Note from Steph: I love this story! It's just a little bit unexpected. And the voice turned out pretty good for it.
The castle maintenance budget is a joke. Literally. I’ve heard the town council laugh about it. “Twenty euros a month to maintain a relic?” But I take their money and climb this hill every week, just to pull whatever weeds have pushed through the ancient stones.
Except today, something’s different.
The iron key sticks in the lock like always, but when I shoulder open the heavy door, the air inside isn’t stale. It’s… sweet. The morning light streams through the Gothic windows, carrying the impossible scent of roses.
“No,” I whisper, because roses don’t grow in abandoned castles. Roses don’t grow through marble floors and stone walls. Roses don’t appear overnight, turning empty throne rooms into gardens that would make Versailles jealous.
But here they are. Deep crimson blooms cascade down pillars, twist through window tracery, carpet the floor in petals. They frame the ancient throne like they’ve been growing there for centuries, though I swear on my grandmother’s pruning shears there wasn’t so much as a sprout here last month.
I check my phone’s calendar. Nothing special about today’s date. No royal birthdays or historic anniversaries. The kingdom’s been without a monarch for so long that most people think of the castle as just another tourist spot — when they think of it at all.
I step closer to the throne, drawn by a particularly perfect bloom.
“Hello,” a voice on my right says.
I turn and find a young woman in the process of picking blooms and adding them to a basket.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I say, though honestly, I’m just impressed she got past the rusty gate.
“Neither are they.” She nods at the roses while adding another perfect bloom to her basket. “But here we all are.”
Her accent isn’t local. Tourist maybe? But there’s something in the way she moves through the room, like she knows every stone. “How long have you been coming here?”
“About three weeks.” She caresses a vine, careful to avoid the thorns. “Ever since they started growing. I thought I was hallucinating at first. Roses don’t just appear in abandoned castles, right?”
Three weeks. The same roses I’m seeing for the first time, she’s been watching grow.
“They like you,” I say, noticing how the blooms seem to lean toward her. “The roses, I mean.”
She laughs, and more buds unfurl at the sound. “They should. I’m their queen.”
I start to laugh too, but then I see her face. Dead serious.
“The throne’s been empty for —”
“Two hundred and forty-three years,” she finishes. “I know. I’ve been looking for it that long. Funny how you can miss something for centuries just because you’re searching too far away.” She sets down her basket and walks to the throne. “My name is Sophia Amaranth Rose, and I’m the last of the Rose Line. We tend to get a bit lost between lifetimes.”
The roses burst into full bloom as she sits down, and suddenly the maintenance budget seems like the least of my concerns.
Image made with Midjourney.
Prompt provided by NoGENver, GoOnWrite.
Flash Fiction written by S. J. Pajonas with assistance from Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
You can listen to this story on YouTube at https://youtu.be/7LTD29c7pEw
