They said Isolde was carved from candle wax and winter mist. Too beautiful to be real, too cold to hold. But when she smiled at you, it was like drinking from a goblet of starlight, heady and irreversible.

She lived in the manor on the cliff’s edge, where the sea roared at night like a wounded beast. Men came and went. Poets, priests, even a duke once. None stayed. Some left with scratches down their backs and shame in their throats. Others were never seen again, their boots found by the cliffside, the leather soaked in sea salt and perfume.

Then came Edwin.

Edwin, with his ink-stained hands and stammered compliments, who brought her a crown of woven briars and called her queen of my ruin. He read her poems by candlelight, kissed the dust off her books, and never once asked about the locked room at the end of the hall.

Isolde bloomed under him. Or so it seemed.

Until she caught him looking—just once—at the baker’s daughter through the rain-streaked glass. The next day, the baker’s daughter stopped smiling. By week’s end, she stopped breathing.

Edwin never suspected. Not until he found the briar crown outside the girl’s door, stained red with something that wasn’t wine.

Isolde wept, of course. Said grief made her strange. Said she needed him now more than ever. He kissed her on the mouth and tasted iron.

That night, he unlocked the room.

Inside: a gallery of past lovers, painted in lifeless wax, each posed in adoration. A shrine to jealousy dressed in velvet and bone.

And in the center, a mirror where his own reflection slowly vanished.

They say she wears his briar crown now, and speaks his name only when the moon is waning and the sea gnaws hungrily at the shore.

No one visits the manor anymore.

But sometimes, on wind-heavy nights, the baker’s daughter can be heard in the fields, humming a lullaby no one taught her, and twisting thorns into her hair.

The End