The Secret World of Briar Rose

A lush and immersive queer “Sleeping Beauty” retelling about escapism, grief, and dreaming of a better world, as imagined by YouTube star Cindy Pham.

The deluxe first edition features:
• A classic fairytale inspired embossed jacket
• Custom designed colored edges
• Gorgeous illustrated endpapers
• A gold foil stamped case

One hundred years have passed since the last heir of Gyldan fell into eternal slumber and doomed the once-mighty kingdom to poverty and invasion. At least, that’s what the fairy tales claim.

Corin is a jaded thief who doesn’t believe in fables, even when she searches Gyldan’s underground tunnels to find her younger sister, Elly, who ran away to find the sleeping princess in hopes of a better life. Corin's conviction is challenged when she discovers the ruins of the ancient castle, maintained by beings from the kingdom's golden age, who protect a hidden portal into Princess Amelia's subconscious. Following Elly’s voice, Corin jumps in the portal and seals the entry behind her.

Inside the lush world of Amelia's dreams, the sisters reunite for a new adventure as they meet Briar Rose, Amelia’s whimsical alter ego, and Malicine, a sharp-tongued demon with a gift for magic. But as they explore ice castles, sunflower mazes, and star-filled oceans, Corin suspects Briar Rose is hiding darker secrets behind her "perfect" paradise – and that there are some things her subconscious can’t bury forever.Cindy Pham is a queer Vietnamese-American author of fantasy books. Based in New York City, she works as a full-time designer while moonlighting as a fiction writer and content creator. Her YouTube channel, Read With Cindy, has amassed over half a million subscribers and focuses on books, movie reactions, and candid commentary. The Secret World of Briar Rose is her debut novel.Author’s note:
This story is inspired by my experience with depression and suicidal ideation. If you find the subject matter to be difficult to read, please take care of yourself first.
3
Chapter 1

The last words Elly said before she disappeared were “I hate you.”
To Corin, the sentiment was nothing new. Saying “I hate you” was a universal language between sisters, and their tongues spoke it fluently.
Elly yelled it whenever Corin stomped over her chalk drawings and wiped them off the concrete. Corin hissed it whenever Elly hummed songs in the middle of her sleep and woke them up. They went to bed angry yet huddled for warmth every night. After the warplanes destroyed their homes and soldiers seized their family’s belongings, the only thing they had left was each other.
But this time was different.
This time, when Elly said “I hate you,” Corin knew she meant it.
Her sister had vanished as swiftly as any other resident come sunrise. Anyone living within the dilapidated buildings or rubble-­filled streets of Gyldan knew their home wasn’t forever. There would be a few years of normalcy and routine, if their factions allowed it, before the rumbling sound of bulldozers came to tear down the walls. A century-­long turf war between rivaling countries­ meant constant itinerance: new military, new flags, but never any warnings for the families who lived in Gyldan. Houses were simply strategic locations to be secured, and people like Corin and Elly were just collateral damage, about as insignificant as roaches that were crushed to death if they didn’t move out of the way.
As Corin wandered through the city center in search of Elly, she could hardly imagine these same streets bustling with trade and people a century ago. Her grandparents had risked their lives seeking refuge in the prosperous kingdom surrounded by forests, but those dreams were quickly dashed when the royal family abandoned its people, leaving an ungoverned country to descend into chaos. Warring groups divided into territories, and with soldiers patrolling the borders, Corin knew Elly couldn’t have left their faction­.
She pasted posters with her sister’s likeness around soup kitchens, town squares, even shops that had closed their shutters, like the burning bakery she had looted for bread after the last round of warplanes came. Her stomach rumbled with hunger by the time she circled back to the marketplace, a deserted area with ramshackle storefronts and stragglers sorting through trash. She approached a few of them to ask if they had seen the girl on her poster, but their eyes glazed over the image, or they muttered a non­committal response, or they cursed her out, which always resulted in her cursing them back.
Mostly, though, she was ignored, like another body rotting on the street.
Her appearance probably didn’t help. Hunger had whittled her limbs to bones and hollowed her cheeks. Swaths of crow-­black hair stuck to fresh bruises across her face. Tattered pants and ripped sleeves revealed grime and mud, the stains blending with her dark skin and old scabs. At eighteen years old, she already looked dead.
She nailed her last poster onto a wooden pole and took a step back, examining her work. She had recreated Elly’s face in charcoal with all the details she remembered. Every freckle on her dark skin, every birthmark on her long limbs. Her short, choppy hair, which always curled behind her ears. She had a small, rounded nose, wide cheekbones, and two large pools of eyes the color of summer soil after it rained. While Corin inherited their father’s broad shoulders and strong nose, Elly carried their mother’s features, soft and feminine like a black-­eyed daisy.
The longer Corin stared, the more she hated the drawing. The sketches were too crude and badly smudged. They looked like Elly but couldn’t capture her. They didn’t show what it felt like to hold her hand, to feel the stickiness of her palms from all the times she broke dandelion stems and marveled at their white milk. They didn’t show the light in her eyes whenever she heard a new story, the cuts on her fingers from plucking weeds in the cracks of sidewalks, the dirt under her nails from digging into soil and shouting that there was another world underneath that they couldn’t see.
“She’s still asleep down there,” Elly would insist in rushed breaths, “the princess from long ago—­”
Corin shook her head, dispelling her sister’s foolish enthusiasm for fairy tales. Even at the age of twelve, Elly still latched onto bedtime stories she’d heard as a child when they had lived with other artisans. Corin thought leaving the commune last year would, at least, let Elly outgrow childish interests and forget their friends. In the end, it was only Corin who wanted to forget them.
Before she dwelled longer, the sound of footsteps approaching made her reach for her belt. She turned to flash a dagger at the stranger’s throat, then pulled back as the elderly woman before her gasped.
“I’m sorry,” the stranger stammered, her voice frail and light. “I wanted to see your poster.”
Deep wrinkles etched the woman’s face like a crumpled plant. She wore a faded shawl that thinned above her wrists, showing a wedding ring that glinted from her finger. Corin handed her the crinkled paper and watched the woman squint at the drawing of Elly. Her lashes nearly brushed against the charcoal as her face pressed closer to the parchment. White clouds that surrounded her pupils shifted, her eyes straining to scan every detail.
“The shading on the girl’s face is excellent,” the woman murmured. “You’re very talented.”
Corin counted her breaths to restrain herself from cursing at the stranger. She felt foolish for hoping Elly would be recognized and angrier that the woman would waste her time by prattling compliments. She was not here to show off her technical skills in some pitiful act of panhandling. But why would anyone care? Even if people knew Elly had been missing for a full day, they would assume she was simply another street rat who faced the early mercy of death.
But Elly wasn’t dead. Corin knew this, because there was no body. She had checked the usual places her sister loitered: the soup kitchens filled with lines of gaunt figures, the root cellars they hid in to shelter from rain, even the riverfront where their old friends had built their commune, a now-­destroyed home that she swore she would never return to again.
No, it wasn’t that Elly was dead. It was that she was nowhere to be found. As if she had disappeared into thin air.
“You remind me of the artists that lived by the river,” the woman observed. “People only remember the insurrection, but before then, I used to see them paint and build. Tragic, really, what happened to them.”
Corin steeled herself to shut out the sound of bullets, the smell of burnt flesh, the muffled scream that burned in her throat whenever she imagined that day. It had been a year, and still the scene came to her in nightmares and woke her in sweat and tears. There was no point in picturing how even the autumn leaves died that night, crumpled like the bodies strewn over the debris. She had not been there, after all. She needed to focus on the opportunities in front of her, here and now.
“Are you an artist?” she asked.
“Yes. But it’s difficult now, as you can see.” The woman’s disfigured hand gestured to her cloudy eyes. “My husband used to describe a scene to me and I would draw it. Before he died, we drew so much together.”
Corin imagined the woman and her husband, hunched over an easel, splatters of paint dripping over the canvas edges. Their voices were soft murmurs, an echo of her own parents’.See this, Corin? Her mother’s hand steadying Corin’s fingers over a brush. A round smear of orange paint, bright like apricot, messy like juice.You just made the sun.
“My parents were artists too,” she said. “My mother was a painter. She taught me everything.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. And your father?”
“A sculptor. He liked making pots, the tiny ones you grow plants from. I’m better with a brush, though, so sometimes I’d paint them after he finished.”
The woman cracked a smile.
“You must keep painting, then. Sometimes art can be the only refuge in this world. These soldiers take our loved ones, but they cannot take this. That’s how we keep a memory alive, even if it’s gone.”
Corin thought of patchwork quilts stained with paint, clay pots drying by the window, a tiny cottage made of lime-­washed brick, and a roof so low she could kiss the thatch. Her father’s calloused palms, her mother’s belly pregnant with Elly, the low hum of a song they’d made up. She could paint the memory into permanence, proof that there was once a home where love overflowed.
She took the elderly woman’s hand. This was someone left with no family, just like her, searching for a way to bond with another human being. Corin would give her that connection. She would let the woman know that, despite their despair, at least they had crossed paths with one another.
“Thank you,” she said. “I won’t give up on my dreams.”
The woman crinkled her eyes and nodded with conviction, as if her heart turned a little softer from their brief connection with each other. They bid goodbye, and Corin watched the woman leave before dropping her smile. Her hand dug in her pocket, where the edge of a wedding ring pressed against her palm.
It was smaller than she would have liked to barter with, but she could still make some decent money from it.
Maybe it took a mind deteriorating with old age to fall for a trick like this, believing in the dreams of a starving artist. But the truth was that dreams were never enough. Her mother died when she was ten, her paintings and clothes discarded by leering men who wanted to put their own marks over her body. Her father changed after that, stewing in liquor and regret until he finally gave in to his darkest desires and drowned himself a year later.
No, if Corin painted a memory, it would be this: A raging river that took three bodies. A baby wailing as the water drowned them. A girl who only had the strength to carry her sister, not the weeping man who brought them there.
It would be a portrait of survival, because in the end, that was what mattered. Not the fleeting love of a mother gone too soon, not the strength of a father who’d lost too much. Not even a makeshift home that once opened itself to an orphaned teenager, only to disintegrate before she turned eighteen.
She had no capacity to focus on something as meaningless as art. After the insurrection took her friends, there was no one else but Elly and her.
Now, there was only her.
Because even as she kept searching, Elly never returned.
3
Corin woke to the sound of soldiers seizing her home. It wasn’t much of a home to begin with, but she had depended on the deteriorated building as a roof over her head, even if that roof was composed of wooden boards and cobwebs.
Troops barged in clanking metal and heavy guns, stomping up a creaky stairwell that led to an alcove blocked by a rotting wood door. When they kicked it open, she’d barely made it out of bed. Their eyes fell upon the pile of burlap and moth-­eaten sheets, their noses wrinkling at the rotting odor of trash and unwashed clothes. She felt naked under the gaze of these strangers, like a roach found belly-­up in a sticky trap.
“No squatters,” one of the men yelled. “You’re on our turf now.”
The distant roar of bulldozers made the floorboards rumble. The walls trembled, as if they could tell another man-made machine was coming. Her pulse raced as she rifled through her bags and fished out crumpled documents.
“I rent under Woodbine,” she spat, as if the name of a rich landlord meant anything. Her pointer finger stabbed the bottom half of her papers where both of their signatures were scribbled beside last year’s date. She had recalled the day she met the old man with as much regret as getting talked into holding a knife, even though she’d never made the cut. His pale eyes had locked onto her first, sensing her desperation even from across his shop. His smile had chipped incisors, like a wolf baring its teeth at his next prey. She knew she’d made a mistake shaking his hand and it had haunted her ever since.
The only consolation from their deal should have been the new roof over her head, even if it was in a decrepit building. But the soldier barely glanced at the document she presented. His disinterested expression felt like a rock sinking in her stomach. She understood, even before he spoke, that any prior agreement she’d made was for nothing.
“Woodbine sold ownership of his land and left Gyldan. Demolition orders call for any illegal housing to be claimed under Zilar military.”
The soldier stamped the Zilar flag, a striking blue marked by an eagle and a coat of arms. He raised the pole high enough to puncture the boarded rooftop. She watched the flapping cloth in the sky with shaking anger. Her curled fists wanted to smash Woodbine’s pallid face. He’d put blood on her hands the day they traded favors, and the desolate excuse for a home she was about to lose had not been worth her sacrifice.
The barrel of a gun pressed into her back, forcing her to move. She couldn’t even walk a clean path to the door as hordes of men swept the home for valuables. Metal detectors crawled the floorboards like mechanical spiders, hunting for hidden gold from a once prosperous land. She sneered at their pointless search. Greedy men who already had everything always wanted more. Her family had escaped Zilar for refuge in Gyldan, only for their home to be stolen once again.
If they had asked, she would have told them there was nothing to seize. She’d sold Elly’s old toys and baby clothes for a pathetic amount of bills after her sister outgrew them. She’d already thrown away palettes and brushes when she gave up on art. At least when they took her parents’ home, there was furniture to overturn and memorabilia to destroy. Old paintings and cracked pottery and things that could have mattered if she still had a family.
They couldn’t take from someone who had nothing left now.
Yet something floated behind a tattered sheet, small and round and strung by a metallic chain nailed to one of the scorched beams. Instinct crackled her heart and made her lunge for it. The sudden movement caused a soldier to knock his gun into her head and force her knees to the ground. He pressed a boot to her back and grabbed the chain. The pendant, a hollowed ring where a gemstone should have been, dangled between his narrowed eyes. He let out a snort, dropping the necklace to the floor where her cheek pressed against wood.
“Worthless,” he muttered.
He was right. Her grandmother’s pendant held no monetary value, the lack of gemstone turning the necklace into nothing more than a misshapen copper band. There was no practical reason for Corin to keep it like a family heirloom. And yet, his disgust at the ornament, as if it were as insignificant as the rest of her ancestry because they weren’t gilded by fortune, made something snap inside her.
She snatched the chain before standing.
“You’re wasting your time,” she spat. “There hasn’t been gold on this land for centuries. The only thing you’re digging up are the graves you’ve made yourselves.”
She had already braced herself for the soldier’s retaliation when his gun barrel swung down, metal crushing against her eye.
Chapter 2
103 years ago

Princess Amelia did not believe in true love, but her faerie godmothers thought she did.
The three of them floated behind the painter, who had been toiling over the royal family’s portrait for hours while Amelia sat with her father and stepmother. One faerie pressed her fingers to both corners of her mouth and flashed sparkling teeth.
“Think of the true love you’ll meet someday,” she said, “and how excited you’ll be to fall for him.”
Ah, yes. A handsome man to provide reason for her to smile. This was the motivation to keep living, despite the curse that promised she would sleep forever when she turned eighteen. Clover had granted the gift of true love’s kiss to break the curse, so of course the godmothers believed in it. Their entire credibility depended on the cure, lest their reputation be tainted.
Amelia forced her lips into a smile. The godmothers clapped for her like she’d performed a magic trick.
Still, she felt nothing.
She possessed a face that every painter loved: bright eyes the color of sea glass, waves of golden hair rolling past delicate shoulders, porcelain skin with blushing apples on her cheeks. Her face had the symmetrical shape of a heart that pinched to the dainty point of her chin. The smile she wore highlighted the pink blooming from her lips. People compared her to roses, even though she never cared for them.
The painter could add as many shades as he wanted, but she was still a blank palette behind the face her godmothers had gifted her. Only a pastel dream of a girl to soothe people’s ideas of what beauty should look like.
If she had any ugly, gnawing thing inside her, no one would ever know.
3
The portrait hung as a centerpiece in the castle’s grand hall. Dark oils streaked across the canvas, the paint bleeding together to make three figures.
The first thing Amelia noticed upon its undraping was the gold glittering on her father’s throne. He sat tall and broad-­shouldered in his chair, casting a wide shadow on its crimson velvet and lacework. A gold finish had been added to the crest rail, and his crown glinted under the light like a halo. Either the painter took creative liberties, or King Victor had ordered it himself, for a crown made of gold was impossible. Throughout the kingdom of Gyldan, not a single ounce of gold existed in clothing, furniture, or jewelry. The mineral had been wiped from the land for centuries, so rare it had become nearly extinct.
Instead, the only remaining gold lived in the royal family’s blood.
She grew up with the story retold to her several times, a teaching tale for why her family was extraordinary. Gyldan had once been nothing more than barren land isolated by surrounding forests, where wild faeries and creatures attacked any human that trekked through the foliage. That changed when her great-­grandfather, King Samael, found an orphaned faerie named Oleander­. To display his gratitude for the king, queen, and their son, Oleander enchanted their blood with gold so that Gyldan would become prosperous for the rest of their ancestry’s rule.
Oleander was the only faerie who possessed the ability to create gold, but he limited his magic to one family so that their exclusivity would hold power. Still, rumors swirled throughout the land that he’d hidden the last treasure in a secret place within Gyldan. People climbed mountains surrounding the river valleys, traveled to other colonies for clues, even fought with wild faeries in the forests to excavate trinkets from tree hollows. They failed to discover any hidden fortune, and would never receive the answer from Oleander­, who crossed death as an act of loyalty when King Samael died.
Amelia glanced down at her wrist. Beneath pale skin, the faintest hint of gold shimmered in her veins. The ancient magic still worked, but the bloodline wouldn’t continue with her. She was fifteen now, a ticking clock set to stop working in three more years. Her father deciding to marry was understandable. Broken parts should always be replaced, therefore King Victor needed to produce a new heir. Preferably a son, but if not, at least a girl who carried a stronger legacy than sleeping for the rest of her life.
She just didn’t expect the new queen to be so young. Lilith looked more like an older sister than a stepmother. Barely eighteen years of age, the woman had married Amelia’s father only yesterday. This painting finally allowed Amelia time to observe her.
Lilith didn’t have the pretty and delicate bearing of most noblewomen. She was strong-­jawed and muscular with dark olive skin and a sharp aquiline nose. Her long hair was tied into neat, knotted locks, streaming down her back like rope. A set of pearls wrapped around her throat like a choke hold.
“The pearls simply ruin the whole thing, don’t they?”
Her godmother’s voice made Amelia startle. Iris had sneaked behind her like a shadow, so quiet that even the flap of the faerie’s delicate robe barely made a sound. She gazed at the portrait and shook her head in disapproval.
“She didn’t listen when I told her they wouldn’t match the wedding theme. Some nonsense about wanting to keep a piece of home with her.”
“Which home would that be?” Clover chimed. Thick coils of blond hair bounced as she entered the hallway. Faeries were known to be lively spirits, and as the youngest sister, she embraced that reputation with a spritely voice and natural sunny glow.
Amelia couldn’t blame her godmothers for their distrust. Being fiercely protective of the royal family was their job, and having a stranger live in the castle introduced too many risks. Especially when that stranger came from disgraced nobles and carried a reputation for spending time at brothels.
“I overheard her trying to convince King Victor to set up camps,” Iris whispered. “More places to take in runaways from Zilar. Danger­ous criminals who would eagerly stab the king for a fraction of his golden blood.”
“Madness!” Clover cried.
“Why he chose a woman with friends from whorehouses, I’ll never know.”
“Well, you are the company you keep—­”
A new voice interrupted their hushed conversations. “Enough with the gossip, ladies. Let’s have a little more tact, shall we?”
The two sisters parted, making room for their eldest. Dahlia wore a ruby gown with a high neckline that accentuated the sharp point of her chin. She tucked a curl of brown hair behind her ear and turned to Amelia with a practiced smile.
“Welcoming another woman into the castle must be difficult. You miss your mother very much, don’t you?”
Amelia didn’t respond, because she couldn’t miss someone she never knew. Her mother had died giving birth to her. She held no animosity toward the new queen, nor did she react with any of the tantrums that one would expect from an adolescent. Instead, she felt about the situation like she felt about most things: indifferent.
Where her mind often wandered as her godmothers gossiped was a different road entirely. One far away from ancient castles and limestone towers and talk of golden bloodlines, demons’ curses, even true love.
“Godmother Dahlia,” she murmured, “will I still become Briar Rose?”
She waited for an answer as the faerie pursed her lips. Long ago, the godmothers discussed plans to disguise her as an orphan. They feared that the demon Malicine would visit the castle and trick her into pricking her finger on a spindle. It might be easier, they suggested, if she lived as an ordinary girl among the other forest nymphs. A girl by the name of Briar Rose.
“No, my dear,” Dahlia said apologetically. “Your father didn’t think it would be a good idea.”
Amelia held her breath so that her chest would not deflate. Hiding­ her disappointment, she bid the faeries goodbye and retreated to her bedroom. For the rest of the evening, the godmothers would likely chatter about the new queen or potential suitors who could break her curse. They wouldn’t know that such matters were far away from her mind.
In her head, she had already envisioned this life they planted long ago, watered the seeds and watched them grow into a cottage nestled deep in a far-­off forest. It would be a fraction the size of the castle, but there would be a garden of sunflowers, a front porch where she’d share tea with forest animals, and windows that let sunlight cast in sideways.
In another life, she would rise with the sun and sleep with the stars and never feel alone.
She would be happy, rather than someone only pretending to be in their portrait.
Chapter 3

Cold water stung Corin’s skin as she splashed her face beside the river. Fat bruises the size of berries bloomed on her cheeks, and her left eye was swollen shut after the soldier had beaten her. But she was used to looking like crap, and really, she was more concerned that Elly had nowhere to return. If her sister tried searching for their ramshackle house behind the railroads, she would find only a mountain of rubble and an army of soldiers who would sooner protect land than their own people.
When most of the blood and grime washed off, Corin limped down the rocky path by the river’s edge. The water had turned to a muted gray, reflecting the dull clouds of a washed-­out sky, though most of the riverbank was covered in dead leaves and weeds that grew along the edges. Autumn should have killed her memories of this place like the trees, yet reminders lingered on every corner. The soft murmur of stream that once lulled Corin and Elly to sleep in their tent. The patch of grass where their friends lay freshly washed clothes to dry under the sun. The gritty pile of rocks that children collected to skip across the water. That time felt like the closest thing to peace, which was why she shouldn’t have expected it to last at all.
She passed by the area where she had last seen her friends, marked now by churned mud and shattered stone. The commune moved their tents along the river trail throughout the seasons to avoid capturing soldiers’ attention, but she remembered the place she’d visited the night she left for good, the gentle slope of wildflowers her boots had crushed to death when she fled under the moonlight. A year was enough time to turn her friends to dust, but she couldn’t stop smelling charred flesh as if she’d been with them.
She quickened her pace to leave them behind. Dryness thickened her throat like the scream she swallowed every morning after waking up. When she thought it would come up again like bile, she steadied herself at a wooden pole. Her blurred gaze fixed itself to something simple: The mud on her boots. The scattering of gravel. The curved lines of chalk on the rocks’ surface.
The familiarity of it struck her. Most of the drawings had faded from rain, but she recognized the rough scribbles of white and the uneven bumps of paint. She had taught Elly to soak chalk in water to create a paste and seen her sister cover sidewalks with drawings. The day before they left the commune, despite Elly’s protests, she had stamped them out. At least, she thought she did.
She knelt down to turn over the rocks. Each drawing revealed underside was a tiny stab of betrayal. There were ruffled petals colored in white, as if in mid-­bloom, and broad circles that spiraled around a stem like full moons. A few of the stems turned into wavy lines, which she guessed were locks of hair, a childish depiction of a flower crown worn by a girl. Except, to Elly, these were not ordinary flowers, and this was not an ordinary girl.
Anger pulsed against her temple as she kicked the rocks into the river. She had told her sister to stop listening to fairy tales. That stories were shared to placate and distract from reality, but they would never be tools to survive in it. All this time, she feared Elly would die in the crossfire of soldiers, be snatched by men with leering eyes, or keel over from hunger and poverty. But she hadn’t lost her sister to any of those things.
In the end, the girl had run away to chase the most dangerous thing of all: hope.
3
Sunset bled into the mountainside by the time Corin reached Gyldan’s borders. She understood then why a castle had been built here centuries ago. The rocky terrain overlooked the surrounding forests, and if any god had favored her to make her born in wealth, she would have wanted her windows to oversee the towering trees and changing leaves as well. But the castle was long gone, rumored to be buried with its sleeping princess, and the only sight left was dead foliage and patrolling soldiers. They stood along the border with rifles and sharp eyes, as keen to pull the trigger if they spotted her as they would be for any animal.
She stayed away from walking trails, ducking behind a boulder to evade a passing military tank. Once the roar of the vehicle faded, she continued stalking along the mountainside as she had for the past hour, tearing down vines that wrapped around the rocky walls and rubbing mud over her clothes for camouflage. Thorns ripped holes in her gloves, and her palms prickled with splinters.
When she thought her chafed skin couldn’t handle more, her fingers dug into a rock crevice that finally felt different from the rest.
Cold air wafted through the small cracks. The change in temperature raised bumps on her skin. She cut through the thick vines with her dagger, shearing the tendrils that twisted around each other until a gaping black mouth opened before her.
She stepped back, staring into the darkness. The wind whispered around the rocks like a secret. She thought about the ones that would never be uncovered by the world, lost in time.
A century ago, refugees from Zilar dug tunnels connecting to their neighbors in Gyldan while evading the dangerous forests that surrounded the kingdom. Her