The moon, it shone below on us all, 
I knew that in love with me she would fall, 
if only I wasn’t confined to mere walls, 
if only I were human.

The hallway seemed a lot more silent as we rode back the way we came. There was no noise, except for the long eerie echo of each step the horses took. Maybe it was because we were going slower, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t like being here.

There are no doors. I don’t remember there being a door on the ride up. Where are we going? Do we have to leave the castle?

We past tapestry after tapestry and still there was no sign of a door. Sometimes it felt as though the pictures in the tapestry were moving. I felt as though something was watching us. We stopped a few times, Astin staring off into the distance, before we continued carefully again. His fists clenched tightly whenever we stopped. What was he seeing that I couldn’t see? What was he hearing?

I could hear hooves. Hooves in the distance, coming closer and closer. I tensed up, but it was only the prince.

He rode quickly until he was besides us and glared at me.

“Didn’t go very far did you,” he snorted.

“There’s something lurking,” Astin said. Suddenly the prince seized up. “I believe it is gone. The loud noise scared it off.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the prince said, his fearful face turning into an odd smirk. He turned back to me. “You don’t have the right to be here you know. Maybe we should feed you to the…”

Astin took off, moving the horse at a faster place cutting the prince’s speech off.

“Hey!” He said and rode forward. “I wasn’t done talking.”

Astin said nothing. I looked down at the horse’s mane, trying to hide a small chuckle, but still feeling uncertainty in my heart.

The prince looked at me, with a glare still in his eyes. “We shouldn’t have taken you. You don’t belong here. I don’t know why grandfather doesn’t just send you through. We should have taken your mother. You were probably lying about being able to remember.”

“I wasn’t lying,” I mumbled, looking away from him. I wanted to run away.

“No? How would we be able to know?” he confronted.

I kept my mouth shut.

“Don’t have anything to say now do you? Where’s all your bravado.

I wanted to go home. I could feel a tear slide down my cheek.

“Are… are you crying?”

Suddenly Astin coughed behind me.

“What Astin?” The prince asked. “What are you pointing at… oh. Oh you’re right. Yeah. Thanks.”

The prince stopped his horse in front of a tapestry that had blues and blacks and silvers running through it. I think there was some sort of a picture on it, but I couldn’t see, my vision had become too blurry.

I blinked trying to clear away tears as Astin brought the horse to a faster walk.

“Sorry…” Astin said after clearing his throat. “He doesn’t mean to. He’s worried.”

“Um… oh… alright. It’s alright,” I replied.

There was silence again after that as we carried on down the hall. I stared at some of the pictures, wondering where they all came from, wondering what all of them meant. There was one with a lady who stood by a lake. There was another with a strange looking person looking out from underneath water. There was another with a man in a red uniform in the middle of a forest. Sometimes, from the corner of my eyes I could see the move. After a while I tore my eyes away from the pictures.

“Um… what… what’s going to happen to me?” I managed to squeak out.

“I do not know,” Astin replied. Then we fell back into silence. At least he was honest.

A few moments later we stopped in front of a rather large tapestry.

Woven into silky threads was the picture of a man sitting on a forest floor. His hands stretched out towards us. A golden crown hung high above his head. Around it were little stars.

Astin leaped of the horse and went towards the tapestry. He reached up and touched the yellow crown. He spread his hand across it, and then pushed down and pinched out a piece of yellow thread. Slowly he unravelled everything into a tangle of thread. He balled it up in his hand, and then pushed it into the man’s outstretched hands.

When he removed his hand, the thread was gone, and in the king’s hands was a twinkling crown.

A loud tearing sound echoed into the hallway, and the tapestry before us began to unravel bit by bit. It tore itself out, weaselling out and then melting into the wall behind it, leaving behind them a silvery rectangle where the tapestry once was.

The silver looked like liquid, moving and pulsing in the wall.

I gasped loudly. My hands reaching to my mouth in shock and my eyes opened wide.

Astin jumped back onto the horse.

“Hold on tight,” he muttered and then we rode into the silver wall.