In a kingdom that was held in a suffocating silence, where crows fed on the vacant eyes of abandoned statues, and the sun always lay beneath a wan veil of despair, a child was born beneath a cloak of red eclipse.
Her name was Aurora, not in promise of the dawn, but as a desperate invocation for the light to return. Cursed from the first breath she drew, she was not cursed by one witch, but by three, evil sisters veiled in darkness and decay.
Their hair was tangled with flowers, and they scented the air with the stench of the decaying earth. One bestowed upon her unearthly beauty. Another gave her endless youth.
The third, with a curse of sleep, and an insatiable hunger that gnawed under her porcelain skin. Years passed, and Aurora became a paradox, feared and adored.
Her skin shimmered, ghostly, refracting the dim light around her. At night's darkness, she whispered in forgotten languages, her teeth grinding as if eating the marrow of agonized souls.
Servants quaked as they spoke of the princess's unflinching stare. She never bled, yet shadows played at her feet.At the doorstep of her sixteenth year, the castle was cast into darkness.
Vines barbed with the material of nightmares as much as the ground spawned them slithered through the halls. Not ordinary tendrils, these; they wept red sap when severed, writhed in malice under the gaze, whispering void-secrets.
They erupted from the screaming mouth of the dungeon, from the ash mouths of long-dead sentinels, from the stones themselves that held the castle upright.
Tapestries un-wove, stripping themselves of color and life. Dogs, wild shadows now, ripped through the stables, hungering with primal rage. The spinning wheel, an ancient relic, corroded and foreboding, in memory haunted them.
Impelled by an unseen force, Aurora extended her hand.
The needle did not prick her.
It buried deep.
It twisted through flesh, snapping her nail, coiling like a serpent into her bones. Her scream was torn from her throat, shattering like glass, summoning whispers of the damned from every darkened corner.
Her eyes rolled into darkness-voids. Limbs contorted as life departed her body. And she was still then, not asleep, not dead, but locked in something far worse.
They laid her on a bed of velvet and iron, gilded with despair. The kingdom succumbed to the stifling silence that the curse demanded. But in that silence, decay crept in, and the rot began to seep.
When the "prince" crept into the castle, he was no gallant knight; he was a sterile raider. One marauder, robbing the remnants of forgotten heroes, trading whispers of myth for tarnished coin.
The castle loomed ominously, choked by creeping vines that slid like dead veins, walls throbbed with a living, but twisted, pulse. The air stank of rot, thick as a pall.
He walked to her chamber, heart racing in his breast.
There she lay, whole yet corrupt, trapped in time, her beauty distorted, a ghastly masquerade. Her dry and cracked lips, her frozen face gleamed with a coating of mucous. And then one eye opened by itself, a horrific jerk in the dark.
He leaned forward, curiosity dissolving into fear.
And then Aurora attacked.
Not like a maiden stirred from slumber, but like a venomous spider sensing tremors in the dark.
Her arms ensnared him, icy cold as death. Her jaw unhinged, impossibly wide, revealing a throat lined with shining rows of needle-like teeth. He tried to scream, but his voice was swallowed up by the void as she baldly entered his person.
Blood splattered the walls, soaking into the wood as if hungry to feed.
She rose, dripping and glistening in red. Her joints popped loudly in the silence.
A piece of his life fell from her open mouth, the ravenous appetite had awakened. and now, it would not be appeased.
Aurora strode through the haunted castle halls, her dainty soles leaving gruesome tracks of blood and bile. The evil vines twined around her ankles like serpents, insidiously whispering the blood-curdling tales of the dead.
In the black throne room, the bony remains of her relatives sat rigidly, their mouths twisted in eternal, unfinished shrieks. She fed them one by one with sinister oblations.
She sang dismal lullabies that echoed deep within their vacant craniums.
Softly, she kissed her father's empty eye sockets, vowing they would never depart from her.
Outside, the ground plunged into a black abyss. The evil vines erupted, and the air grew thick with decay.
In distant villages, children awoke from nightmare dreams, blood dripping from their eyes, murmuring her damned name in terrified sleep.
"Aurora."
"Aurora."
"She rises again."
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Finally, a third chapter! Did you enjoy it?