← Taming Malice
Chapter 4

What Blooms in the Dark

Substack Premium Released: Jul 12, 2026
Content Warnings 4 listed
  • Dark fae fantasy
  • graphic violence & gore
  • dubious/non-consent themes
  • captor–captive romance
Excerpt

It started with flowers.

Yellow, pink, pastel flowers, growing along the edges of the warmth surrounding me.

A sound, a giggle from my throat, small, just forming, made the flowers glow.

They smiled at me.

Each glow receded until my voice called them back. Sweet pastel light and smelling bloomed things surrounded me. My fingers, tiny soft nubs, reached for them.

And then the warmth thinned.

Something was wrong with the room. The corners were wrong.

The corners had leaked.

Author’s Note

Welcome to Taming Malice — a dark Sleeping Beauty fae retelling, new chapters on Fairytale Fridays. If morally grey fae romance with teeth is your kind of trouble, you might also like my other ongoing serials: Victoria and Nobody Came Looking.