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She sat on the stone bench, twirling the rose between her slim fingers. The stem had been stripped of thorns, only bumps revealing their previous presence. The girl sighed. “Such destruction of a beautiful thing,” she murmured.

It was nearly midnight. She sat in a secluded nook of the garden placed at the center of the Maze. Moonlight filtered down through the vines crisscrossing the hedges, helping any merry wanderers toward the middle. “The center,” she mused aloud, “is the solution to all things.”

Everything in that small, secluded garden shimmered with a silvery phosphorescence--from the curved stone bench to the iris flowers, their purple paled to a misty lavender in the moonlight. Even the rose she held glimmered slightly. Its petals were red, and to her they appeared to glow from somewhere deep inside, somewhere she could not reach.

The moon had almost reached the zenith of the sky. Its cheerful crescent shone down with as much light as a full moon could offer. The girl looked up, her eyes closing quickly, as tears slipped down her face, mirroring the stars laid across the sky.

“I suppose this means he won't be here. I suppose this means I shall never see him again,” she whispered, looking down at the rose. Her tears were gone, and would not return. An owl hooted solemnly from a nearby hedge.

“I suppose this means that all was for naught. I suppose this means I was wrong.” Her voice broke. “I suppose this means he held no love for me after all.”

“You suppose too much, fair one,” a voice said softly.

The girl jumped up, dropping the rose at her feet, as her gaze swung rapidly about the small garden and, finally, to the opening in the hedge. She sank back onto the bench without a sound.

The man leaning across the door in the hedge took a step forward. He straightened to reveal a considerable height. “What, no words in reply?” he asked gently.

The girl took a breath calmly, and replied flatly, pretending to look at her feet, “You had better leave me be, whoever you are.” She said no more. No more needed to be said.

The man's face showed no emotion, but was at the same time neither cruel nor emotionless. If anything, it appeared rather bland. The mark of a professional guard. She noted this through the shielding curtain of her hair. Whoever this stranger is, she thought, he has heard far too much if he knows who I am.

All the sadness in her eyes disappeared as she dispassionately considered the situation. The man did not move forward, but did not retreat. If he knew her and her purpose here tonight…. She had no means of escape except over the hedges into the Maze. She hoped it would not come to that. Her dress tonight was rather decorative, and completely unsuited for scrambling over prickly hedgerows.

“How do you know I am not the one you seek?” the man continued quietly.

The girl looked harshly at him. “You mock me,” she said stiffly. “If you intend to arrest me and drag me before His Highness for justice, then do so. Otherwise, leave this garden and cease to belabor me with your presence.” She continued to stare into his face. There was something oddly familiar about it…something she felt she should remember.

Those eyes…the grey of a sky before dawn—all the colors just out of sight—reminded her of his eyes. “Who…who are you?” she asked, her voice trembling minutely as she rose to her feet.

He stepped forward, and in those few paces, his height seemed to shrink considerably and his face…changed somehow. It became less remote. It became the face of the one she loved more than life itself.

He would always remember that moment, standing in the moonlight. She held her head up proudly on her slender neck. The lights of the night dappled her white dress with shadows and folds, falling gracefully to the silver ground. The irises around them shimmered with some inner joy that was reflected on her face.

She did not question his unexpected choice of appearance; she did not demand any explanation. She stood in the moonlit garden, looking beautiful, and gazing at his now-familiar face with a hungry tenderness.

He would always remember that moment, when her face was surrounded by a fiery halo, her body luminous and moonlit, and the rose she held, the broken rose she had retrieved from the ground, blazed whole in her hand.