The Girl with No Shadow

In a land far, far away where rivers shimmered like silver, their banks teeming with silver-finned fish leaping into the air, and kings possessed riches beyond measure, a child was born beneath a blood-red moon. Her skin reflected the pallor of wax, her eyes gleamed dark as soot, and her back betrayed not the smallest shadow.

The midwives gasped. The priest refused to bless her. The queen, her mother, wept without knowing why.

They named her Aelira, which meant “little light,” though she cast none.

Scholars whispered that a child without a shadow heralded an omen, a sign of hollowness. People said the gods forsook her before her first breath.

But the king refused to kill his only daughter.

So, instead, he hid her away, a choice that set the course for everything to follow.

He locked her in the highest room of the ash-towered keep. There were no mirrors, no visitors, and her name was never spoken in court. When she disappeared, there was no grave.

For the kingdom, it was as if she had never lived at all, her presence forgotten even as she endured above.

Yet Aelira did not cry.

She listened.

As the days grew into years, she learned the quiet language of rats and the sounds of the stone walls. She listened to the guards whispering outside her door, and she watched the moon change through the slit in her tower wall, counting the days by tying knots in her hair ribbons. Sometimes, she recalled the whiskers of a rat brushing against her ankle—the only tangible company in her isolation. The chill of the stone floor seeped through her skin, amplifying the solitude that wrapped around her like a second skin.

And so she waited—for something she could not yet name.

She did not wait for rescue.

Instead, she waited for a reason.

When she was seven years old, and the years of solitude grew heavier, she asked the nursemaid why she cast no shadow.

The old woman turned white and left a bowl of broth on the floor without answering.

Ten years passed after her first question was ignored—then, on a lonely midnight, she asked the stars.

That night, they told her that her shadow had been taken, swallowed, and traded away by someone else's blood. She was twelve, and after that night, she stopped asking.

And when another year slipped by, now thirteen, she began calling.

The first thing she lured from the cracks was a spider the size of the palm of her hand—a small response to a long silence.

She named it. Next came the creatures that lived beneath the keep: blind, slick beings with many eyes and bones that clicked as they breathed.

She fed them her blood, her laughter, and a song her mother used to sing while brushing her hair.

They gave her stories in return. And promises.

And names.

On her thirteenth birthday, after years in the tower, Aelira stood before the stone wall and spoke the oldest of those names. At that moment, the air thickened around her. The name was a bridge, tenuous and shimmering, between the world she knew and one veiled in shadows. She hesitated, aware that this moment could cost her not just her innocence, but perhaps her very soul. The mortar shivered, the tower cracked, and a silence fell so profound it seemed to echo within her mind. Her shadow, forgotten for so long, returned to her, not as it once was, but transformed. Where once it mirrored her absence, now it stood as a testament to her found identity, embodying the courage and essence she had reclaimed. It no longer followed but walked ahead of her, as if to lead the way into her renewed self. A mirror, and not.

It was changed.

Her shadow now led her—upright and apart.

A mirror and not.

The shadow bowed.

At this, Aelira smiled.

Far below, meanwhile, the king sat in his golden hall, surrounded by flattery and power, unaware that the daughter he had hidden had found something stronger than magic.

Memory.

She did not ride down from the tower with an army, as stories sometimes begin with such endings, but something quieter marked her descent.

Instead, she walked.

Alone.

And everything bowed to her, because everything born from silence keeps its own memories.

In a land far, far away, a princess was buried.

And in her place, a queen began to grow.

But not the kind with pearls in her hair.

No, Aelira would wear a crown of bone.

And bone remembers.

The wind shrieked across the battlements as Aelira stepped down from the ash tower for the first time in thirteen years.

Her feet, long unshod, did not bleed.

The stones remembered her.

The halls below, once filled with harp music and sweet perfume, now smelled of rot and polished iron. Servants hurried through narrow passages, not recognizing the girl who moved among them like the coming of night.

They didn’t see her — not truly.

That was the first gift of being forgotten.

The second was this: she saw everything.

She passed through the palace like a shadow. Her own shadow walked next to her—or ahead, elegant and wrong, never mimicking her.

Sometimes, it looked ahead.

Sometimes, it looked behind.

She never questioned it.

In the royal hall, the king slouched on a marble throne carved with dragons. He was older now, hair gone to silver, but his eyes still gleamed with the cruelty of power.

Around him stood flatterers, generals, and half-drunk nobles. They had shaped the kingdom’s story for years, covering it with war and wine, while truths like Aelira were locked away.

She stood at the back of the chamber and listened to them speak of wins, festivals, and taxes.

No one noticed her.

Until the hearth waned.

It began slowly.

Candles sputtered.

The hearthfire guttered low.

The golden tapestries faded into gray.

And one by one, voices fell silent as the shadow that walked beside Aelira moved ahead and stood in the center of the court.

It did not speak.

It simply turned.

And everyone saw.

The king rose from his throne. “Who—?”

He stopped.

His eyes widened.

Recognition flickered in his eyes. The kind you hide deep, like a seed in cold ground, hoping it never grows.

“You’re dead,” he spoke quietly.

Aelira moved ahead. Her voice was soft, but the room bent toward it.

“No. I was buried.”

She walked past the nobles. None moved.

Her presence made them remember things they didn’t know they had forgotten: a silent nursery, a name removed from records, a cold feeling near the tower stairs.

“You gave me away before I had breath,” she said, her voice trembling slightly as she met his gaze. For the first time, a flicker of sorrow and anger danced in her eyes, betraying the steel mask she wore. Her fingers clenched, a heartbeat of hesitation as she bared a piece of her past. “All because I had no shadow.”

The king's face distorted. “You were cursed.”

“No,” she said, standing before the throne now. “I was empty. You worried about what might fill me.”

“And what has?”

She smiled.

“Everything you denied.”

The shadow turned toward him. It had grown taller, its crown rising above even the throne.

The king backed away.

“Guards!”

None came.

No one could move.

Aelira reached out — not to touch him, but to gesture past him.

At the tapestry on the wall.

The great woven one. A depiction of the kingdom’s founding: white towers, golden banners, heroes with clean swords, and smiling queens.

She snapped her fingers. The cloth unraveled silently, stitch by stitch, until nothing was left but black thread and dust.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “you wrote a story without me.”

The king trembled.

“I am here to write the ending.”

She did not kill him.

She did not have to.

He fell to his knees, crown falling from his head, his own shadow clawing away from his heels like it no longer belonged to him.

Aelira turned.

The court did not bow.

They knelt.

Every single one.

Now they saw the truth: not just the girl, but the emptiness she had mastered, and what filled the space where a fairy tale once was.

They did not crown Aelira.

She did not ask.

The throne room emptied. The king’s followers vanished like snow in warm wind. Some ran away, some hid in their homes, and some simply forgot how to move when she looked at them.

But she stayed.

The ash-towered keep was hers now. The rooms within whispered differently with her footfall. The dust stirred to greet her. The mirrors fogged in reverence.

And the throne, carved with dragons and polished by generations of obedience, cracked under her weight.

She did not repair it.

She rebuilt it.

From bone.

Not the bones of enemies or kings.

But the bones came from old stories: women burned to ashes, children lost in the woods, names never sung in songs. She called them back, piece by piece, and built their truths where lies once stood.

Her throne grew taller than the old king’s.

And her court?

Her court was quiet.

She outlawed mirrors first.

Then bells.

She did this not to punish, but to protect.

“Blessed” was the word they used to describe the princess who replaced her, years ago, born with curls of gold and two shadows instead of one. The perfect heir.

The girl had smiled in portraits.

Said nothing when Aelira vanished.

No one knew where she’d gone after the coronation feast. No one asked.

Aelira had made sure of it.

The only part of that girl that remained was a single pearl sewn into Aelira’s glove. It pressed against her palm when she made a fist, a memory that was cold and small.

The people did not revolt.

They remembered the red moon.

They remembered the tower.

They remembered the stories whispered by candlelight about the girl with no shadow, who listened too closely and never cried.

Now she walked their streets in bone-threaded robes, speaking to no one.

And yet everyone heard her.

In the third month of her reign, after the old king's fall and the court's surrender, the earth cracked beneath the cathedral.

The high priest claimed it was an omen.

He was correct.

Aelira visited him at dusk. She asked if he remembered her mother, the queen who had wept the day Aelira was born.

He said no.

She laid her hand on his brow.

And then he did.

He remembered the scream her mother made when she learned her daughter had been taken. He remembered the bruises. The silence.

He remembered the sound of a name being erased from every book in the library.

And then he fell to his knees and wept until his robes soaked through.

Aelira did not punish him.

She kissed his cheek.

And left him with his memory.

The land changed under her rule.

Wolves came down from the mountains and did not attack.

Black blossoms opened in the frost.

The moon grew larger in the sky and stayed that way.

They said she spoke softly to the trees, and they answered in roots.

They said she walked with her shadow behind her in daylight and ahead of her in the dark.

They said she no longer slept.

And that in her time awake hours, she spoke to the dead — not to ask questions, but to offer them names again.

The peasants began to bring her offerings.

Not gold.

Names.

Scratched upon bark. Sewn into ribbons. Burned into wax. Names no one had spoken in generations. Names once erased from tombstones, songs, and births.

Aelira took them all.

She stitched them into her cloak.

And the cloak grew heavier.

But she never stumbled.

Once, a little girl with a crooked tooth asked her why she always wore white.

Aelira lowered herself beside her.

“To remind them I’m not the villain,” she said.

The girl blinked. “Aren’t you?”

Aelira smiled.

“Only in stories that end too early.”

Many moons went by—not gently.

Not gently.

The land changed under Aelira’s rule, like grass bending under frost—not broken, but different. Children were born under moons too bright to ignore. Old songs lost their endings, and new ones had no beginning.

And still, no one called her cruel.

They called her inevitable.

The visitor came at the turn of the tenth winter. He arrived alone, wrapped in a mantle of fox fur, his boots clean of snow in spite of the storm. As he passed through the gate, a faint scar glimmered under his left eye, barely visible beneath the hood he wore. His gaze lingered on the castle's old stone walls, as if seeing an old memory. He walked through the kingdom gates without being stopped, without being announced, without being afraid.

Aelira felt him before she saw him.

He stood close to the foot of her throne of bone, head bowed, shadow obedient at his heels.

“I’ve come to end your reign,” he said calmly.

Her court did not stir.

Her shadow leaned forward, interested.

Aelira regarded him with eyes that had outlived fairy tales. “You are late.”

“I had to be,” he replied. “The story needed time to rot.”

She laughed, her voice sounding like ice breaking in slow water. “And what role do you believe you play?”

“The hero,” he said.

She tilted her head. “Then you’ve already misunderstood.”

He spoke of prophecy.

Of balance.

Of how the land was growing strange — how the dead did not rest, how children dreamed of bones and doors and silhouettes that walked ahead of them.

He spoke of light.

Of restoration.

Of happily ever after.

Aelira listened without interruption.

When he finished, she rose.

The throne groaned behind her, not in protest but in recognition.

“Once upon a time,” she whispered gently, “that ending belonged to people like you.”

She stepped down the steps, bone clicking lightly beneath her bare feet.

“Once upon a time,” she continued, “I was told my story would never be told at all.”

She stopped an arm’s length from him.

“You want to fix the world,” she said. “But the world was never broken. It was edited.”

The hero frowned. “You’ve twisted it.”

“No,” she replied. “I’ve returned the missing pages.”

She reached out and touched his chest.

Not with magic.

With memory.

He gasped — staHe gasped and staggered as visions filled his mind: towers sealed, children silenced, names erased for convenience. He saw the fairy tales rewritten until only the winners remained.

“This isn’t right,” he spoke in a low voice. “This isn’t how stories end.”

Aelira crouched before him.

“No,” she agreed. “This is how they begin.”

She bent near and whispered something into his ear — a name.

His own.

Not the one he used.

The one he’d buried.

His shadow screamed. A sudden rush of cold enveloped the air, as if the unearthing of the name stirred forgotten winds. The scent of soil filled the space, carrying the weight of the past sacrifices, crawling up from the bones of the earth. And ripped itself free.

When the storm cleared, there was no hero.

Only a cloak of fox fur was stacked carefully at the base of the throne.

Aelira returned to her seat.

Her shadow stood next to her now — whole.

In a land far, far away, the fairy tale did not end.

There was no wedding.

No golden crown.

No song that softened the truth.

Instead, there was a queen who remembered everything and made the world remember, too.

And those who came seeking an ending learned the same lesson, again and again:

Not all stories are meant to be saved. Some are meant to be finished properly. But in the distance, a forgotten lullaby lingers, its melody weaving through the cold night air, stirring memories that refuse to fade.