Snow’s POV

My knees were starting to hurt. It didn’t help that it was extremely hot out today either. I had been scrubbing the stairs for the last thirty minutes. A bird had dropped a little surprise for me on it this morning. Ingrid told me to leave it till tomorrow so that it might be less hot out, but I just couldn’t stop looking at it. 

I hated when things weren’t clean. If Ingrid didn’t stop me, I would clean the entire castle everyday. 

Ingrid is my aunt. She is also the regency, not that it matters, there’s no kingdom to lead anyway. Everyone left after my father died. I guess no one wanted to stick around for me to become of age. They didn’t want me to be their king so terribly bad, that they left the kingdom entirely. Even though I’m 23 years old now, Ingrid is still the regency. I didn’t want to go through with the ceremony of power. I saw no point in it. It would have been pathetic. Usually, they would hand over the power of the kingdom, but there is no power. It’s only been 9 years since my father died, but everyone already left and the surrounding kingdoms already claimed all the land.

 I still don’t fully understand why or even how this all happened. It was like when my father died, the rest of my kingdom just decided that they didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. Everyone just up and left! And now it’s like we don’t even exist anymore. All that's left is the castles and the castle gardens. And all I have left to do is clean and pretend that there is a point to it all.