literature

Happily Ever After

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Tolren always knew that he was of secret nobility, what with his fair, perfect skin that endured despite all his days out in the fields and his flowing locks that resisted the dirt and grime that found his siblings at every opportunity. Certainly, this drew him lots of looks from the village girls—strange ones rather than amorous—and mutterings from family at the dinner table, but he forgave them all in his heart as magnanimity of spirit dictated.

He maintained his dazzling smile through times of harshest drought and floods, even when the others groaned and staggered between the halving of meals and demands of taxes; for he knew that someday, he would be recalled to his proper heritage and it would be up to him to make everything right.

The day came, and there was a curious mix of fanfare and uneasiness as his parents and siblings saw him off to the company of a silver-inlaid carriage and unsmiling but well-dressed royal retainers. His father’s third wife, especially, hugged and sobbed and seemed loathe to let him leave, such that he wondered for an instant if she were royal herself. But alas, she had wrinkled hands and sun-blistered skin.

“There is something I- no, we need to tell you,” she said, eyeing each of the other wives and her husband in turn, before casting another strange look in the direction of the carriage. “It is about the real reason you are here, and why they have come for you.”

Tolren saw the look of alarm in their faces, and halted the disharmony in its tracks by nodding solemnly and stating, “I know. I’ve known my destiny all along.”

“You- you don’t mind?” said his adoptive father, a hard man to phase and now definitely so.

He calmed them again. For after all, he was nobility, and was it not his responsibility to take on the burdens of rulership and court that seemed so mysterious and terrifying to the good common folk? That seemed to settle it, and Tolren departed at last, matching what tears they shed with a single sparkling droplet of his own as he watched the humdrum of his peasant childhood fade into the distance.

The royal palace was everything he imagined from his dreams, from the white marble to the gilded spires to the other portions of architecture that he did not doubt served some sort of function, but which escaped his mind in the moment of awe. The retainer—who had been silent despite his best efforts to impress and relate during the journey—ushered him quickly through grand carpeted hallways and long candlelit rooms to a chamber where strange things bubbled and brewed on racks and tables within glass vials and bottles.

There, the court wizard—for who else would maintain a respectable beard and star-patterned flowing regalia—dismissed them and examined him from head to toe with a lens of sorts. At last appearing satisfied by Tolren’s trappings of nobility, the old man motioned again for him to follow to a smaller antechamber.

Tolren asked him if there was going to be lengthy but highly relevant exposition, for which he might perhaps be better dressed, to which the court wizard responded with an appropriate cryptic promise of things to come.

He would be hard pressed to deny that his reaction was less than appropriate of royal blood, once the wizard light the room he beheld the sights before him. For there was a not-quite corpse on a bed, evident only in the small twitching motions of its hideously blackened limbs and the faint opening and closing of what might have been its mouth, as a trio of physicians administered all kinds of salves and tonics.

Tolren raised his hands to his mouth, first in horror of the situation, then in reprimand of his own undignified outburst, then again in sympathy for the poor soul. The wizard took a position by the bed, facing the poor soul with his hat off in respect. Then the old man looked up to Tolren with a steely gaze.

“This is Prince Alaric,” he said. “He looked very much like you before a terrible accident.”

Tolren thought it strange, the looks that the physicians were giving him and the wizard as they were dismissed, but politely held his tongue given the circumstances, for sympathy was in order. He shed another single crystalline tear as he enquired of how he might help.

“You would do anything within your ability to help the prince?” asked the wizard, with an added mysterious smile.

“Yes,” said Tolren, his jaw clenched in determination.

The old man placed one hand over Tolren’s forehead and that of the injured prince, muttering deep arcane syllables, and the world faded away.

Prince Alaric rose with a gasp, bolting upright in an instant, and spent the next few moments examining his soft hands, with which he then felt his flowing locks and smooth face. He exhaled in relief, eyes filled with gratitude as he let the court wizard support him off the sheets that had been his only awareness of the world for weeks. He muttered a curse as his knees buckled and he almost fell over.

“It will take time to adjust, my prince,” said the old man, as retainers entered the room with the prince’s proper raiment. “But I believe you will find it to your liking.”

The prince nodded, and the retainers took over the task of supporting him on the way out. Two of them remained to the instructions of the court wizard, who took one last long look at the blackened, twitching not-quite corpse in peasant’s garb, before sending it out in the opposite direction.

“I got the eyes wrong,” muttered the old man. “Oh well.”




Gwendolyn always knew that she was of secret nobility, what with her fair, perfect skin that endured despite all her days out in the tanning yard and her flowing locks that resisted the dirt and grime that found her siblings at every opportunity.

She knew that someday, she would be recalled to her proper heritage and it would be up to her to make everything right.
Sometimes I get strange ideas. This is one of them.
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Sorrowscoldfrost's avatar
I feel bad, but I kinda found it funny.

I have a morbid sense of humor, it seems. XD