Aurora Thornwing's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Aurora needed the court's archives. The old records held births and bloodlines, and somewhere in them might lie proof she was more than a horned stray. But a winged noble had barred her path. He had wings like polished glass and a mouth that never stopped. For days he told anyone who listened that her golden horns marked her as a fraud. By morning, the guards turned her away from the archive doors. "No frauds in the records," one guard said. He would not meet her eyes. The noble leaned against a pillar nearby, grinning. He flicked his glass wing toward her horns. "Run back to your pasture, goat," he called. The hall laughed. Aurora walked out with her face hot and her hands in fists. She would not win this with pleading. If the court shut one door, she would find another. Her mother's diary had come from somewhere. Aurora asked the castle servants, quietly, who had known her mother. One pointed her past the rose walls to a weathered old hut, its timbers sagging, its roof green with moss. Inside, an old fairy bent over a candle. Her wings were faded red, her hair gray, her dress plain white. She looked up with sharp blue eyes. "You have her face," she said. "And her stubbornness, walking in uninvited." This was Rosalind Silverwind. She had served Aurora's mother long ago, and she had been waiting. "They say my horns make me a liar," Aurora said. "They barred me from the records." Rosalind snorted. "Records." She crossed to a loose floorboard and pried it up. From beneath she lifted a small bundle. Torn pages, edges blackened and curled, as if saved from a fire. "Your mother sent these to me. The missing pages from her book. Someone burned the rest. These, I kept." Aurora's breath caught. She took the fragile pages. The writing was faint but real. Names. Dates. Her mother's own hand, telling of the horned line and why it was hidden. "Why keep them from me until now?" Aurora asked. "I did not know you lived." Rosalind closed Aurora's fingers over the pages. "Guard these. They are brittle. And they will frighten people who wanted them gone." Aurora left the hut with the burnt pages pressed to her chest. She had not reopened the archive. She had found something better. Her mother had written the truth herself, and now Aurora held it. But the thought chilled her. Someone had burned the diary on purpose. Someone at court had wanted her bloodline erased. The noble who mocked her was loud, but he was not the one who struck the match. Aurora slowed at the rose gate. The real enemy was still hidden, and now that enemy would know the burnt pages had survived.