The Jilted Bride!

🕊️ The Courtship of Morylda

Morylda met him - Chalen - in the greenhouse of her aunt’s estate, where she’d gone to escape the suffocating expectations of her lineage. He was not a gardener, though he wore the green apron like one. He was a composer, moonlighting among orchids to pay for studio time. His hands smelled of soil and sandalwood, and when he spoke, his voice had the cadence of an unsung lullaby.

They fell in love the first time their eyes met, like two mirrors facing each other - reflecting, multiplying, vanishing into infinity.

The two taught each other how to listen to silence. How to speak without words, finding joy in metaphors of the heart.

They danced in the empty ballroom of her fairytale mansion, bought by her parents years ago in hopes of grandchildren romping in the hallways. But Morylda and Chalen pretended it was full of ghosts who applauded their every step.

They wrote letters to each other even though they lived not far from each other, hiding them in books and teacups.

Her family approved, cautiously. He was not from money, but he had the kind of charm that made even the chandeliers blush and lean in.

They agreed to marry a short year later. The wedding was planned with operatic grandeur. The great hall was draped in wisteria and many-colored floral bliss. A string quartet rehearsed for weeks. Her dress was custom made, embedded with tiny pearls, each one a promise of a forever happiness.

Everything was perfect. Many friends and relatives had come to the wedding..an elaborate affair in the great hall.

She had waited and waited...

But he never came.

🌪️

The great hall, once an anticipation of celebration, had become a symbol of dark embarrassment, a mausoleum of dashed expectations. The guests - draped in silk and sequins - stood in clusters, whispering behind gloved hands. The quartet had stopped playing. The cake, untouched, appeared to sag under its own weight.

Morylda appeared at the top of the grand staircase like a storm cloud in lace.

Her veil had slipped. Her bouquet had been crushed in her grip. Her eyes, once full of stars, now burned with salt.

She didn’t cry. She roared.

“Leave! All of you! This is not a wedding - it’s a wake!”

The guests froze. Some tried to console. Others simply nodded, their pity curdling into shame. One by one, they left - heels clicking like guilty metronomes, laughter replaced by silence.

The mansion exhaled.

Morylda wandered back to the bridal suite, her gown trailing like a lost and wounded animal. She locked the door. She didn’t speak for three days. She refused to leave the room...refused to eat, refused her parents and siblings, friends...everything and everyone...she was done with the world.

🌑The Silence That Followed

Ten years passed. The mansion remained, but the laughter it had been built for never arrived. Morylda stopped hosting. She stopped composing. She started collecting silence like others collect stamps.

But she never again left. She walked around wearing the wedding dress, even when it turned to tattered shreds.

Never again did she enter the bridal suite. It remained her greatest failure, the stealer of her happiness. A room that held all of her secret shame and a loss that time would not heal.

She turned the great hall into a gallery of unanswered questions. Each room became a shrine to a different version of herself:

The Library of What-Ifs, where books lay on shelves, unread - covered in dust and cobweb.

The Conservatory of Ghost Dances - where she danced with an imaginary partner, laughing amidst tears of sadness. The townspeople shaking their heads as they passed by.

"Poor Morylda, dancing with the ghost of time". They would say, as naughty, curious children threw pebbles at her window

She wrote Unsent Letters, scattered everywhere within the untended mansion.

She spoke to mirrors. She drew Chalen in invisible ink. She waited for the ink to fade.

🕯️

Morylda began a ritual.

- Every year on the anniversary, she would light a candle in the great hall and let it burn until it drowned in wax.

She kept the wedding gifts in a room - unopened, fading within their ribboned exterior.

But still - she would not leave.

🎻

Until one day, ten years later, a knock echoed through the empty halls.

Morylda was startled. Only her parents and siblings ever came - and only on Saturdays - to bring her food and try, when she allowed them, to get the place into some semblance of order. They would bathe her and dress her in clean clothes. But as soon as they left, she would throw off the clothes and don her tattered wedding gown.

They had once tried to get rid of it, but Morylda wailed for days, people though she had died and her ghost was waiting for revenge. They gave her back her dress.

She crept to the window, peeking out towards the door.

A child.

🎻 The Child with the Violin

Morylda hesitated. Her hand hovered over the doorknob like a ghost unsure of possession. The knock had come again - soft, insistent, like a ghostly memory tapping from the other side.

She opened it.

There stood a girl, no older than ten, with a violin case slung over her shoulder and a note clutched in her hand. Her eyes were the color of dusk - violet, with flecks of gold - and her hair was a wild constellation of curls.

A girl with a violin case and a note that read:

“For the woman who taught my father how to listen.”

“Are you Morylda?”

The shattered woman took a hesitant and frightened step backwards into the room. Who was this child who seemed to echo her world from ten years ago. The spitting image of a lost ghost.

The child waited. Smoothing her disheveled hair, the woman stepped towards the child.

“I am.”

“My name is Lune. My father said you taught him how to listen.” She handed her the note.

Morylda’s breath caught. She hadn’t spoken Chalen’s name in years, not even to herself.

“He left me,” she said.

“He left everyone,” Lune replied. “But he left me music. And he said you were the first note.

🎼 The Mansion Awakens

Lune didn’t ask to stay. She simply opened her violin case and began to play.

The notes were raw, imperfect, but they spoke of something Morylda hadn’t felt in a decade - an invitation to open her heart again.

She led Lune to the great hall. The chandeliers blinked awake. The dust danced. The silence leaned in.

They played together.

- Morylda on the grand piano, long untouched.

- Lune on her violin, eyes closed, bow trembling.

Each room of the mansion began to awaken. The Library of What-Ifs rearranged its shelves. The Conservatory of Ghost Dances bloomed. The Cellar of Unsent Letters released its ink into the air.

But the bridal suite, the forgotten room...felt the life begin to stir again, way down deep in the bones of the mansion.

Lune told Morylda how she had recently learned the truth of why her mother had left them not long after she was born. Her father had learned that her mother was carrying his child...conceived not long before Chalen met Morylda. Being ever the gallant knight, he had not hesitated to marry her.

But he carried a sadness that was inconsolable. Lune's mother knew and she could not bear it. So she left. Lune gave Morylda a letter which he had written all those years ago, but never had the bravery or strength to post. He tried his best to offer an explanation...but I only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive, he wrote in the last line.

Lune believes that he died from grief.

This time it would be Lune who never leaves.

🌙 The New Ritual

They made a pact.

- Every week, they would compose a piece for a room in the mansion.

- Every month, they would invite no one - and everyone - by leaving the windows open and letting the music drift into the village.

- Every season, they would bury a broken object in the garden and plant something new atop it.

The mansion, once a mausoleum, became a theatre of sound and silence.

Lune asked questions Morylda had never dared to answer:

“Did you love him?”

“I love him still, even in the way he vanished.”

“Did he love you?”

“He loved my soul and the echo I made in his silence.”

They played through grief. They played through joy. They played through the ache of beauty that has no name.

Morylda looks at the child for whom she should feel no love, should resent for robbing her of her youth. But she sees only light and joy...and a new life of awakening - new beginnings and possibilities.

🕊️ The Room of Reconciliation

One day, Lune led Morylda to a room she had never entered - the bridal suite - It was untouched. Crumbling. A floral nightmare of dust and cobweb. A single sheet of music lay on the desk, unfinished.

Lune placed it on the piano -

“Let’s finish it.”

They did.

And when they played it, the mansion didn’t just rejoice - it wept. The chandeliers gleamed rainbows like dewdrops. The mirrors fogged with ghostly breath. The faded flowers in the bridal suite bloomed for one night only - before they became dust for new flowers.

Chalen's spirit found rest at last, walking the halls of the now reawakened mansion.

🌸

The mansion was no longer a place of sadness and gloom.

It had no name now - only a sound. A chord that lingered in the air, changing slightly with the seasons, like a living hymn.

Each room had found its voice:

- The Library of What-Ifs now echoed with laughter and the rustle of pages turned by curious hands. The books were now rearranged, whispering new endings to old stories.

- The Conservatory of Ghost Dances had become a rehearsal space, where a child spun barefoot on mosaic floors, shadow dancing with the light.

- The Cellar of Unsent Letters had been emptied. In its place: a wine cellar filled with bottles labeled with song titles and dates - each one a vintage of healing.

The great hall, once a place of abandonment, now hosted twilight concerts. Villagers came with lanterns and loaves of bread. Strangers left poems tucked into the ivy.

Morylda no longer waited.

She listened.

She played.

She taught Lune how to hear the silence between notes, how to bow to the ghosts without letting them lead.

And when Lune asked, “What do we call this place now?” Morylda smiled and said:

“We don’t. We just let it sing.”