Dancing Queen

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room.

She had forgotten much of the world, even as it had long forgotten her.

Save the seasonal predictability of treetops ghosting between the lush teals and lilacs of sunny months to the golds and mauves of winter, much of the view had remained the same for centuries.

So much the same she had scarcely bothered to look out for a decade. Or was it two?

Thus it took her by surprise, as the rising sun glittered behind pearly dawn clouds, that the old fort towers had crumbled into gravel while she wasn’t looking.

She only chanced to look up on this particular day as the small boy had returned to this room he had seemingly claimed, creeping through the creaking wooden door, skipping over cracks in the ancient stone, to sit amongst vines of flitterfae ivy at the arched, paneless window.

The boy with dark curls and darker eyes sighed with enraptured pleasure as the violent shades of sunrise engulfed the sky, consuming from sight the late-sleeping constellations.

The sky was beautiful, she supposed, as she stood in the shadows of her funerary alcove, watching the boy seated in his black linen frock tug at a string of pearls about his neck.

She wondered which of her grandchildren, or great grandchildren, or perhaps, by now, greater generations uncounted, the curious boy belonged to.

He had something of what her king’s nose had been, and something of her own son’s studiousness in the furrow of his young brow. Yet there was something also of her niece’s cheeky nature in the boy's quiet smirk.

The ghost of the woman who had once reigned queen turned to regard her own bones, set as they were into the fluid marble walls. Her skull was elongated, the half visible socket of her eye unnaturally large as the living stone subsumed her skeleton.

She had long estimated her ribs would be the last to merge with the walls of this long forgotten wing of Grimwood Palace. A ghoulish clock, of sorts, the bands of her vanishing bone marking the passing of centuries.

At the base of the wall, a bed of poison-blue flowers with petals edged in gold ensured her spirit would not be taken. She was no longer sure she was glad of that.

Set into the opposite wall were the smaller bones of her daughter. The ghost sighed. She missed the company of her child’s spirits.

The boy started at the sound, turning from the morning vista to regard the ghost regarding him. The shock on his face flowed into fear, settling finally into raw fascination as the boy withheld the spirits of the ghostly queen.

“What— who… are you?” the child asked, his eyes narrowed. Cautious. Curious. Eyes hungry for secrets. She knew those eyes from her own face. Or what it had once been.

“I am Edrice Rose the third, Queen Dignity of Royal House Grimwood. How strange…”

“Agreed. But what in particular?” The boy was funny. Clever.

“I’ve never had to introduce myself before.” The queenly ghost smiled, the fanning corals of her spirits trailing like ribbons of sunrise as she encircled the boy. The hair rose on the back of his neck but he did not step away. Brave, too.

Edrice Rose pointed a pale, glimmering finger towards her burial hollow. “Those are my bones.”

“That’s you?” the boy exclaimed, stepping forward to better see the twisted skeletal form embedded within the alcove’s wall.

The boy reached up, as if to touch the bones, but held himself back. The child’s curiosity did not outmeasure his respect. She was pleased.

“Oh, does it not bear resemblance?” The queen remarked, aligning the profile of her transparent face before the grotesquely contorted skull, a row of stony teeth visible through the ghost’s wry smile.

The boy laughed loudly, charming peals of mirth echoing from the stone.

She liked this one.

“Queen Dignity…” the boy murmured. “We don’t use that anymore. Haven’t in over two hundred years. My mother is Queen Majesty Seraphina of Royal House Grimwood. Though she comes from the High Clan of Wildwood originally.”

“Wildwood… times truly have changed.” Perhaps, even, for the better, Edrice Rose thought as she appraised her scion of far generations. So close to touch, so distant in time.

He did have something of the wilds to him, in his hair, his feline posture, the way his fingers curled and uncurled, as if constantly yearning for the textures of nature.

“Why are you here? Are you alone?” the princeling asked.

“I didn’t used to be. My daughter, Hannah, was buried here long before I was. I chose to be entombed with her, when age claimed me. I could almost, almost hold her again…” the queen stepped towards her child’s bones, bleached with the age of three hundred years, yet not even ten years grown.

As the queen stepped forward, away from the shielding aura of her poison flowers, the deep song grew louder.

“A dragon came through the walls one day. She chased it beyond the door.” Edrice Rose sighed, all the longing of a grieving mother ringing in her voice. “I haven’t seen her since… have you?”

The princeling shook his head, his eyes sad. Almost as if he could understand.

The queen took another step towards her daughter’s alcove, empty but for bones.

“She loved to sing. She loved music. The songs would call her to the dance halls. I so loved to watch her dance.”

Another step and the regal ghost stood almost in the centre of the room. Had the chamber been but a measure shorter, she and her daughter might have touched fingertips.

Yet the haunting song resounding from the deep earth was too strong to safely tread another step. Not without succumbing. And so, queen mother and child princess had spent the centuries dancing together—dancing apart—across the length of the forgotten, crumbling crypt.

Until her daughter had answered the call of the deep song.

“I don’t know why I’m still here,” the queen whispered, a rasping echo of what had once been a woman’s voice, now faded with time and forgetting.

Gliding towards the window, the last she would ever see beyond, the ghostly queen took in the sprawling landscape in its entirety. The rubble of crumbled towers littered the rocky crevice below, blocking the old bridgeways and chambers that had led to the great waterfall thundering into the Grimwood River. Rockpools glinted in the morning light, brighter even than the glowing lights of early merchant ships cutting through the cool and curling mist.

If she craned her neck, just barely visible towards the south east was the golden canopy of Faewood, the colours of early Harvest season. The forest’s tree line was further distant than she remembered, having been whittled away, she supposed, by Grimwood’s encroaching industry.

That had seemed so important to her once.

“Will you dance with me?” Edrice Rose asked of her descendant. The boy regarded his ancestor queen for a moment, his face solemn, then offered his arm in a style of dance popular in her time that had surely long since died.

His footing was clumsy. Unfamiliar, yet intentful. So courteous was this young wild prince, she was almost sad to leave this world behind.

As they spun like swirling fish across the floor of the crypt, she was glad she was leaving this world to him.

On the arm of a princeling, the queen twirled towards the bones of her daughter, the keening choir below the earth tugging at her spirits. Calling. Pulling.

Another step, another spin.

Was that the voice of her daughter..? Singing, singing.

The bones of her princess were at last in reach. Edrice Rose caressed the thin bone of her daughter’s cheek, as she had oft done in life. Bone didn’t dimple, but the queen could still conjure the image of her child’s sweet smile.

The queen exhaled, and with a final curtsy to her dance partners, was gone.

Prince Steph of Royal House Grimwood stood bowing in the crypt, alone but for bones and a window to a new day.