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February 14 - March 9, 2025
Wishes were about as real as unicorns.
Tella smiled, but it wasn’t the happy sort. It was the way someone smiles just before they say something they wish they didn’t have to.
But the lie had already buried itself inside of Scarlett, as lies that children are told often do. It didn’t matter how many other people confirmed the truth.
A child who’d yet to realize that most fairy tales did not end happily.
She’d disappeared like a broken star, leaving the world untouched, save for the bits of missing light that no one would ever see again.
Dreams that come true can be beautiful, but they can also turn into nightmares when people won’t wake up.”
Rather than actual facts, she’d given Scarlett romantic impressions that were beginning to feel a bit off. Pictures painted by a woman who saw the past as she wished it had been rather than as it actually was.
She remembered her first impression of him, tall, roughly handsome, and dangerous, like poison dressed up in an attractive bottle.
The future knows what things we desire, unless there is something greater in our path that chases us away.”
Every person has the power to change their fate if they are brave enough to fight for what they desire more than anything.”
A funny thing happens when people feel as if they are paying less for something than they ought: suddenly the worth goes down.
Not quite sure how far she’d already fallen, she imagined loving him would feel like falling in love with darkness, frightening and consuming yet utterly beautiful when the stars came out.
His steady gaze was even softer than his voice. It reached out to the broken parts of her like a caress. The type of touch that moves through damaged flesh, past fractured bones and into a person’s wounded soul.
Scarlett wasn’t fully convinced of this, but she’d begun to learn that no matter how logically she tried to reason, there were always variables she’d be unable to see. Sometimes caution held her back rather than kept her safe.
She remembered thinking falling for him would be like falling in love with darkness, but now she imagined he was more like a starry night: the constellations were always there, constant, magnificent guides against the ever-present black.
When she’d kissed Julian, it had felt right. Two people choosing to give tiny vulnerable parts of themselves to each other.
She was done allowing her fear to make her weaker, to eat away at the meat on her bones until she could do nothing but whimper and watch.
“I feel as if I don’t even know him.” Scarlett also felt like a fool, but she felt too ridiculous to admit that.
Saying something was for someone else’s own good was almost always another way of justifying something wrong.
To Scarlett, castles were bastions of safety offering protection. Tella saw them as fancy prisons, perfect for watching, controlling, and punishing.
People tossed around the word sorry far too easily, as if it were worth even less than the promise of a copper.
Few things were quite so brutal as critical ladies.
He tasted like exquisite nightmares and stolen dreams, like the wings of fallen angels, and bottles of fresh moonlight.
Tella might have been many things, but she was far from silly or worthless or whatever labels people liked to affix because a person was young and female.
Tella wasn’t fool enough to say out loud that it would never happen to her. She also believed that when girls voiced sentiments like that aloud they were usually wishing for the opposite to occur, daring the Fates to bring the one thing they claimed not to want.
‘Fate is only an idea, but I think by believing in it we turn it into something more.
She used to think it was ridiculous, the idea that a girl would give her heart to a boy even though she knew it would also give him the power to destroy her.
she was beginning to understand how hearts could be slowly given away, without a person even realizing.
Tella claimed she didn’t want love – she liked to say love trapped and controlled and ripped hearts apart. But the truth was she also knew love healed and held people together, and deep down she wanted it more than anything.
‘Every curse has a way to be broken, and a loophole.
In her experience, the safe choice often felt like not making a choice at all, like politely stepping back and allowing others with more power to do what they saw fit.
‘Not everyone gets a true ending. There are two types of endings because most people give up at the part of the story where things are the worst, where the situation feels hopeless. But that’s when hope is needed most. Only those who persevere can find their true ending.’
Every story has four parts: the beginning, the middle, the almost-ending and the true ending. Unfortunately, not everyone gets a true ending. Most people give up at the part of the story where things are the worst, when the situation feels hopeless, but that is where hope is needed most. Only those who persevere can find their true ending.
Occasionally, there are minutes that get extra seconds. Moments so precious the universe stretches to make additional room for them, and this was one of them.
He was trying to dazzle her. But dazzle was a lot like romance – fantastic while it lasted, but it never lasted long enough.
Tella had decided long ago to never make decisions ruled by fear. Fear was a poison that people mistook as protection. Making choices to stay safe could be just as treacherous.
It was the sort of celebration that would make it into history books and eventually turn into romanticized fairy tales that made even the horrible parts seem attractive.
‘This is my choice, and I choose you, Donatella. I don’t need immortality. You’re my forever.’
All stories are made of both truths and lies, she used to say. What matters is the way that we believe in them.
