Fictober 2022 | Day 14 | Deep Water Prompt #2808

Photo by Nikita Tikhomirov on Unsplash

❝There is something in her chest cavity, pulsing, glowing through her skin. It moves like a frightened animal. It is definitely not her heart. ❞

Her heart is in her hands, porcelain and perfect and utterly still, just as it should be.

Alyss is quietly pleased. She had no idea if the spell would work for herself; the old queen only ever cast it on other people, to own their hearts and command them as she would, a punishment and a service all at once.

There’d been a chance this spell would’ve killed her, but Alyss was--had been—destined to die anyway, so what did she care about the risk?

But she’s not dead after all. She’s holding her own heart, and she’s breathing and living and thinking, no empty shell like the Queen’s Cards. And now she’s unkillable.

Unless, of course, someone gets a hold of her heart. But they won’t. She’ll bury it, out in the garden of poisonous blood red roses, right in the (hah!) heart of the maze where nobody will go and where no one will find it. She’ll bury it in soil and spells and a chest, and she’ll live forever.

Alyss is the author of her own fate, and nobody else is.

The thing in her chest flutters and shifts where her heart used to be, settling into its space. Alyss wonders if it’s her soul. If, without the burden, the foible, of her heart, she can feel it now. She wonders if it’s at all affected by what she’s done.

She decides she doesn’t care if it is, nor how.

Fictober is a challenge where writers respond to a prompt a day for the whole of October.
This year's prompts are from Deep Water Prompts on tumblr.

This prompt fill is also a glimpse into the backstory of one of my characters in Oracle.