A short story, born from this animation.
The morning finds me the way it always has these past seven years: rooted to this spot like some cursed oak, my feet having long forgotten the language of movement. But today feels different. Today, the silence has cracks in it.
I catch my reflection in the polished surface of my breastplate—fractured into silver fragments by the delicate stems that have learned to call this armor home. They didn't grow here overnight. Nothing beautiful ever does. They arrived the way grief does: quietly, persistently, until one day you realize they've colonized every empty space in your chest.
The court sees the Iron Maiden when they look at me. The Flower Queen. The Unbreaking. They've given me a dozen names, each one heavier than the last. But I remember when I was just Elena, seventeen and reckless, braiding wildflowers into my hair before dancing barefoot through summer meadows. That girl feels like something I dreamed once, in another life.
The first bloom appeared three days after Ashford Bridge.
I'd returned to an empty castle, my sword still speaking the language of war in crimson syllables. Victory, they called it. The kind of victory that tastes like copper and sounds like the echo of your own heartbeat in a room full of the dead. I'd dismissed my handmaidens, sent away the physicians with their poultices for wounds that weren't carved in flesh.
When dawn broke through my chamber windows, something impossible had happened. A single white blossom, no bigger than a child's fingernail, had pushed its way through the seam where my gorget met my breastplate. Delicate as spun moonlight, trembling with each breath I took.
I tried to pluck it. My fingers passed through the petals like they were made of morning mist—real enough to see, too ethereal to touch. Like everything else I'd lost.
Now, seven years later, I'm a walking garden of sorrows. Each bloom carries a name I'll never speak aloud. The cluster near my left shoulder remembers the twins from Miller's Creek—boys who'd never seen battle before they followed me to hell and back. The single white rose at my throat belongs to Captain Morrison, who taught me to ride when I was seven and died protecting my flanks when I was twenty-four.
The tiny forget-me-nots scattered across my pauldron? Those are for the faces I remember but the names I've lost. Lives that ended because I chose duty over mercy, strategy over hearts that beat with the same desperate rhythm as my own.
They think I'm praying when they see me like this—eyes closed, lips barely moving in the throne room's perpetual twilight. They don't understand that I'm taking attendance. Every dawn, I count them. Every dusk, I whisper apologies to flowers that shimmer like captured starlight and disappear when anyone else tries to look too closely.
The armor was supposed to be temporary. A ceremonial piece for the victory parade, then back to the vaults where such things belong. But the garden had other plans. The roots didn't grow into the metal—they grew into me. Through seven years of seasons, they've remained constant, my beautiful burden, my living monument to the mathematics of war.
Dr. Whitmore called it "acute stress manifestation with psychosomatic projections." The kitchen staff crossed themselves and whispered about divine judgment. But I know what it really is. It's what happens when a heart has nowhere left to store its grief.
Some nights, when the castle sleeps and the only sound is wind through broken battlements, I swear I can hear them singing. Not with voices—flowers don't speak—but with something deeper. Lullabies my mother hummed. Drinking songs from taverns I'll never visit again. The half-remembered melody of a childhood that ended the day they placed a crown on my head and a sword in my hand.
The court thinks I've gone mad. Or blessed. Or cursed. They've stopped trying to understand why their queen has become a garden of sorrows. Let them whisper. Their living voices matter less to me now than the silent songs of the dead.
But yesterday was different.
A petal fell.
Not withered or torn away by wind. It simply... released. Drifted from its stem like a feather finding its way to earth. When I bent to catch it, my armor creaked—the first sound it had made in months. The petal crumbled to silver dust between my fingers, and I understood something I'd been too afraid to hope for.
Not forgiveness. Not healing. But something quieter, more patient. Permission, maybe. To remember without drowning. To carry the dead without becoming one of them.
Tonight, I'm going to try something I haven't attempted in seven years. I'm going to try to remove my helmet.
Not to escape the garden that grows from my grief, but to tend it properly. To learn the difference between honoring the dead and burying myself with their ghosts. To discover if a queen can be both monument and gardener, both memorial and woman.
The flowers will remain—they're as much a part of me now as breath or heartbeat. But perhaps they can learn new songs. Not just elegies for the lost, but hymns for the living. Melodies about the weight of crowns that aren't forged from guilt, but from the courage to bloom again after the longest winter.
I close my eyes and feel the familiar weight of petals against steel. When I open them again, the throne room looks different somehow. Not smaller, exactly, but less like a tomb. More like a greenhouse where something new might grow.
The morning finds me as it always has. But today, for the first time in seven years, I think I might try to find it back.
