A Free Short Story: The Winter Thorn
A Tale of Exile, Frost, and Faerie Beginnings
Before the events of On Wings of Ruin, there was a queen in exile and a realm already trembling at the edges. This is her story – a quiet one, but nothing in Faerie stays quiet for long.
They told her not to go.
Even the wind warned her, gossiping in spirals around the carriage wheels, trailing ice-laced ivy across the road like a ribbon unwound from a child’s hair. But Ara Mor Faryn, Queen of the Opal Court and silver-stitched survivor of a thousand court betrayals, simply pulled her cloak tighter and pressed one gloved finger to the pane of glass, where frost bloomed like lace, like a warning, like wings of something long-dead.
The Grey Marches, where dragons sleep, and when they dream, the trees ignite.
The road was narrow as a vow and just as easy to break. Pines stood in regimented silence, as though afraid to speak of what watched from the eaves of the world. And ahead: the palace. Not a castle, not a manse, not a dwelling of any architectural obedience, but something older. It hunched in the snow like the skeleton of a beached leviathan, its door a toothless maw, its towers mere spinal knobs. It was a place with no beginning and no windows – only the promise that once you entered, you would not leave quite the same.
Sir Aldren, ever the knight, ever the mouse-heart in steel, shifted beside her.
‘Majesty’ he murmured, his voice muffled by his scarf, by his fear, and by the long tradition of men who think danger wears scales and breathes fire. ‘We should not …’
She lifted a single, white-gloved hand, and the words froze on his lips like the rime on her carriage’s wheels.
‘I am not here to duel dragons,’ Ara said, her voice low. ‘And if I were, I would not bring a carriage.’
Then the gates yawned wide, opening as though they had been waiting. As though they had sighed and said: At last. She’s come to us.
He was there. Of course he was. Eldaeriel. Brother of the King, son of the storms, scribe of forgotten flames. He stood like a statue carved from mist and memory, his coat the colour of extinguished embers, his hair the hue of old moonlight trapped in crystal. No crown, no guards. Just him – and that smile, that barely-there quirk of the mouth that said I see you, in a way no man had said it to her since the Court began to rot from within.
‘Queen Ara,’ he said, and his voice was soft and dry, like paper curling in firelight. ‘No envoy? No heralds? No one to spill wine on the table? How refreshing.’
She stepped down from the carriage, her boots sinking delicately into the snow.
‘Lord Eldaeriel,’ she said, voice smooth as spellwork. ‘No banners? No trumpets? No flaring wings or ceremonial transformations? I confess myself disappointed.’
‘Oh,’ he said, offering his arm, ‘that comes later.’
And somewhere beneath the snowbound palace, something very old opened one eye and began to listen. The palace did not have hallways. It had arteries.
Ara followed Eldaeriel through passageways that pulsed faintly with a heart too deep to name. The walls were made of something that looked like stone, but wasn’t – pale green, veined with gold, the colour of seawater caught between a kiss and a drowning. No torches, just the walls themselves, giving off a sighing luminescence.
‘Is it true,’ she asked, trailing one finger along the glowing seam of a wall, ‘that this place was built atop a sleeping wyrm?’
‘No,’ he said, his voice gentle, and just a touch amused. ‘It is the wyrm. We live inside her dreaming. When she stirs, the palace shifts. When she sleeps, the wind forgets its own name.’
Ara raised one brow – not dismissively, but in the manner of a woman who has danced with riddles before and found them lacking as lovers.
‘And when she wakes?’
Eldaeriel smiled. ‘Then we all burn beautifully.’
He held the door open for her, and she stepped into a room shaped like a teardrop and lit like a cathedral just before sunrise. The ceiling curved overhead in fossil-etched bone. In the centre: a low table ringed with velvet cushions the colour of twilight and laid for two.
Not twelve, just two. A love-letter's table.
No clattering dishes. No golden roast pheasants stuffed with dates. No harpsichords sighing in the corners. Just – bread dark as peat, sliced fig dusted in ash-sugar, thin cuts of venison so fine they trembled on their plate like candlelight. Two cups, and a decanter shaped like a falling star. The cups were made of emberglass, each etched with a different constellation, glowing faintly with warmth.
‘I expected a council,’ Ara said. ‘Or at least a steward. Not … this.’
She did not sit. Eldaeriel did. He did it with the grace of a prince who had once abdicated his world. ‘Would you rather I summoned a witness?’ he asked lightly. ‘Shall I call my brother from his wars and his chessboards to watch us sip wine?’
‘Fahriel would not come,’ she said. ‘Not unless I brought him an army gift-wrapped in opals.’
‘Then it’s good,’ Eldaeriel said, uncorking the decanter, ‘that I brought something better than an army.’
He poured the wine – dark as garnet, thick as honeyed blood and handed her the cup etched with a fox constellation. Ara did not drink. She held the cup in her hand as if weighing it against the weight of history.
‘This is treason,’ she said, softly. Almost kindly.
‘Only if someone writes it down.’
Their eyes met like flint and steel, and something unseen sparked.
‘Why me?’ she asked. ‘Why now?’
He did not answer at once. Instead, he took a sip and set the cup down as though it were part of a ritual older than Faerie itself. Then he stood.
‘You ask questions with teeth,’ he said. ‘Let me show you the answer. It isn’t written. It isn’t sung. It’s grown.’ He held out his hand.
She hesitated, not out of fear, but from the knowledge that every great story begins with an offered hand.
And every tragedy begins with its acceptance.
Ara placed her fingers in his. His palm was warm – far warmer than it should be in a place carved from ice and dragonsleep.
Somewhere far below, the wyrm turned in its dreams.
And the moth that had circled above them in the dining chamber blinked once, as if it remembered something lost to fire.
The path downward did not feel like descent. It felt like forgetting.
Eldaeriel led her through a door hidden behind a tapestry of withered vines – not a dragon motif, but something older and thornier. The stair beyond wound in gentle spirals, carpeted with silence, lit by braziers that gave no flame and no heat, only a faint breath of saffron and smokeleaf. Ara touched the stone wall as they walked, and it pulsed once beneath her fingers. Not stone. Never stone. This place had been born, not built.
‘Is this a shrine?’ she asked at last.
‘A chapel,’ he murmured. ‘Built in the marrow of the palace, where the wyrm sleeps deepest. No priests, no prayers, just what was left when we stopped naming gods.’
A silence bloomed. It stayed with them as they passed an arch carved with spiral glyphs – draconic script, if she had to guess, though the grammar was strange. One looked like a falling feather; another, a flame curling back into itself.
The room beyond was round, cloistered and quiet.
At its centre stood a single altar, overgrown with silver moss. Cracks laced its sides like laugh lines on a weary face. Something pulsed faintly within – a glow not unlike the emberglass from supper, but older, more hesitant, like it had not been called on in an age.
Overhead, no ceiling. Just roots, gnarled and pale, curling like the fingers of a sleeping creature over the rim of the circular chamber. Tiny drops of water hung from the tips. And perched above the altar, utterly still, was a moth.
Grey as shadow. Wings veined with opal.
Ara paused.
‘Your house keeps strange idols,’ she said.
Eldaeriel turned to her. ‘That isn’t mine.’
The moth’s wings twitched. Just once. Then again.
He watched it. So did she.
‘There are spies who carry daggers,’ Ara murmured, ‘and spies who carry scrolls. But some carry nothing at all. They simply watch.’
Eldaeriel reached into the folds of his coat and drew out a ring – silver chased with fireleaf. He flicked it through the air like a coin. The moth vanished.
Ara said nothing. Not yet. Instead, she stepped to the altar.
‘What is this place, truly?’
He came to stand beside her, not too near.
‘This was the first place the Mother touched down, before she left us to burn or prosper on our own. Here she lit her last fire. They say it’s still smouldering, somewhere in the stone.’
‘And your people worship her?’
‘No.’ He touched the altar gently, reverently. ‘But I do.’
She stared at the stone, at the faint throb within, at the moss braided with filaments of something not quite metal, not quite living. She felt the air charge around her – not magic, not glamour. Something deeper. Like a chord plucked just beneath the breastbone.
‘I wasn’t sure you still believed in anything,’ she said softly.
‘I wasn’t sure I did either,’ Eldaeriel replied. ‘Until you arrived.’
And then he reached beneath the altar and drew out a dragon scale.
It shimmered – not opalescent like a serpent’s scale, but translucent, glowing faintly from within, as though it held a candle made of memory. He placed it in her hands. It was warm.
‘What is this?’
‘A gift. Or a key. Or a promise. Depends how you carry it.’
She turned it in her hands. ‘It feels … awake.’
‘It is,’ he said. ‘You asked why now. Why you. This is why.’
Ara felt something stir inside her – a recognition, a sorrow not hers, as if the scale remembered her more clearly than she remembered herself.
And then: the touch. Simply his hand brushing hers as she held the scale. But it was enough.
Glamour flared. Fire answered it. Around them, the roots above trembled. The moss hissed. The altar cracked a little further, and a faint voice rose with the susurrus of a name never meant to be spoken aloud.
Ara’s lips parted. ‘We should not be here.’
‘No,’ Eldaeriel said, his voice now low and strange. ‘But we are.’
And far above, in a different shape and with eyes borrowed from dust, Blahnid circled once over the garden courtyard, having returned to himself, wings furled beneath courtly velvet, and whispered a single sentence into the ear of the cold air:
‘They have chosen ruin.’
They did not speak on the way back. The silence between them was not awkward–it was reverent, like the hush that falls when the last note of a song still clings to the rafters. Ara walked beside him, her gloved fingers still tingling from where his had brushed them. The scale – his scale – rested inside a pouch over her heart, and it thrummed like a second pulse.
When they emerged from the chapel corridor, the palace had changed.
The green-gold corridors were now tinted with rose, as if dawn had fallen asleep on the walls. Tiny motes drifted through the air, catching in Ara’s hair like feathered fire.
They reached her guest chambers, though the word was comical. Nothing about the room said guest. It said sorceress. Stranger. Queen of uncertain allegiance.
He turned to go.
She caught his sleeve. Just her fingers, resting on the velvet of his coat, asking something wordless.
He paused. ‘I would stay,’ he said, ‘but I fear what it would mean.’
She met his eyes. ‘Meaning is all we have,’ she whispered.
He stepped inside.
The room was all soft stone and high arches, lit by a single hovering lantern of trapped dusk – pale lavender and stormcloud grey. She undid the clasp of her cloak. He watched, unspeaking, as she laid it over the chaise like a shed skin.
‘You are not what I expected,’ she said, turning.
‘And what did you expect?’
‘A creature of fire. All fangs and fury. A prince of storms.’
He stepped closer, slowly. ‘And what am I?’
‘A man,’ she said, ‘who knows how to light candles in the dark.’
He reached out, and this time it was not ritual.
Their kiss was not tentative. It was recognition. The kind of kiss that remembered something neither of them had said aloud. His lips were cool from the chapel, hers warm from wanting. They met in the middle, between flame and frost.
He lifted her hair – an act of reverence – and kissed the skin just beneath her ear, where her glamour softened. Her hands traced the lines of his back, memorising the man beneath the myth.
When they lay down – on silk the colour of half-remembered dreams – there was no hunger in it. Only slowness. Only listening. As though the world might forgive them if they simply moved gently enough.
Later, as she drifted in and out of that place between dreaming and aftermath, he drew something over her body: a cloak, not of her own making, not stitched from court velvet or mortal cloth. It shimmered like heat over stone, and hummed faintly, as if alive.
‘What is it?’ she murmured.
‘My own,’ he said. ‘Woven from ember-thread. It remembers warmth. I thought you might need it.’
She wrapped it around her and felt a strange heaviness – not weight, but memory. As though it had been waiting for her all along.
And far above them, beyond the reach of stone and silence, the wyrm that was the palace exhaled once in its sleep.
Outside the chamber, on a balcony laced with frost, Blahnid stood unseen, wings hidden beneath a courtier’s cloak. He pressed two fingers to his lips and whispered their names into the moth-shaped brooch pinned to his collar.
Then he turned and walked into the dark.
There was no sunrise in the Opal Court. The day unfurled itself in colours: mauve bleeding into nacre, peach curling into pearl. The dome above the throne room was made of cloud-glass – translucent, fragile, forever shifting – held aloft by columns of crystallised wind. A good breeze could ruin the architecture. Or rebuild it. That was the way of things here.
Ara sat alone on her throne of saltwood and riverlight, hands folded in her lap, the ember-thread cloak hidden beneath a mantle of silver thorns. Her eyes drifted over the courtiers assembling like petals falling in reverse.
The creatures of her court were not beautiful in any mortal sense. A lady with mirrors for eyes and coral branches for hair whispered to a vulture-headed jester who juggled hearts made of ice. A sentient lace-veil glided past her, trailing perfume and low, anxious laughter. The Harlequin of the West, an eyeless creature spun from ribbons, lounged sideways on a hovering swing, singing a song about blood oranges and betrayal.
A silverfish in a velvet robe – he preferred to be called the Archivist – bowed stiffly and slid across the tiles toward her.
‘Your Majesty,’ he murmured, ‘the King of Fallmere has requested a response to the matter of the Eastern baronies. Again.’
Ara nodded faintly. Behind her smile was a crack.
The Court had not changed. But she had. And it knew.
She saw it in the subtle glances, the slow circle of the glass moths above the chandeliers. The way her herald’s voice now stuttered on certain vowels. The way the blood in her goblet no longer stayed still, but trembled softly, as if aware of a hidden pulse nearby.
Eldaeriel’s dragon scale still rested over her heart.
‘Tell Fallmere,’ she said, ‘that the Eastern baronies may do as they wish. The Opal Court will not rise to match their tantrums.’
The Archivist twitched. ‘Majesty, forgive me, but is that … wise?’
Ara turned her gaze on him, and for a moment her glamour cracked just enough to show the fire beneath.
‘I do not recall requesting wisdom,’ she said.
He bowed again – more deeply – and retreated into the marble hush.
Ara exhaled. She had not removed the ember-cloak since her return. Beneath its warmth, she dreamed in flame: spirals of scales, stone-voices, and a kiss that had tasted like old magic remembering itself.
The Court watched her. Not openly, not yet. But the moths watched. The walls listened.
She rose from her throne. As she descended into the Stone Garden – her sanctuary, her invention, her trap – she passed beneath wisteria that sang in four-part harmony. Orchids with mouths like sea-urchins murmured old gossip. A tiger made of smoke padded past her, then dissolved into perfume.
And still, she could feel it: something was coming. The Court was tilting. The whispers behind her gowns were sharpening. A voice called her name. She turned.
Ysirien, her advisor and sometime executioner, stood in the ivy court. Her face was a mask carved from shell, eyes black as pitch, voice like rustling silk.
‘My Queen,’ she said. ‘There has been a summons.’
Ara lifted her chin. ‘From whom?’
Ysirien did not blink. ‘From Fahriel.’
Silence fell like a dropped veil.
Ara smiled, slowly. ‘Then the war begins.’
It happened at dusk, of course. Not mortal dusk, which slips in quietly and asks permission, but Faerie dusk, which never knocks.
Ara stood at the edge of the Namer’s Bridge, where all the old paths crossed – between the courts, between the realms, between what could be spoken and what must be forgotten. The stone beneath her feet was laced with sigils: runes carved by the Founders, rewritten by every monarch since. It glowed now, faintly, as if trying to remember her name one last time.
Eldaeriel came on foot. No dragonsong. No glamour.
He wore the same coat, now storm-streaked and unfastened, and the ash in his hair caught the evening light like fire refusing to die.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before anything else.
‘I’m not,’ she said.
They didn’t embrace. They stood like ruins do – close, and full of memory.
Behind them, the air shifted. Fahriel’s decree had not been made with trumpets. It had been whispered through roots and rain, through the mouths of spies and the ink of the old books. Treason. Unbinding. Locking. Not execution. Not erasure. Just this: never return.
The Locking was not loud. A ring of iron thorns rose from the ground behind them, slow as breath, coiling into a circle of jagged bloom. It hummed with old power – Fae law, raw and ancestral, the kind that doesn’t need judges.
Once the ring sealed, Faerie would turn its face from them forever.
‘You can still walk away,’ he murmured. ‘Say I bewitched you. Say I laid a glamour on your heart.’
Ara looked up at him. And in that moment, the fire beneath her skin burned clean and quiet. ‘Then I would never have been Queen.’
The Locking began.
The ring folded inward. The symbols on the bridge turned dark. Wind poured in – cold and dry, without scent or sound. The glamour of Faerie began to unspool from them like thread from a snipped hem. Their names – their true names – slipped from the mouths of stones, the memory of trees, the dreams of cats and songbirds.
Ara felt the air grow thick. Eldaeriel took her hand.
As the final sigil closed, the world lurched – and then it was still.
They were outside. Utterly, irrevocably. Faerie no longer knew them. Not the woods, not the rivers, not even the moths. Behind them, the Namer’s Bridge shimmered once, then vanished like a lie swallowed by silence.
The wind in the mortal world was sharp. It smelled of coal smoke and river rot. They stood on the banks of a river that had never learned to dream, beneath a sky that had never burned blue enough to matter.
She pulled the ember-cloak tighter.
Eldaeriel looked at her, half-laughing, half-lost. ‘What now?’
Ara turned, eyes fixed on the unfamiliar stars.
‘We begin again.’
Blahnid perched high on the cornice above the Hall of Eyes, where the Court gathered in its flickering magnificence, draped in weeping silks, enamelled wings, mouths full of wine and prophecy. He clung to the carved stone with three of his six limbs, his wings furled tight against his back. The air here was always warm, always scented of honeyrot and mirror-dust.
Below, the courtiers danced in relief. The Queen was gone. The dragon lord too. Their treason sealed, their names scrubbed from the ledgers of magic. The Locking had succeeded.
He had watched it. He had whispered the warning. He had done his duty.
And yet … A thread remained. No glamour-thread or spell-bind or name-string. Just a feeling – like the last echo of a bell that refuses to fully die, even after the toll is done.
Ara Mor Faryn had stepped into exile with fire in her eyes and a dragon’s ember at her breast. And the one called Lord Eldaeriel, for all his terrible softness, had looked at her as though she were the last true thing in any world.
Blahnid had seen lovers before. He had seen folly, too. But what he had seen on the Namer’s Bridge had not been love or folly.
It had been myth – half-born, still wet with grief.
Below him, Fahriel laughed. It was a quiet sound, a sovereign’s chuckle. But it made the chandeliers shiver.
Blahnid tilted his head. He had served the Opal Court of the Burning Crown for six centuries. He had worn twelve faces, danced in sixteen wars, whispered a thousand names into the folds of silk and salt.
But he could not forget the way the emberlight had clung to Ara’s skin. Or the way the altar stone had cracked when their hands met.
They will not be forgotten, he thought.
And then, without sound or ceremony, he unfurled his wings and vanished into the shadows above the throne.
Some thorns flower again. Some stories never truly end.
To learn what happens when the gates of Faerie close – and who dares reopen them –
👉 Read On Wings of Ruin