A Ruin Of Roses Novels & Stories

It was calm and steady. "Sarah," I choked out. "Can I... can I talk to you for a moment?" She looked at my walker and then back at my face. There was no judgment in her gaze. "Come in. You shouldn't be standing out here. It is hard for you to walk." She stepped aside and let me in. The house smelled like lavender and old books. It was clean but it felt empty. There were no photos of Mark on the walls anymore. Just empty spaces where frames used to hang.

the voice said. Then the image — Violet had blond hair now, cropped and precise; the red suit she wore cut into her as if the fabric were armor. Her eyes were thin knives. The girl who once laughed at small things and hid scars under loose sleeves was gone in the way that rain removes dust, she had been cleansed into a different weather.

Suddenly, the smoke shifts, and I see the glass greenhouse at the edge of the cliff. But it isn't beautiful anymore. The thousands of white roses on the floor are dead, turned into black ash. The thousands of candles have melted into pools of liquid wax that look like tears. And standing right in the center of the ruins, under the broken crystal chandelier, is Rosalina.

At the end of the hall, a door sat slightly ajar. I pushed it open… and froze. The room was filled with portraits of me. Me dancing on stage. Me reading quietly in the library. Me sitting alone on a park bench, lost in thought. Every angle of me, every moment… Jordan had captured in painstaking detail. I stepped closer to one painting. That was seventeen-year-old me in mid-dance, skirt flying, laughter radiant. In the corner, there was a line of tiny words that read: My rose has finally come to me.

I used to think strength meant standing tall no matter what, but now I know it’s about learning to stand again after you’ve fallen, even when you don’t want to. People see you smile and assume you’ve healed. They don’t see the weight you carry in silence — the ghosts you tuck behind every laugh, the memories that never fade no matter how many years pass. Twenty-six years since the night that stole everything from me, and I can still hear it sometimes — the shattering glass, the screams, the gunshots. I can still smell the gunpowder in the air.There are things you don’t ever forget. You just learn to live around them.

They want to dismantle the hierarchy of the entire wolf kind. "Who’s your contact?" I demand, stepping back. "How are you moving across borders unseen? Who’s feeding you intel?" He grins up at me, his teeth stained red. "The Rose." My heart hammers against my ribs. "What did you say?" "The Rose," he whispers, a look of reverence crossing his twisted face. "She blooms in the dark. She carries the scent of the garden and the poison of the grave. She opened the door for us." Wild roses.

"Where are her things? Why is everything gone?" The poor maid trembled under the weight of an Alpha's fury. "Madam destroyed them all," she stammered. "Even the rose garden in the backyard… she burned it." My pupils constricted to slits. I dropped the maid's arm and vanished in a blink, reappearing in the backyard. And there it was. Charred earth. Blackened stems. Not a single rose left alive. I stood frozen, staring at the remains. I had planted those roses myself, the day we became mates. My vow had been simple, spoken with her hand in mine. "My love for you will bloom like these roses—fierce, and forever burning."

***** Roen's Palace: Queen Rosa stood up from the ground and went over to her flowers, picking a blue rose. She held it in the air and started whispering some strange words and the rose left her hands and started floating in the air, spinning around in the air. The rose petals started removing by itself and began forming circle. It started growing bigger and bigger until it was like the size of a portal.

Arianna said, her green eyes glistening. Willow reached for her hand and she quickly pulled it away to dab at her cheeks. Embarrassed, he laughed sheepishly, "Yeah, sad for the roses. They also perished, now we can't see them" "The ruins...are they still there?" Arianna asked, without smiling. To her, the story was indeed a sad one.

~YULIA It was a destroyed village, ruined from the foundation to the top. I had never seen destruction on this level before. As I walked into the ruins, I could hear voices whispering. I had read somewhere that the troubled dead would whisper in the ruins of the clan, that was why its location was kept a secret. But now that I heard it, was creepy and I wanted to bolt. But Yara silently assured me it was fine. I came across black roses, growing in the wild and native to the clan. But they had withered and dried up, barely recognizable. A painful image of the rose beside my dead mother flashed in my head and I walked past it.