She Married a Ghost of Fire

by Lady Dra


Only she remembered what had happened on her wedding day. I remember all.


Sandy was beautiful in the way dusk is gorgeous—soft, aching, and full of thresholds. She wore a dress the color of stormlight, not white. White was for forgetting, she said. She wanted to remember everything.


Her bride, Lior, was a quiet fire. The kind of girl who spoke in half-poems and moved like she’d danced with ghosts. They met in a protest, fell in love in a library, and chose to marry in the old greenhouse behind our grandmother’s estate. Vines curled around broken panes, and orchids bloomed through rusted beams. Sandy said it was perfect—half alive, half dead. Like love. Like memory.


I was Sandy’s sister. Her witness. Her keeper of secrets. But I wasn’t the one she married.

The guests were strange. Not family. Not friends. They came from Lior’s side, but they didn’t speak her name. They toasted with wine that tasted like rust and danced without music. I asked Sandy who they were. She said, “They’re from the place she came back from.”


I didn’t understand then. I do now.


After the vows, after the kiss, after the veil of ivy shimmered and the sky flickered like a dying candle—Lior vanished. Not walked away. Vanished. Like fog burned off by sudden sun. The guests followed, slipping through cracks in the greenhouse walls, disappearing into the bloom.


Sandy stood alone, her stormlight dress stained with wine and ash.

She never spoke of it again. Not to me. Not to anyone.

But I remember.


I remember the way the air shimmered when Lior said Sandy’s name. I remember the way the vines recoiled from her touch. I remember the whisper that passed through the crowd like wind through reeds: She’s chosen. She’s bound.

Sandy changed after that. She moved into the greenhouse, slept among the orchids, wrote poems in languages I couldn’t read. She stopped eating. Stopped laughing. Her eyes grew darker, deeper, like wells that had forgotten the sun.


One night, I found her standing in the moonlight, her dress torn, her hands covered in ink. She looked at me and said,


“She’s coming back. When the veil thins.”


I asked her what veil. She said, “The one between breath and bone.”


She disappeared the next morning.


The greenhouse was empty. No vines. No orchids. Just dust and silence. Her dress lay folded on the bench, and beside it, a note:


Only she remembered what happened on her wedding. I remember all.


I don’t know who wrote it. I don’t know if it was meant for me.


But I carry it with me. I read it every night. I whisper it to the wind, to the trees, to the stars. I search for her in dreams, in shadows, and in the spaces between words.


Some say Sandy was taken. Some say she went willingly. Some say she was never real.


But I remember.


Because memory is a kind of magic. And love is a kind of binding.


And I will not forget.