He dreamed of a woman made of moonlight and mortal skin.
A queen destined to rule beside him in the fortress he called home.
To others, it was only a house carved of stone and shadow. To him it was a castle built for love eternal and a place where his .
Her pulse raced as she read his words glowing on her screen. “It’s so romantic! I’m crying!?” she gasped, tears streaking her cheeks like silver thread. With trembling hands, she typed, “Are you for real?”
“I am,” came the answer, simple and absolute.
Her next message struck like a vow: “To be loved so completely and cherished so amazingly is a dream all girls want. You are incredible—your words are like silk.”
What began as pixels and poetry became a storm of longing. Across hundreds of miles, they clung to a single thread of faith until distance itself broke beneath the weight of desire. Standing in a lonely parking lot, he whispered into his phone a goodbye through tears. She stood behind her office building, doing the same. Then came her final text, “I can’t let it end this way! I’m coming to see you.”
He laughed and wept at once, joy and sorrow twined like a curse and a blessing.
Two days later, she stood beneath the stone staircase of his castle. When their eyes met, the world stilled. The kiss that followed was slow, certain, and ruinous. Together they crossed the threshold, losing themselves to passion heavy as prayer. He carried her through dim corridors to chambers crowned by a tower; her hair smelled of sunlight, her skin glowed like rare silk on fire. Beneath his hands she trembled; half goddess, half storm.
Later, while she lay sleeping, he sat beside her in silence. She looked like peace dressed in mortal form, too beautiful to last. Treasure this, he thought, for she leaves tomorrow. And though she promised to return, his heart already knew how dreams dissolve with the dawn.
But return she did. Days blurred into months of laughter, of whispered secrets in candlelight. He met her family, walked in the bubble of her world as she once walked his. He told her he loved her; she said nothing. Still haunted by the ghost of an old wound. Yet her presence painted life back into the castle’s cold walls.
On New Year’s night, the massive city glittered beneath them like a reflection of heaven.
“So shall we have our talk?” he asked softly.
“What talk?” she answered, feigning ignorance.
“The talk about how we’ll make this work.”
“I’m fine with things like they are. I see us married in a year or two.”
He smiled and believed her.
Then, without warning, her warmth faded.
“I’m not ready for a relationship,” she said one evening, her voice stripped of the soul he’d come to know.
He dropped to his knees in the dining hall; his cathedral of emptiness crying out, “Why!?” But no answer came. Only silence thick as fog, and the sound of her absence echoing through the stone chambers where she’d once breathed his name.
Now each night he stands again beneath the stair where she first appeared, watching the horizon bleed into dusk. Was she ever real, or only a specter drawn to play his muse until love demanded truth? Perhaps she was no queen at all, but an actress reciting lines from a script he wrote in innocence.
Still he waits; not for her return but this time for the one who will not fear the crown.
The woman bold and fierce enough to walk through the castle gates and write the next chapter with her own hand.