All you simply wished for was to be left alone? Did you fly somewhere out there, etiolated in the pale sunshine like a wash of milky white skin, pastures of open green dancing in your eyes?

She held the flowers like the castle in the distance, cupping the gray stones in her hands, fingers curved but never touching its hardness.

He gave her a look of resignation, he who was so unreal, he who would be lost as the slumber became undone. “You do not belong here.”

She could drink of the sky. Tilt her head back as sun poured down her body, lining the blizzard-wept peach with gold, spilling down her nightgown in an sea of estival vows, lips parted, birds singing… And taste an ocean that made the Atlantic grow faint, an ever changing blue curling at the bottom of her lungs. Not here… the words flow, grass waving in the direction of her stone bedroom, a place where no amount of lavish fabric could hide the condensation growing on the walls, a prince awaiting the sacredness of her kiss.

Her eyes were dry, fingers wilting from the gloom of the stone kingdom, the bitterness of reality staining her dreamland. “… A few more moments?”

A certain warmth cut across her cheek when his digits made contact, weaving down her features like a needle and thread, not mystical, unwavering, too sure of themselves, bedecked in prosperous lineage and smitten intent; too warm, too cold, and too real.

---

Like daylight he crept into the room, footsteps of solid perfection, of noblesse. The Prince saw her lying there, flaxen hair splayed around her pillow like snow spilling over a welcome banner, and perhaps he had overstayed his, lost in the delicate lines of her sleeping features, rose petals of flesh delicately sewn together with magical threads of silk.

He saw hope, perfection, and even diamonds glittering in the corners of her eyes as his fingers brushed her cheek bones… And he was saturated by their warmth, by the tiny, liquid tokens of her dying dreamscape sliding down his hand.

He did not know that the oxygen singing through her ribcage was sunshine.

---

“Farewell,” He bade, and he was made of celestial enchantments, even his smile a glittering star, body built of mild blues, pinks, and cream.

The grass swam around her ankles in a final adieu, rustling the sunshine, guiding her head to turn toward his, champagne hair a pother of light. “Our moments have ended?”

Coldness on her lips; - A frore that was all too actual, far too dark for this aureate, summer fantasy.

---

Her eyes slip open, greener than moss, unable to grow within the gloomy boudoir, starved for the light of another world. The snowflakes of a kiss freeze her lips closed, even as he speaks. Even as his words slice declaratively over this world, inaudibly falling through her own.

“My prince has come,” she laughs, the first time in a century, finger still aching from the spindle, the sunlight gone from her voice.

Fairytales bury his face in a grin as he leans to kiss her, recanting, “A curse that has withstood the century, finally lifted…” only to feel oxygen filling the crease of his words, not the softness of the maiden he had pursued. No longer on the bed – but rather crossing to the window, arms braced on its frame as if posing for an empyreal artist, waves crashing along the shores after a long repose, too long a wait for even the trembling azure.

“A century means nothing; so long are they that they will always be remembered.” Quieter now, whispering, the voice a reflection of what it once was, a shimmer of moonlight rather than sun; the plainer of the two sisters. “It is the moments that are mine.”