Life persists in throwing curveballs my way, but please accept this offering of the opening paragraphs to the next chapter of paranoid and petrified:
Bloom didn’t lose her sister to the Ascension.
But she may as well have.
A renewed vigor spreads to every corner of the planet after Daphne’s Ascension; the very air thrumming with glittering hope. As if the Great Dragon Himself burst from the sea, reared his head and breathed a second wave of flaming life into the kingdom. Faith was restored and the people’s resolve strengthened by the arrival of a new Supreme.
Bloom supposes she should feel hope. Yet she feels no difference. In fact, the only emotion lodged in her chest is a gnawing sense of loneliness. While the Great Dragon added a nymph to his legion, He stripped her of her sister. Her only friend. And in her scorched shadow, her mother swooped in like the songbird of her namesake. Twittering about with a wide smile and deliberate ignorance of her youngest daughter’s plight, Queen Miriam eagerly began preparing for the next death knell in the family: Bloom’s coronation.
Talk of guest lists and flower arrangements and dress fittings flood each and every conversation and drowns screaming in Bloom’s ears. She doesn’t care what shade her Solarian silk gown is. She doesn’t care which members of the Magic Council make an appearance. She doesn’t care how many courses the dinner will be, or what’s served. She doesn’t care that the finest jeweler in Isis is fashioning her a new crown. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to care.
What she wants, she knows she can never have again.
A peaceful summer, brightened by the brilliant sun warming her skin and her family’s laughter trailing on the wind. Her hair billowing behind her as her horse races to keep up with Daphne’s as it surges through the Dragonswood, hellbent on reaching the coast before her sister.
Her sister with amber eyes. Not the soulless, white voids Bloom stares at now.