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Her name was Johanna and she was a Lady of Whitestone.
She wasn’t the born to Whitestone, but she fell in love with it as swiftly as she did her betrothed. The story goes that she was the one to receive the letter, she wrote the reply. Some people say you can hear her crying from her room in Castle Whitestone on dark nights with no moon. Other people say you can see her falling from a balcony to her death.
No one wants to remember why.
On certain summer nights, if you walk down to the Sun Tree without making a sound, and you leave a flower at its base, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear the sounds of people’s last words, their last breaths, their cries for help. You’ll hear them curse the Briarwoods and sob. But if you wait for long enough, and the flower you bring is pretty enough, you can hear a young boy and a young girl telling each other to run.
There’s a rumour shared amongst the children that if you walk down the streets at night, you should hold your breath every time you pass a crossroad. They say it’s respectful. They say it’s so the spirits don’t steal your voice. A young boy swears that his brother saw people fighting at a crossroads in the middle of the night. The brother couldn’t see what they were fighting, but he watched the whole battle play out, right down to the last death and the victory cheers.
Teenagers, old enough to know better, sometimes sneak into the forest with candles and bundles in their pockets. They leave in the evening and search for the patch of golden flowers that always bloom and dark soil that leaves their fingertips red. They whisper to each other that this one spot is powerful, that this is the one spot where the Astral Plane crosses the Material and spirits walk through. They say these things with lit candles, holding hands, trying to play with forces they couldn’t hope to know. They don’t realise what the spot they sit at is.
Some nights in the castle, when its occupants have fallen asleep, the servants sometimes say they hear footsteps and soft voices in the halls. They hear young children’s hushed giggles and mischievous. They hear old names that haven’t been uttered for years and muffled cries of a child coming out of a nightmare. The veteran servants - the ones who remember the days before the Briarwoods, before they were cast out and the city fell to darkness - they know which corridors to take to avoid the memories.
His name was Julius and he was the eldest son of Whitestone.
He left notes around the castle. It started as a small child’s distraction on his bedroom walls. They evolved when they needed to. Some people say that there used to be entire rooms with cries for help written on the walls inside the castle from a desperate son trying to save his family. Some say those walls only said ‘sorry’.
Some others say that in some of the books hidden in some of the rooms are notes written in Vesper’s hand - last words written to try and bring some comfort to the only survivors. Some say those notes - found years later by a tired Cassandra late at night, or an overly curious Percival in his idle time - only said ‘sorry’.