Seasonal
For years he carried out her cruel demands, each one cutting deeper than any blade he wielded. His heart bled quietly behind his ribs, unseen and unacknowledged, yet he kept working for her, believing loyalty might someday be enough to earn her gaze.
Then came her final command:
The order snapped something in him. Not his morals—those had eroded long ago—but the last thread tethering his heart to hers. He realized she would never love him, never thank him, never even remember him. He was nothing more than a tool in her arsenal of madness.
His heart, already cracked, began to spill blood he could taste in the back of his throat.
So he made a choice no mortal had dared.
Deep in the forest, where even the moon refused to look, the Huntsman tore open his own chest with his bare hands. Blood poured onto the earth in a dark, endless stream. And when he ripped his heart free, it did not die.
It pulsed in his grip—furious, grieving, alive.
The earth swallowed it whole, and from that place grew a bloom shaped like a human heart, dripping red as steadily as the day it was torn out. The forest took pity on the man but none on the Queen. It twisted his heartbreak into something cursed—something eternal.
Those who follow its crimson trail whisper of its strange power. On nights when the full moon hangs heavy over the trees, the bloom’s dripping slows…then brightens…glows. And any soul who dares to taste its essence is said to witness their heart’s truest desire—raw, unmasked, undeniable.
Some say the Queen eventually found the clearing. Others say she followed the Huntsman’s blood-soaked footprints into the trees. No one knows what happened next—only that she never returned, and that for days after, the forest bled thicker, darker, heavier than before.
The clearing still bleeds.
And the curse still listens.
For devotion given blindly will bleed forever—
and a heart torn out will make the world bleed with it.
