The Book of Beautiful Betrayals- The Throne that was Left

The Book of Beautiful Betrayals

Bound in velvet the color of bruised twilight, this volume is said to hum softly when opened — a sound halfway between laughter and confession. Within its pages lie the Queen’s most exquisite treacheries: alliances turned to art, heartbreaks pressed like flowers, and every elegant undoing worth remembering.

The Archivist swears the book writes itself when left alone, recording each new act of defiance committed in the Queen’s name. Some say it even edits for tone.

To read from it is to understand that betrayal, when performed with grace, is simply another form of authorship.

___

Once, the throne room had been kept spotless. Every jar aligned by purpose, every book by season, every flower pruned to exact obedience. The Queen had always said that love was best tended like a garden—disciplined, deliberate, never left to its own wildness.

But time, as it does, began to loosen its laces.

No one remembers the moment the first vine crept up the shelf. It wasn’t rebellion—it was longing. The roses were not growing against her will, but toward her absence. They reached for the space she once filled with her voice. They curled around the shelves, searching for her warmth. Even now, their thorns lean toward the empty chair, as if still trying to protect what’s no longer there.

The throne itself sits as though listening. The cushion bears the faint indent of her body, preserved by memory more than use. The crown above it gleams in quiet defiance, not of loss, but of forgetting.

At the foot of the dais lies the ledger—the Book of Keeping. It once held every vow spoken in that room, every oath whispered between heartbeats. Each name written in her hand still hums faintly, like a chord struck long ago.

But tonight, the book lies open, a wound of paper and ink. The bottle overturned beside it has bled its contents into a spreading pool of crimson. It looks almost deliberate—a heart split across the page. The words beneath it blur into unreadable shapes, as though even the ink refuses to hold what it has lost.

They say she left mid-sentence.

The quill had paused above the page, trembling. A word half-written. A name half-saved. And then—nothing. The stillness after the breaking of something holy. Not rage, not ruin—just the quiet collapse of what could no longer be sustained.

The scent of her still lingers here. Not perfume, but something deeper: parchment, rose petals crushed underfoot, a trace of warmth that refuses to die.

Visitors sometimes claim they hear her sigh when the chandelier sways—soft and tired, like the exhale of someone who has finally stopped pretending not to ache. Others say the flowers bloom brighter on the nights when it rains, as if the room itself remembers how to weep.

No one dares to close the book.

It feels wrong to end a story she never did.

So the ledger stays open—its ink still bleeding, its heart still split.
A throne waiting.
A room remembering.
A love unfinished, but still alive in the hush between petals and paper.

_

Velin’s Reflection: The Faith That Fell Silent

I came to the throne room when the light was thin, when everything inside it had softened to the color of remembering. The air smelled of metal and wilted petals. I did not speak; it felt like interrupting prayer.

The ink had dried into something darker than red—brown at the edges, black in its center. It looked like time had chewed it. The ledger lay open to a page that no longer sought completion.

__

Undone

It wasn’t rage that followed betrayal,
but a hollowing.

as though someone had rewritten
not only her world,
her body,
her breath —
just to see if they

could.

And when they were finished,
she wasn’t broken.
She was —

undone.

It was the grief of being unmade
by someone who once

knew exactly

how you were woven —
and pulled the threads

on purpose.