A youth danced along the shoreline, earmarking his path with stories of tiny shoeprints in the primrose sands.  

In the gloaming, the ocean emanated an illuminant, gilded glow. The waves susurrated along the shore with gentle hisses and purrs; their frigid bite just scarcely nipping his feet before receding and repeating. As the beckoning night enveloped the sleepy sun, ethereal shimmers of light pranced across the waters, and the darkening firmament was flecked with the beginnings of quiet vespers.  

The boy paused to take a whiff of the air, homely and tinged with salt. It brought a cheerful, relaxed smile to his face as he embraced the brine and pelagic brume. Though he has dwelled by the coast his entire life, seldom was he offered the chance to behold its magnificence firsthand. Yo-yoed between royal obligation and too-stern retainers, unfettered, simple leisure was a rare luxury indeed— a travesty for one with their childhood yet intact.

  

In clusters bespeckled in the sand, multicolored, glittery refuse caught his eye, and he scurried over to confirm, swooping down into a hunch as he scooped them into a gloved palm. Drift glass, ashine like a mine of scattered, brimming gemstones cataloged in vibrant hues of greens and translucent blues. The boy excitedly shoved them into his satchel, which was already filled to its veritable brim with assortments of other frivolous treasures, namely clams and conches, that he had chanced upon since he arrived. More for his ever-growing collection, that is.  

On the whispering, saltish breeze voyaged a pleasant echo, distinctly worn but as sweet as honey notwithstanding as that adoring tenor practically curled around the articulation of his name. The boy promptly righted himself in response and waved an enthusiastic hand in the direction of the choir— that is, a woman gowned in gossamer finery, who was seated atop the sandhill a safe distance from the water.

She was bouncing in her lap his younger sister, who was only about a year old, little, mischievous Veronica while her small, innocent hands fiddled and pawed at their mother’s unshorn, dark tresses. Their mother— Camilla— she replied with a flimsy wave of her own; and while her countenance was ever-radiant with its easy, unrestrained joy; an ever-present overhang of exhaustion discouraged its validity, marred with near-black rings underneath her eyes and her pallor nearly ashen. Irrefutably unwell, she hauled herself outside even if their head maid Beatrice threatened to have her head for it, or when her own bones moaned and groused.  

His mother had been bedridden since the birth of his aforementioned sister. The healers explained that she harbored an underlying disease that abruptly kicked up following her pregnancy, which had been wrought with various complications. It oftentimes left her too weak to so much as drink and eat without assistance, thus she was monitored extensively around-the-clock. 

As most chronic pain was, there were some days that were “better” than others, or at least semi-manageable— such as today; she had peeled herself out of bed, whether it was advised or not, and practically kidnapped the young prince after he had finished his ritual sword-training with his young tutor slash friend from the Alexis Dukedom. With his younger sister in tow, they traversed the crags and cape before eventually arriving at this sheltered cove— seated just beneath the prominence of the castle in a secluded alcove. Supposedly, this was where his mother and father met some decades prior as well as a pair of downtrodden souls, both seeking the embrace of the ocean and her crisp comfort.  

Out of all the heart-racing, thrilling tales of heroics and swashbuckling escapades his mother had relayed to him throughout the years, though a relatively cliche story, this one was his indisputable favorite— how his father nearly succumbed to the hellish demand of having to regather this broken country after the tyranny of his callous predecessor left it on the cusp of utter ruination, only to be saved from a crucible of his demonic blood and own self-doubt by the kindred adventurer who danced her way into his heart and gave him the rough push he needed to stand tall in spite. 

Perhaps that was why he felt so instinctually interconnected with these grounds; he felt eerily at peace here, and all the backbreaking liabilities— expectations— of princehood seemed to unroll off his worn shoulders and retreat into the deeps. For once, it felt as if he was not going to crack under the damning tonnage of the entire world. 

He only wished that he and his mother could come here more often. He knew that with one positive day came a slew of negatives, as her cursed luck would have it, and that it would be another long year until they could share another fugacious adventure together. And for a woman who was raised as a mere commoner— one who never truly acclimated herself to the ruthless vivisections and demands of her fellow nobility once she was inaugurated verboten— in the end, there was little that could trammel her venturesome spirit. 

When she was younger, the queen eluded her retainers and embarked on impromptu questlines disguising herself in rags, singing and waltzing with the townchildren, and outdrinking the working men at the docks. And when he was born, she began to drag him along: and since he learned to walk, it, of course, had become something of a daily routine for the two of them; and it was a routine he sorely mourned; a cavernous hole persisting like a machine without its most integral elements, leaving him empty and longing.  

When her sickness eclipsed, this once, audacious woman was thereby strapped to her chambers— and for a woman with insatiable wanderlust and almost nonexistent patience, when her legs refused to cooperate, it must have been doubtless torture for her. Her situation was unjust through and through— godless, he would even dare to say: while raised to praise the name of Lord Antares, a veteran of the Celestial Hierarchy, the older he grew and the frailer his mother became with no viable remedy in sight— he began to doubt more and more in their legitimacy, even if it was taboo to insist as such aloud. 

Codoslia, their westerly neighbors, forsook their faith in the divine centuries ago to worship the evolution of science in lieu— and in his eyes, they seemed freer than helpless fools who tied themselves to their unchangeable destiny without mustering the courage to structure their own. 

Though, it was debatable if Fate— the Fates, plural— could be truly defied. After all, their honored Law was initially instated for this precise reason: to cultivate subservience, temper avarice— discourage overabundance. 

With the future of his kingdom, and the interminable lives of his subjects lodged on his shoulders— the young prince could not help but wonder if he had what it took to... liberate them. Decades of endless bloodshed; his lineage condemned by their ensanguined pride and feral voracities, raising a superpower capable of overtaking the heavens should it ever commit a treachery itself and choose to point their spears skyward, but what his father— and by extension, him once he inherits the weight of his duty— has sought to accomplish since Eligor the Tyrant was beheaded and the reddened throne was his to recultivate— all we desire was peace. 

Children of the Principality of War they were, but there must be more than the needless culling of the innocent and the obsessive, furious heat of clashing metal or the rancid stench of a bloodbath. Glory achieved over subjugation and slaughter was fatuous. War itself was merely a convenient excuse to monopolize and expand— to take and pave golden roads along galleries of bodybags at the behest of the rich.  

He wanted to change this land for the better; it felt like his tried-and-true calling in this life. Alirense, the gentlehearted king whom their city was recently christened after, belonged to an era of bloodletting and rabid arrogance and was ultimately betrayed and martyrized for his innocent dream of concord. 

Eligor’s regime had damaged us all: public reception to his father and his legislation has been less volatile, but there was yet division: those who desperately pleaded for redemption and the conservatives who stubbornly clung to tradition, however bleak. And he wanted to help his father build that bridge between them: reach a compromise that would benefit and convert both outlooks, and outright purge the notion that Igerene would ever fall back on its old, patriarchal ways. He was loyal to his people— young and naive as he was, he was more than knowledgeable of the breadth of their struggles. It was a delicate, unsteady balance.  

He knew that he could not save them all. Perhaps he was heartless for dreading his destiny.  

He would someday wear the crown, ill-tailored for his small, fragile figure notwithstanding. If he failed— failed them, everyone— it would not be that he would be reduced to yet another stain on his long-winded list of his family’s uncountable sins, nor a useless king who was unable to provide, liberate— when he was born, they say that the voice of the gods themselves whispered his future legacy: that he was to shine above the rest of them: a champion of divine providence who could reportedly reshape the sun in the palms of his hands if he chose. He wondered, really, if he was to be dragged around on a leash by something as abstract and amorphous as fate. 

His mother said that he was destined for greatness. He believed her reasoning above the clerics— and he wanted to prove himself worthy of her objection. He could never admit out loud how suffocatingly terrified he was, in truth. For he was the Crown Prince; an exemplar and the culmination of his kingdom’s pride. Whether through cold yield of steel or the nourishment of warmer gospel, he had to be the one to lead them to rejuvenation.