The Princess of the Howling Waste. by JRManaia.
PART ONE.
This story begins just like all good
fairy tales have since the dawn of time itself, before the young sun had made
his first dance across the heavens and before the moon had seen her stars.
This is how the great bards and
story tellers of a bygone age began their nights by the bonfire. This is how
your story was passed on through the generations, from the lips of the old to
the ears of the young. This is the point where you leave today and enter the
world of yesterday, of tomorrow, and the forgotten realm of your imagination...
Once Upon a Time...
A very long time
ago when dragons still roamed the earth, and fairies still danced over the beds
of young babes while they lay sleeping there lived a king in castle, the king
of a great kingdom.
Outside the walls of the kingdom there
was a desert land, a barren and howling waste where a princess lived in rags,
beautiful and forsaken, with a heart of fire and gold and a life of unfulfilled
dreams and torn promises.
She was the ruler of her lonely little
kingdom, in which her subjects were the vultures and hyenas who fed on the
flesh of those that could not survive the harsh land. Her friendship was
abandoned to the crows, the sleek minions who told her what she wanted to hear
and never the truth. She slept on a bed of stones and she knew each stone by
name, each stone that pricked her soft skin at night when she tried to sleep.
Her heart she kept outside her chest in
a box she called Hope. This box had many locks and the princess had many keys,
keys she had found all across the face of the wasteland. But none of them were
cut to open the locks.
For most of her day the princess
wandered the dry earth of her kingdom in search of keys. She upturned stones
and rolled aside mighty rocks in her search, though most of the time she only
found ashes and dust beneath. If she found a beetle, she ate it. On the odd
occasion she found a key, and when she did she went running back to the place
where she hid the box called hope only to discover her efforts had been in
vain. There was not a single key that could open even one of the locks.
The princess did not remember why she
was a princess, and she did not remember how she had come to be in the
wasteland. She did not even remember why her heart had been taken out and put in
the box. She remembered that it hurt, but not the reason for the pain.
But this story is not about that. This story is about the King in his castle.
Now the King could see for miles from his castle, for miles into the paradise
of his kingdom and in contrast he could also see for miles into the desolation
of the lands beyond his walls.
Most interestingly he could see the
princess from his castle window, and while the King had his whole beautiful
kingdom to observe and be well-pleased with, he liked to watch the princess in
rags.
He could watch her all day. Everything
she did, every step she took and every choice she made either amused him and
made him happy, or made him sad. He watched with sadness when she listened to
her crows and fought with the hyenas for her food and with sorrow when she
searched for keys. Other times when she lay spread-eagled in the sand with her
face upturned toward the sun he smiled a little, warmed that she was warm,
happy that she had found a moment of peace in the storm of her existence.
He adored her. He adored her passion for
life, her will to fight, and her delight in even the smallest of things. He
watched on in awe of her beauty, despite her cuts and bruises and her garment
of rags. Even the scars on her chest which told a bitter tale had become part
of the make-up that was her, and in his eyes she was flawless.
Flawless, and captivating.
He learned that he was in love with the
princess. Her life fascinated him more than all his riches and anything in his
kingdom, and he was desperate to rescue her from the abandonment of the
wilderness.
The Princess of the Howling Waste PART TWO will be here tomorrow, Sunday the 23rd December, at 8pm.
See you then x
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