more passion between him and that woman in that single moment than any novel could put in words.

The Queen couldn't mistake what she saw, play off their affair less than it was between them. She couldn't forget the way his hands were wrapped around her. The same hands on the Queen's waist when they danced. The way he smiled at that woman in the pale moonlight, the same smile he gave her to reassure her nervousness while introducing her to the aristocrats in the king's court. Worst of all, she cursed the way her blood burned like fire in her veins while witnessing the way his lips were on that woman's which were once on the Queen's hand when they first met and each time they departed for the night.