EMMA—PURPLE
Purple. It comes at the ends of sunsets, at the death of something beautiful—just like she, Emma, has always seemed to stumble upon anything and everything good just as it is ending.
Too late, always too late. Somehow those hateful words seem softly, malevolently tangled in the flow of the waves that are lapping against the sides of the Jolly Roger.
Purple waves.
Emma blinks. Surely it is an illusion—water is clear and blue by day, or inky black by night—but as she peers down from her place by the ship's rail there does seem to be a violet tinge in the ocean's depths.
Maybe she's hallucinating—but then, this is the Never-Sea after all. It, like the land it surrounds, must be teeming with magic.
Magic. Magic, too, is purple—deep and heady and mysterious, full of power and pain. Magic is in her, as surely as she surrounded by it. Emma, while not quite missing the old lonely life of stark simplicity, is not certain she likes it. Magic and she and, for some reason, purple—they all have something in common. A startling, dangerous warmth at their heart, guarded by an unfathomable, imperceptible aloofness…almost a coldness. Almost a shield.
Halfway suspended between the passion of red and the purity of blue—does that make it the color of regret? Purple is the darkling pain of the bruises—visible, swift-fleeting, and invisible, long-lasting—that she carries, but it is also the purple of resplendent banners, heralding the regal status of the princess who she doesn't want to be.
Is it too late for Henry?
Too late for me?
She wants to love, to feel, to be free—but can she be free from the power when power is needed for freedom? Can she ever break free of Magic, of purple uncertainty…of herself? Can she ever embrace it?
She wishes she knew.