Two weeks ago for Writing Wednesday I wrote about my run away idea, the story that became “The Princess Behind the Thorns.”  I didn’t manage to finish the story in a single day, considering it stretched to 9,000 words, so I finished it on the second day.  I don’t think I knew quite how it was going to turn out until I got there–although to be honest, with a story written that fast, it’s hard to remember the order different ideas arrived in!

For the eighth day and seventh story of my flash fiction writing challenge, here’s another excerpt from “The Princess Behind the Thorns.”  This excerpt is quite near the end, after a prince has come to rescue Rose, but that didn’t go as expected either…

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            Rose sat up, looking out through the gaps in the bower’s woven walls.  There was blackness all around them.

“I think the spell’s breaking down,” Terrence said, sitting up too, staring at the shadows around them.  “That’s the only explanation, it’s been too much time and the magic is coming apart.”

            “But we don’t know how to break the spell—to lift it,” she said, voice shaking.  “And we’re trapped here.”

“There was nothing, when they cast the spell—you didn’t know anything about how it was supposed to end?”

“Someone strong enough to get through the challenge and wake me up,” she recited.  “That was what they kept saying.  But it twisted, it changed.  The spell was never supposed to look this way, and it didn’t lift when you came through the thorns.”

“It has to be something to do with you.  You’re at the center of this.  The spell changed for you, the way to lift it must—”

“I don’t know!  No one told me anything.  They never told me anything, they never believed I could even think or feel or care about anything.  I never mattered except for my bloodline, I never had any choices, I was never allowed to want anything, in my entire life!”

She was shouting over the noise of the thorns now, and they were still getting louder.  Louder and louder and she didn’t think she could shout loud enough now to even be heard.  And the shadows were coming.  They were spilling through the branches around her bower, swallowing up the walls, swallowing up her bookcase, her bed.