Flurries of Blood

Once upon a time, in a doomed kingdom, a princess bit into a poisoned apple and fell into a hundred-year sleep.

That is the story they tell children. Perhaps it is simply easier to believe a princess could sleep for a century than to accept the truth.

Sleeping had always meant rest, dreams, peace—at least, that was what I had been taught. My curse turned sleep into consciousness.

A curse offers none of those things. It offers only despair, and then hatred. It turns every second into an eternity. You cannot wake. Neither can you die. At first, the despair feels unbearable. Later, it becomes your only companion.

At some point, I stopped counting the days. Thousands, millions—numbers lost all meaning. Only the seconds remained, and every single one felt unending.

After a few decades, I learned to recognize who was descending the stairs simply by the rhythm of their footsteps. Children always stumbled on the third step. Soldiers never dragged their feet. Priests breathed louder when they began to pray.

I never slept. For ninety-seven years, I remained fully conscious, trapped inside a body that had ceased to obey me. I could not open my eyes, move a single finger, or even draw a breath—yet my mind remained awake, watching time pass without being able to take part in it.

In the beginning, I fought. I tried to move my hands until I felt pain, though today I know it was impossible to feel anything at all. I tried to scream, to pray to every god I knew, to beg. Then I discovered that hope dies too—it just takes longer than people imagine.

I always found it curious how the living fear silence. I used to fear it as well. Today I know there is something far worse: absolute silence eventually acquires a voice of its own. I learned to recognize its variations—the weight of winter snow upon the roof produced a different crackle than spring rain; the birds always returned at the exact same time of year, building nests over the ruins of the mausoleum; when a fiercer storm battered the mountain, small stones would roll down the stairs, their echoes slow to fade.

That was how I learned to measure time. Not by days, nor by months—by sounds.

People changed, too. In the early years, I could still hear familiar voices: soldiers who had served my father, maidservants who had watched me grow, priests who prayed for the salvation of my soul. Then those voices vanished, and others took their place—strangers, telling stories of a sleeping princess who, little by little, ceased to be a person and became merely a legend.

It was strange, hearing my own life being reinvented.

“She killed the Queen before she fell asleep,” an old man once swore, striking his cane against the stone floor.

“No. Her father sacrificed her to save the kingdom,” another replied, like someone correcting an obvious mistake.

Listening to them, I realized that the dead never control their own story. To some, I was chosen by the gods. To others, my body concealed a relic capable of granting eternal life. There was even a man who spent nearly an hour trying to convince his companions that my coffin was made of diamond. If I could have laughed, perhaps I would have laughed that day.

But I had forgotten how to laugh.

I had also forgotten my mother’s face—and that terrified me more than any legend.

I spent years repeating her features inside my head, like a child memorizing a prayer: the shape of her eyes, her quiet smile, the way she pinned her hair before dinner. I repeated it all every single day, terrified that a single moment of distraction would be enough to erase her from me.

I still remember the exact moment I realized something was wrong. I could no longer recall the color of her eyes. I tried imagining them brown. Then green. Finally, I thought perhaps they were blue—and the harder I tried to remember, the more every color seemed possible. My mind began inventing memories to cover what I had lost, until I no longer knew if I was remembering my mother or simply inventing a woman to take her place.

Shortly after, her voice vanished as well. That was when I understood that time can kill people without ever having to touch them.

Perhaps that was why she appeared.

The woman in white never said who she was. She walked across a snow-covered plain, and I followed her. Her face seemed hidden behind a thin layer of ice—impossible to distinguish—yet there was something strangely familiar about her, as though I had known her since before I was born.

The first time, I tried to touch her, and my hand passed through the air as if she were not there at all.

“Are you real?” I asked.

She did not answer. She simply kept walking, leaving no footprints upon the snow beneath her feet.

She returned the following night. And the night after that. Slowly, I realized she was not there to speak with me—she was there to teach me.

“Kings sold their own blood for power,” she said on one of those walks, without me having asked a thing. “Queens vanished leaving no tomb behind. There were wars so ancient that no book dares to mention them.”

“What wars? Why are you telling me this?”

Silence.

“Hemomancy,” she said, weeks later, like someone resuming an interrupted sentence. “Primordial Ice. The Scarlet Crown.”

“What does that mean?”

She never answered. She simply walked on, as if she knew that, one day, I would find the answer on my own.

For a long time, I believed those encounters were merely dreams birthed by solitude. Later, I began to suspect that dreams cannot teach us things we have never learned.

It was precisely when I had begun to accept that strange routine that everything changed.

I heard footsteps.

They were neither swift nor hesitant. Whoever was descending the mausoleum stairs did not seem lost—they walked slowly, but with the certainty of someone who had spent years searching for that exact place. For the first time in nearly a century, I felt fear.

The man stopped before my coffin. I heard the metallic scrape of a sword being drawn from its scabbard, and I thought that, at last, someone was going to destroy my prison. Curiously, the thought did not bring me despair. After ninety-seven years entombed within my own consciousness, even death felt like a form of freedom.

“Forgive me,” he whispered, his voice cracked, spoken more to himself than to me.

His breathing was heavy, ragged, as though every breath carried the weight of years of failure. I could not decide whether I had found salvation... or simply one more reason to lose everything.

The sound of a blade slicing through flesh.

A drop fell upon the crystal. Then another. And another.

Blood.

The instant the first drop touched the coffin, something deep within me answered. It was not pain. It was not heat. It was as though the entire winter held its breath all at once. Fine cracks spiderwebbed across the crystal above my face, and, for the first time since I bit the apple, I felt my heart beat.

Just once.

It was enough for me to understand.

For ninety-seven years, I wished to live again.

The instant my heart beat once more, I realized I should have wished to die.