Blind Storyteller - The Forgotten Prince

This is the story of a young prince from many years past, residing in a city that was once the capital of a mighty kingdom. This city was famous for its glory and magnificence across the realms. The king of this realm, celebrated for his wisdom and benevolence, was cherished by his people. He was the seventh son of the former king, who had been one of the earliest rulers of this era, and he himself had seven sons.     The youngest, Prince Su’Alhazi, was a curious child, fond of bird-watching and constructing eccentric models out of sand and bone and the spare clockwork detritus harvested from the palace’s perpetual repairs. He trailed after the older brothers at a polite distance, never interfering in their contests of arms and wit, his pale hair and quieter mannerisms marking him as the odd stone in the family’s gleaming diadem. Some said he was born under an evil star; the king and queen, however, denied it. The stars were still new in this age, and the wise among the mortals knew to distinguish fact from fiction.     Regardless of his parent’s love, the young prince was an unusual child. He could disappear for hours, sometimes days, wandering the labyrinthine hollows beneath the royal palace, where the wind sang through old passageways and the lantern light painted the stones with shifting sigils. Nobody knew where he went and nobody could find him during these hours. Su’Alhazi liked the echoes there, liked the way the air seemed denser, the stories older, the secrets more patient. He would bring back handfuls of oddities: a piece of ancient tile glazed in patterns that bent the light, a corroded ring that fit no finger, a handful of bones etched with lines almost too fine to see. The king and queen, indulgent, thought this merely the boyish passion of the undersized and overlooked, and paid it little heed.     One day, it was the young prince’s twenty-fourth name-day, the day of the Grand Equinox, and the city was celebrating. The air above the city rang with bells and the laughter of children. In the markets, boats of glass and carved wood ferried dazzling fruits and savory pastries through tributaries of sand. The dome of the palace was adorned with colored silks, and the king’s voice echoed over the walls, inviting not just the city but all the lands beyond to feast and revel.     On the edge of the horizon, just where the far away mountains’ shadows fell sharpest onto the dunes, a band of travelers was making their approach. They moved with the unhurried confidence of the truly rootless: three wagons on wooden sleds painted with sacred geometry and festooned with banners, a dozen camels braying and tossing their harnesses, and a retinue of humans, gnomes, and even the rare, tall elf; each one wearing tattoos of chains and shackles. They were the Allaena — one of the three surviving branches of an ancient nomad people, and they brought with them glassware, stories, and omens for those willing to pay.     They were late for the first round of festivities, but this was by design. The Allaena always entered a city at dusk, when the sun’s glare made it hard to see their faces, and when the wind’s howl would swallow any unsettling thing that might be said about them. And so it was, under a darkening sky, that the Allaena’s long file entered the city’s western gate, moving neither hurriedly nor slowly, but with the same implacable pace as a river carving stone. The guards, who had spent the day in anxious preparation, watched their approach in silence, uncertain whether the etiquette of the old world still applied to these unusual guests.     The king’s alsinshal, the royal herald, awaited them with the ceremonial chain and a parchment scroll, the words of greeting written upon it in seven languages, none of which were the tongue of the Allaena. The Allaena’s chief, a woman of advanced years whose eyes shone with the scarlet sheen of rubies, bowed once and did not take the proffered scroll. Instead, she whispered to her retinue, and one of the younger men—a scribe, judging by his ink-stained fingers—stepped forward to perform the necessary courtesies.     They were led into the banquet hall where the king’s guests were feasting and dancing. The Allaena did not sit, nor did they eat, though plates of the kingdom’s finest delicacies were set before them: candied fig, roast dune-fowl, sweetmeats in honeyed sand. Their chief remained standing near the low table, watching the flow of the feast with the peculiar patience of one who has passed many such evenings and expects little new from them. Conversation lapped around her, growing louder and more reckless as the wine ran dark and plentiful.     At the appointed moment, the king—whose voice could still the pulse of a crowded plaza—called for silence, as the time to regal the young prince with presents had arrived. The Allaena chief, with a smile thin as a blade’s edge, inclined her head and produced from the folds of her sleeve a slender tube of black glass. She exhaled a word, and the tube’s cap blossomed open in a swirl of burgundy smoke, revealing a scroll wound so tightly that the ink shimmered through the parchment as if resisting the air.     “Your Majesty,” she said, in the language of the court, her accent precise but foreign, “the Allaena observe custom, and bring to this house the words that have traveled far.” She gestured, and the scribe unveiled the document, careful as a surgeon. “This is a map. And it is also a prophecy.”     The king’s eldest son stood to interject, his hand raised in the air like a blade ready to strike. “Father,” he said, though the word was addressed with a certain severity to the chest of the Allaena chief, “it is not our way to welcome augury into the home on the recurrence of a prince’s name-day. The omens of the Equinox must be weighed in the day’s last hour, alone, by the crowned head, lest they sow confusion among the faithful.” He looked around the hall, at his brothers—each meeting his gaze steadily, in support of his words of protection for their youngest brother—and then at Su’Alhazi, who sat at the lowest seat on the table’s curve, eyes wide and pale as uncut topaz. “Let us not tempt the fates by inviting foreign prophecy to our beloved brother’s feast.”     The Allaena chief’s smile did not change. She held the scroll aloft, and with a twist it unfurled, the panels snapping open like the wings of a moth. The scribe’s hands trembled; the young prince’s eldest brother made a noise, half cough, half curse, but the attention of the room was already drawn to the dancing lines of the map.     It was unlike any chart the scholars had seen. The rivers ran not as blue lines but as threads of copper; mountains were painted not with brown but with ferric red, and at the center of it all, the city glowed, not as a fixed point, but as a spiral—its name, in the oldest writing, a word that meant both “Gem” and “Grave.”     The court’s master cartographer, old as the sand and twice as brittle, shuffled up to the display, pushing aside the king’s sons with the ease of a river stone parting reeds. He bent close, monocle trembling, and muttered, “It is not drawn for the eye, but for the hand.” He pointed, and the scribe—his own fingers stained by foreign dyes—smoothed the map flat. The copper rivers sparked in the lantern glow, each slightly raised, and the mountain spines cast minute shadows onto the parchment. But at the city’s center, the spiral’s ink was so dark it seemed to devour light.     “It’s a puzzle,” Su’Alhazi said quietly, the first time he’d spoken above a murmur all night.     The Allaena chief nodded, her attention weighing him with the gravity of an ancient creditor. “It is a prophecy that binds itself to the one who solves its riddle,” she replied, voice pitched for him alone but echoing down the length of the long table. “We call it the Shadow’s Crown. There is no gift more precious, or more dangerous.”     The Allaena chief spoke, her voice receding into a trance-state cadence, half chant, half explanation: “The spiral is the first path, the boundless loop. All that turns returns. The seventh son is the axis. His fate is the city’s fate. He will either reign from the sky, surrounded by all those he loves, or fall so deep that his shadow becomes the only shade in a world scorched to ash.” She rolled her hands, fingers weaving a counterpoint to the writhing script. “This map is also a clock, and the clock only runs forwards. Once begun, the spiral cannot be unwound.”     The words landed with the weight of judgement. Su’Alhazi looked to his father. The king’s eyes, usually so quick to laugh, held a wariness not seen in the boy’s short life. He nodded, almost imperceptibly—permission, or perhaps a test.     Su’Alhazi rose. Barefoot, in a robe that seemed several shades too large, he approached the unfurled map, his movement slow but unerring. The spiral at the city’s heart was a labyrinth, more than symbol: every ring a story, every intersection a forked possibility. He traced the copper rivers, then the crimson ridges, letting the pads of his fingers rest in the grooves between. The voices stilled, the air thickened; he forgot the hall, the feast, even the Allaena chief’s glittering gaze.     He pressed lightly at the spiral’s center. The parchment responded with a subtle give, as if it were thin, soft clay, and the blackness there deepened. Without thinking—without hesitation—he slid his slender finger along the leftward swirl, following its curve outward, outward, until it kissed a tiny fleck of gold at the edge of the city. He paused, then reversed, tracing the opposite direction, this time along a barely visible seam stitched into the map. The world seemed to shift and the spiral hissed, the blackness at its heart unspooling like a skein of midnight oil. The map buckled, shedding motes of silver dust that shimmered as they fell, and the spiral’s lines began to move—not metaphorically, but with a living, writhing reality that drew gasps from the gathered nobility and servants alike. The spiral’s center opened, a shallow well, and with a sound like distant thunder, the map drew first Su’Alhazi’s finger, then his hand, and then the whole of him into its ever-tightening gyre.     He vanished with no more resistance than a drop of dye into water. The court blinked. For a moment, nothing happened; the map snapped flat and blank, the spiral gone, the copper rivers dull. The Allaena chief pocketed the parchment with clinical precision, as though she had never produced it in the first place, and her retinue bowed once, twice, and departed the hall in an orderly file, their faces blurred by an inexplicable mist that seemed to radiate from the king’s own confusion.     At the dais, the queen’s hands clutched the arms of her chair, uncertain whether to cry out or to trust that her son was engaged in some marvelous trick. The king’s eldest son, turned, confused about where his beloved youngest brother had gone, and he was just about to order the guards to seize the Allaena, when he abruptly stopped. A slow smile started to spread across his face, and his mother’s and his father’s and brother’s.     A hush, and then the oldest prince clapped his hands with a thunderous report. “Let us not sully this night with mystery and omen,” he declared, and the muscles in his face worked to compose an expression of revelry. “Tonight is for celebration! Tonight, we honor the cycle, the Equinox, and the promise of renewal.” His words fell over the crowd like a warm mantle; courtiers blinked their confusion away and, as if reawakening from a moment’s sleep, filled their goblets anew and called for minstrels to strike up the next song. The hall, which just moments before had been poised at the edge of catastrophe, erupted in laughter and the rhythmic clapping of hands. The Allaena were gone, the scroll vanished, the memory of Su’Alhazi’s long silence and sudden absence wiped from the room like sand from a polished floor.     Music, bright as a day in midsummer, spilled from hidden alcoves and sent dancers spinning. The servants hoisted fresh amphorae of spiced wine; the kitchens heaved forth platters of fig and mutton and still-warm honey cakes. Only the Queen seemed to hesitate, her smile paused in an unfinished thought, before the laughter and commotion swept her aloft as well. The city’s seven towers glimmered in the evening, their lamps lit in honor of the princes, or perhaps only for the revel itself, and the celebration ran so long that the next sunrise found the revelers still clustered in little knots, retelling the story of a vanished boy as if it were a clever parlor trick, or an elaborate jest. No one could recall the sequence of events, or even the name of the prince at whose table they had dined. The servants quietly removed the extra chair, folded away the child’s favorite cloak, and scrubbed the palace floors until even the smallest traces of his presence faded. A day later, the king commissioned a sculpture to commemorate the Grand Equinox, and the artist, working from memory, produced a tableau of six laughing sons raising a toast to their father.