The Ballad of the Blooming Exile

The Ballad of the Blooming Exile

Here is a version of the tale as it would be told by the fey-born folk and old families of Tèarmann Nàdair, a story equal parts reverence and resignation—half myth, half memory.

It’s how mortals explain why a prince of near-divine grace lingers so long among them, walking roads of dust while the eternal Feywild waits beyond the veil.

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A tale told in Tèarmann Nàdair of Prince Caer of the Gilded Twilight

They say the green country between the rivers was once barren rock and ice until he came—the Pale Prince with music in his hands. One spring morning, the old hills woke to birdsong where none had ever sung, and the meadows began to uncoil like sleepers stirred by sunlight. From that day, the land was called Tèarmann Nàdair, the Sanctuary of Nature, for it was said the Prince’s passing gave the soil its patience and the wind its melody.

But folk disagree on why he stayed. The priests say he was driven here by prophecy—a vow to guard the border where the worlds meet. The poets whisper a lovelier lie: that he waits for a lost love whose heart turned to crystal in another world. And farmers mutter the truth more practical—he broke some law too grave for pardon and was cast out until the end of days.

Whatever the reason, all agree on this: Prince Caer walks bound by choice, not chain. He could step across the veil at any hour, yet he will not. The oaths on his heart are older than mountains, and the Queen who waits beyond them is slower to forgive than time itself.

Some claim that when spring air thickens and the orchards bloom too early, that is his doing—a longing for home bleeding into the world. Others say he fears the call across the river, where the Nightspinner keeps watch from its Black Spire, guarding the vow that exiled him.

In taverns across the valleys, the tale ends the same way, told over ale and candlelight:
  the Prince walks not as a ruler, but as a gardener of regret.

He tends the mortal realm because it forgets—because it must forget—lest the songs of the Feywild call him home, and in coming home, end all things that bloom.