She stood at her balcony and gazed out at the shores. A river leading to the sea, wrapping her father's mountainous peaks in its cool embrace. The seasons turned as the tides, and she waited still for her lover to return.

He had been banished to serve on-board fragile galleons, tossed across waves in the dark months since their seperation. The love they shared forbidden by birth - she was left alone to mourn from her castle walls, imprisoned by privilege, lonely in stone.

Ever slower, the years passed, and no sign of him came. No word of his health, nor message of his affection reached her halls, as she paced. Longing for a sign from him, even so much as his effects or the emerald locket she gave to him as a keepsake - a promise of her faith.
The castles aged with the dynasties who ruled them. Ten years of storms weathered the valley - months of rain tumbling from mountain ranges carving torrents of tears into rock.
Passage to her father's land was fickle. People left the ivy, an overwhelming sadness left to echo in its vines.

In a solemn dusk, the sun set on her last hope, her broken heart condemned her spirit and on a moonlit night, the first calm after a decade of rage, the smooth water's glass was shattered in the dark. The body of a broken princess who had leapt to her end sent shards of water skyward.
She sank to the still depths where the river consumed her and echoed her song through the heavy moonlit years. Haunting the valley, still waiting for her lover's return, her spirit wandered aimlessly through water and stone.

Sailors returned to the land years later, though he was not in their company. Instead, madmen and criminals forged trade passages from the old docks, and buried their sin beneath its surface. A pirate vessel limped sickly into a narrow harbour and sank to rest at the river's mouth. She watched from all corners as the men, savage brutes swept into her once beautiful home.
She sat silently mourning the last of her people who were driven out of the valley or else submitted to the will of their new masters. A new dynasty to reign - a captain clad in black silk, with an emerald locket around his neck.

In the moonlight his eyes burned like nightfire. His men called him this. They feared him, and worshipped him while she followed, and cursed him for his indiscretions. For hollowing burrows in her waters to hide his crimes, for ravaging her home and her people. for plundering the seas which once fed her valley life, and for wearing her locket around his neck.

Violent nightmares tormented him in the night, she haunted his dreams, driving him mad. She unleashed a furious vengeance on her invaders, and drove many from her waters, or from their lives. She threw them from their stolen balconies, the ivy's fallen met their ends as she had, while in the solitude of a dank brick cave, the captain claimed himself. Another dynasty was lost, and the ivy grew once more as icy waters warmed, and rippled softly under the peace of a new moon.

Years went by. Though it had returned, she could not open the locketwith her lifeless touch. Her desperate despair faded to nurture the land that claimed her, and she watches still as new travellers find their home in the stone which lines her waters. She guards and protects them, hoping that someday, one of them will call her name to the winds once more. That one of them will set her free.