Marmalade's Love Potion

In the final days of autumn, a young princess climbs her favourite tree clutching a folded star of paper to her aching heart.

Contained within its crisp lines are recountings of her dreams and darings... and a plea that she might, at last, be welcomed home.

With a kiss for luck, she tosses her star to the southbound winds, and stumbles her way to a crumbling cottage in the deep woods.

Years pass and the constellations spin, her pleas have gone unanswered. The princess grows, and her uncertainties are buried beneath the gentle earth of spurned hopes.

It is now, when she has almost forgotten how to wish on morning stars, that an invitation of smoke and dream light arrives, carried on horseback by soldiers of a different kingdom; the Dark Moon Ball might prove her salvation.

She does not yet know that love is an exquisite, wretched thing and that wishes are fickle as wisp light.

She does not yet know that paths of magic have their own sense of poetry, and walking them presses footprints into the deepest sands of self, remaining even as the stars and seasons turn.

She does not yet know that home is where you keep your north star.