taair khalisa nasir 🕊️ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
historicals) wrote2025-01-19 03:11 pm
historicals) wrote2025-01-19 03:11 pm
prologue: safe
Your memories of your childhood are a blurry, foggy mess. Tapestries and stuffed toys, posing for paintings, kindhearted maids, kindhearted teachers. The voices of your father and mother, echoing through cavernous hallways. That's it.
And no matter how hard you've searched your memories for one night in particular, in all of your forced recollections, only pieces return to you - like shattered glass, you stand and pick up the pieces of the life that came before.
--
The year is 985, and you are ten years old when your evening is interrupted by a cacophony of sound - shouting, and the distant thunk of crossbow arrows releasing from targets. You look up from where you are curled up in a chair in a sitting room, nose in a book, watching your mother rise in a clatter and make her way to the window to peer out at the lavish courtyards and gate that make up the front of the royal palace of the State of Iria.
At first, you think it's just the guards practicing, but something makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up - and when your mother turns back around towards you, her face is ashen pale. She hurries to your side in a sweep of silk, kneels down next to you and tucks your hair behind your ear.
She says something to you. You don't remember what. You don't remember how she looks, or her smile, or what her voice sounds like. Behind her, you see the windows light up, muffled orange behind cloth curtain - fire. The noise builds, cries of anguish and fury, death rattles and screams, now, and your heart start to beat harder against your ribcage, fluttering wings.
From behind you, comes another voice - a male one, reassuring and familiar. Sir Leonide stands at the door, saluting your mother, and she nods, placing her hands on your shoulders.
"Taair," she says again, soft, taking your chin in her hand to turn your gaze towards her. Your mother's eyes are a radiant blue, but the rest of her face is blurry, blurry. She says something you can't remember. By the gods, you want to remember.
And before you can even react, or understand entirely what's going on, she starts to push you back, back, back towards Leonide, who sets a hand on your back, and then without further ado, scoops you up into his arms. You like Leonide - he's around often, and you've seen him tend to the gardens, and you like that someone so large can be so delicate. Instinctively, you curl your fingers in his clothes, trusting, as he turns on his heel and takes off down the hallway. As he runs, the luxite-powered lanterns in the halls sputter out and plunge the world into darkness, leaving you staring over his shoulder at your mother's thin figure, illuminated from behind by eerie red skies.
The rest is just snatches of memory in tattered pieces.
Leonide rushes you through secret passageways you never knew existed in the palace, and through those dark stone palace walls, you can hear the chaos. You hear mens bodies hit the walls - glass, shattering, windows smashed in, the sound of people dying. You feel the heat of fire from under a door as Leonide rushes you around a corner and away from unknown figures in strange clothing and uniforms alike, all screaming. Over his shoulder, you catch a glance of a massive, imposing wall of a figure with an axe larger than you've ever seen, barking orders. "Death to the State! Clear out the remains and seize the palace at once!"
That is clear.
The air around you smells like smoke, and fire, and the sharp iron tang of blood, blood on the walls of the palace, blood on the floors, burning your childhood home, destroying everything within and when you see an Irian soldier stab his dual knives into a guard and spill his guts across the marble floors, you bury your face in Leonide's shoulder, and he spirits you away in the dead of the night to Lightgloam City, and away from the destruction of the home you grew up in.
In the history books that you so love, this event often earns a sentence or two.
This story is one you are told many times by your guardian. In Lightgloam City, in another large palace, you live in the care of her holiness Bishop Caris.
You knew Caris before she took you under her wing. She is a bishop within the Papal States, a woman renowned for her kindness and faith in the Radiant. You know she's a caretaker of the Sanctuary - other children in an orphanage. Lady Caris has been present at many a royal function, and she knew your parents well, too, enough that the sight of her is a relief. Her smile is soft and sad when she informs you of what happened - that the old nobility of Iria, the people you've known and grown up around, have fled to the safety of Lightgloam City, including you. Many people were lost in this flight, killed by rebels who wanted senseless violence, riotous chaos, and that included your parents.
Caris tucks your hair behind your ear, like your mother did, when the intensity of loss start to rattle your hollow bird bones, hushes you quietly and takes you in her arms.
"Your Highness. From now on, you will stay in my care - I will protect you from those who wish you harm. No child should be forced to witness such horrors."
Your heart aches. You miss your mother and father, but you rub your eyes with your small fists, and you nod, letting the tiny flickering candle of relief flicker on through the crushing onslaught of loss. Though you'll never see your parents again, you are alive, and you're safe, with Lady Caris. You'll be safe, a vassal kept under the wing of the Papal States. Like Iria itself has always been, because you are the last living piece of the Irian royal family, though you have yet to really understand that, or what it means.
But you'll be safe here, and someday, you'll return home to Iria, to your homeland. You just have to be patient - and be thankful, too.
-- ꕥ --
Cloistered away in the safety of Lightgloam City, your life continues on. You attend your lessons, you recite scriptures, you sing the hymns, and you talk with your teachers and the maids who bring your meals, but more than anything, you read.
You read, and you read, and you read. You devour every book you can get your hands on in the massive library of the palace once Caris grants you access to its chambers, but your most favorite books are histories and travelogues. Stories of adventurers, of fine members of the Radiant Guard who explored the outside world, missionaries who brought the Radiant to the dimmest parts of Rodinia. You read swashbuckling adventures of defeats of the Darklight, of valiant and brave soldiers who fought for the Papal States, for the State of Iria, to keep its people safe, to keep their lights on with precious luxite. Your teachers praise you for your quickness, your ability to digest difficult texts, far beyond many of their teachings: the truth is the books feel like a lifeline and you want to know everything.
You become so enamored with the tales of these travelers that you inform your teacher you wish to leave the palace and visit the Vlder mountains. You want to see the Vlderians for yourself, people with ears like a fox and senses just as sharp and cunning. You want to ask if the things you read about them in books are true. That they are excellent hunters, excellent workers, excellent fighters, and most of all, if they loved the State of Iria, too. Your teacher looks startled at the request, shakes her head and laughs it off, and it's never brought up again.
Confused and young, you bring it up to Caris at dinner. She smiles at you, placidly, and tells you she'll look into it, but life carries on.
You ask her again, weeks later, and she's much too busy to take you herself, and you're too young to go travel right now, your highness. You ask her again, a week later, about the Irian River, and she says, The guard can take you to the fountains. Is that flowing water not the same?
It sits badly in your chest, and you stare down at your dinner, silenced by the phrasing, stunned by the artful shutdown, by Caris' kind smile across the table. Even Leonide merely nods in agreement, and the conversation ends as soon as it starts.
To make up for the sadness on your face, Caris buys you a bird for your eleventh birthday, a lovely little lark to keep in your tower room full of books and toys and anything a young man could want. "I so love to hear you sing at services, Your Highness." Caris says, kind smile, kind eyes, "I hope that your songbird brings you just as much joy as you bring to me."
-- ꕥ --
The first time you leave without permission, you are twelve. It's a minor infraction, but nevertheless. You see Caris walking around the gardens with a young girl your age - and the sight ignites you, enough that you rush down the stairs and past the guards, and stop in front of her and Caris with no plan what to say or what to do. After all, you've never seen anyone your age up this close, before.
The girl, with thick, dark hair and proper clothes of a student of the church, looks at you in surprise, before her expression melts into a kind, if shy, smile. You open your mouth to say hello, to properly bow, and Caris looks down at you. Her nose wrinkles, a blink and you'll miss it flash of disapproval that's like being struck by lightning, and you shut your mouth again.
In the end, she allows you to join her and the girl - Samantha, the adopted daughter of the Hierophant - on their walk, but Caris walks between you. You're afforded no time to talk to her, and hastily brought back inside once the walk is done.
The next time you see Samantha and Caris, you try to leave again, but you're stopped by a guard, who informs you that you're to return to your lessons. They don't leave until Samantha and Caris are gone, and you watch them turn to pinpricks in your vision as they move past the palace walls.
Later that night, you climb the roof of your tower and sit there, and you stare at the horizon. You desperately imagine a world where you can traverse all the land that you can see, the world that you'd never know. Where you'd make memories. Adventures. You'd explore your homeland and every land beyond it, and maybe you'd meet others on your journeys, and learn their stories. Maybe you could finally have a friend.
You dream of campfires and shared stories, and your loneliness drags you to earth and binds you there, threatens to pull you completely under. You cry on the roof of your tower curled up with your arms around your knees, with the stars and the moon as your only company.
And when you pull yourself together, hollow as the bones of a bird, even still, you drag yourself dutifully back inside to your room, close your windows, and obediently go to sleep to meet the morning. You are lonely, but you are obedient. Maybe Caris will let you out to make a friend, soon.
--ꕥ--
The days meld together to weeks, to months, to years. Lonely years with your books and your teachers, and the beautiful walls of the palace in Lightgloam City.
The first time you try to sneak out of the palace altogether, you're thirteen. And you do it again, when you're fourteen. And again, and again, and again, and eventually, you are rebuffed before you even make it down the side of the parapet where your room resides, as a Radiant Guard member who looks tired and annoyed marches you back inside by your shoulders, and grumbles about your behavior. After all, you never want for anything. You are dressed in the finest of clothing. You eat the finest of food. You take the finest of lessons, have the finest of tutors, live in the most beautiful palace in all of Rodinia. The bishop cares for you as if you're her son. "You should be grateful," the guard grumbles. "Not everyone has it so nice."
You smile and apologize, bowing your head and promising you'll be obedient, but it's not a real smile. You haven't donned a real one of those in some time.
--ꕥ--
One night over dinner with Caris as usual, you ask her, in a last ditch request of desperation, if you can travel back to Iria to see its beauty for yourself. You've prepared the perfect argument for this moment - you barely remember what it looks like, your homeland, and it makes your bones itch. You're almost old enough to rule, now. If you're their prince, and they want to see you, shouldn't you be allowed to at least visit now that things have settled down? Shouldn't you know the land you'll rule over someday? How will you be a good ruer, if you don't?
"It's for your own safety that you stay,", Caris tells you. Her smile is sympathetic. Kind even, and she gets up and crosses the room, then cups your face gently in her hands and tells you she understands your sentiments, that she understands why you sneak out. That she's sorry, but she explains - "There are far too many watchful eyes that want you dead, Your Highness. I would be devastated, if anything ever happened to you."
Caris is kind, and she cares for you. You swallow down your disappointment, and you nod. Maybe you are just ungrateful.
--ꕥ--
The lark Caris bought you, in its cage, never once sings a birdsong. You free it after one of your nights sitting on the roof, and you watch as it soars up, up, high into the sky until it's beyond your line of sight, never to be seen again. You can't blame it.
No matter how beautiful a cage, no matter how kind the bird's owner, a cage is still a cage, after all.
When she finds out the lark is gone - assumes it escaped, so you don't have to lie - Caris buys you a bluebird. This one sings.
--ꕥ--
By the time you're nearing adulthood, you have at least convinced Caris to let you go to the market. You're delighted at the prospect, even as you hide your silver hair under a hood, and you take your first steps out into Lightgloam City with a spring in your step and hope renewed in your heart. You make it four or five steps down the main thoroughfare, before you feel a pair of eyes on the back of your neck, and you realize you're being watched.
It's like that everywhere you go. When you look out at the gate of the city, you note a member of the Radiant Guard standing among the locals, watching you through his golden helmet. As you walk to the market, to examine the produce and spices and goods from other nations, you note a shopkeeper staring at you, pin of the Radiant Guard on his chest. You can't escape. You can't escape any of them. They watch you like a hawk, keep you safe, keep you pampered, keep you, keep you, keep you.
In the end, you purchase an apple, and more importantly, a book from a merchant from the State - no, from the Kingdom of Iria. It is a rare and precious purchase, a book for your own personal library and not a gift from Caris, and the merchant is all too happy to part with it for the absolutely exorbitant amount of money you offer for it, unaware of the precious treasure they had. You hug the book to your chest as you hurry home, and when you make it back to Caris, who smiles her kind little smile and huffs when she notes your purchase, she teasingly calls you a bookworm and asks what it is. You tell her shyly you bought a book of fairy tales, and she nods, and sends you back off to your room.
It's the first time you've ever lied to her.
Your heart pounds as you shut the door and lock it, then throw yourself onto your bed and dive under the covers, opening the book in your lap and lighting up a simple spell to use as a reading light. This is not, in fact, a book of fairy tales. It's a history book, a brief account of some of the events of the last Radiant War. You grab another book to set this one inside, just in case, and you curl up, and you read.
The book describes events you're familiar with in your studies - you've always loved to study history, more than anything in this world. It goes on past the history of the last Radiant War, past the earthquake that uncovered rare and valuable luxite in Iria's rich lands. A chapter near the end details the story of a rebellion, fourteen years ago.
You know this story - General Faris' betrayal. The people who yearn for the Papal States' protection, for the Radiant's light to dawn across the land and keep them fed and safe. The chaos and lawlessness in the reign of now King Faris. Still, you read, and as a passage catches your eye, your blood stops cold.
No one is looking for you.
No one is hunting you down. The Papal States are no savior of a country in desperate need of protection, but a ruthless, cruel empire. And you, the scion, the final survivor of the original bloodline, have been kept in this cage your entire life not for your safety, but for her use.
Caris has been lying to you the entire time.
You rise from your bed in a flurry, tossing your blankets in a heap as you climb your shelves and get out your history books, and in a fervor of a madman, you compare the two stories - the propaganda of the Papal States, and the story in front of you. You question it, too, is it real? Is anything real? What's the truth? How will you ever actually know which story is the right one?
And further than that. What else has she lied to you about? What horrors have been committed? And worse... what horrors could she commit, using you as her proxy?
All these questions coagulate, and the answer to the last crystallizes. the desire to leave, to get to Iria and ask, to learn their histories, burns in you like a pilot light.
--
A thorough examination of your collection of books and the palace's library's books reveals half-truths and unknowns. There is no complete history of Iria available to you. Large parts of the State - no, of Iria's existence are blacked out or simply unknown. Unverified, unsolved, and it becomes your purpose. You have a purpose. You cannot fly from your cage. Not yet.
You cannot fight back with weapons. She is too powerful - the Papal States are far too powerful.
But what you can do, as you begin to chronicle the histories bit by bit, undertaking a research project that consumes you for the next several years of your life, is learn. You will unravel every atrocity. Every lie. You will shine a light on the mistreatment of the Irians, the Vlderians, the horrors of the luxite experiments done to Vlderian children and innocent men. You will unveil all of it. Even if it kills you. For the first time, you don't hope that it will, because you have to finish this book. You have to expose Caris for who she is, from inside her gilded cage.
What you can do, what you will do, caged bird that you are, is sing.
And no matter how hard you've searched your memories for one night in particular, in all of your forced recollections, only pieces return to you - like shattered glass, you stand and pick up the pieces of the life that came before.
--
The year is 985, and you are ten years old when your evening is interrupted by a cacophony of sound - shouting, and the distant thunk of crossbow arrows releasing from targets. You look up from where you are curled up in a chair in a sitting room, nose in a book, watching your mother rise in a clatter and make her way to the window to peer out at the lavish courtyards and gate that make up the front of the royal palace of the State of Iria.
At first, you think it's just the guards practicing, but something makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up - and when your mother turns back around towards you, her face is ashen pale. She hurries to your side in a sweep of silk, kneels down next to you and tucks your hair behind your ear.
She says something to you. You don't remember what. You don't remember how she looks, or her smile, or what her voice sounds like. Behind her, you see the windows light up, muffled orange behind cloth curtain - fire. The noise builds, cries of anguish and fury, death rattles and screams, now, and your heart start to beat harder against your ribcage, fluttering wings.
From behind you, comes another voice - a male one, reassuring and familiar. Sir Leonide stands at the door, saluting your mother, and she nods, placing her hands on your shoulders.
"Taair," she says again, soft, taking your chin in her hand to turn your gaze towards her. Your mother's eyes are a radiant blue, but the rest of her face is blurry, blurry. She says something you can't remember. By the gods, you want to remember.
And before you can even react, or understand entirely what's going on, she starts to push you back, back, back towards Leonide, who sets a hand on your back, and then without further ado, scoops you up into his arms. You like Leonide - he's around often, and you've seen him tend to the gardens, and you like that someone so large can be so delicate. Instinctively, you curl your fingers in his clothes, trusting, as he turns on his heel and takes off down the hallway. As he runs, the luxite-powered lanterns in the halls sputter out and plunge the world into darkness, leaving you staring over his shoulder at your mother's thin figure, illuminated from behind by eerie red skies.
The rest is just snatches of memory in tattered pieces.
Leonide rushes you through secret passageways you never knew existed in the palace, and through those dark stone palace walls, you can hear the chaos. You hear mens bodies hit the walls - glass, shattering, windows smashed in, the sound of people dying. You feel the heat of fire from under a door as Leonide rushes you around a corner and away from unknown figures in strange clothing and uniforms alike, all screaming. Over his shoulder, you catch a glance of a massive, imposing wall of a figure with an axe larger than you've ever seen, barking orders. "Death to the State! Clear out the remains and seize the palace at once!"
That is clear.
The air around you smells like smoke, and fire, and the sharp iron tang of blood, blood on the walls of the palace, blood on the floors, burning your childhood home, destroying everything within and when you see an Irian soldier stab his dual knives into a guard and spill his guts across the marble floors, you bury your face in Leonide's shoulder, and he spirits you away in the dead of the night to Lightgloam City, and away from the destruction of the home you grew up in.
In the history books that you so love, this event often earns a sentence or two.
In the year 985, the State of Iria was attacked by vicious rebels led by General Faris, who declared himself the King of Iria, renaming it as a Kingdom and separating from the Papal States of Rodinia. Thankfully, with the help of the Papal States, the aristocrats and royals of the state of Iria were spared from the atrocities of the rebels led by Faris. The brave soldiers of the Papal States exerted all their efforts to save this nation in peril, but ultimately, the nation was consumed by war and fell under the plot of the rebellion. The people of Iria's hope for their missing royalty - the lost prince, in particular - remains to this day. This author hopes only that the Radiant will return him to his rightful place on our throne, soon.
This story is one you are told many times by your guardian. In Lightgloam City, in another large palace, you live in the care of her holiness Bishop Caris.
You knew Caris before she took you under her wing. She is a bishop within the Papal States, a woman renowned for her kindness and faith in the Radiant. You know she's a caretaker of the Sanctuary - other children in an orphanage. Lady Caris has been present at many a royal function, and she knew your parents well, too, enough that the sight of her is a relief. Her smile is soft and sad when she informs you of what happened - that the old nobility of Iria, the people you've known and grown up around, have fled to the safety of Lightgloam City, including you. Many people were lost in this flight, killed by rebels who wanted senseless violence, riotous chaos, and that included your parents.
Caris tucks your hair behind your ear, like your mother did, when the intensity of loss start to rattle your hollow bird bones, hushes you quietly and takes you in her arms.
"Your Highness. From now on, you will stay in my care - I will protect you from those who wish you harm. No child should be forced to witness such horrors."
Your heart aches. You miss your mother and father, but you rub your eyes with your small fists, and you nod, letting the tiny flickering candle of relief flicker on through the crushing onslaught of loss. Though you'll never see your parents again, you are alive, and you're safe, with Lady Caris. You'll be safe, a vassal kept under the wing of the Papal States. Like Iria itself has always been, because you are the last living piece of the Irian royal family, though you have yet to really understand that, or what it means.
But you'll be safe here, and someday, you'll return home to Iria, to your homeland. You just have to be patient - and be thankful, too.
Cloistered away in the safety of Lightgloam City, your life continues on. You attend your lessons, you recite scriptures, you sing the hymns, and you talk with your teachers and the maids who bring your meals, but more than anything, you read.
You read, and you read, and you read. You devour every book you can get your hands on in the massive library of the palace once Caris grants you access to its chambers, but your most favorite books are histories and travelogues. Stories of adventurers, of fine members of the Radiant Guard who explored the outside world, missionaries who brought the Radiant to the dimmest parts of Rodinia. You read swashbuckling adventures of defeats of the Darklight, of valiant and brave soldiers who fought for the Papal States, for the State of Iria, to keep its people safe, to keep their lights on with precious luxite. Your teachers praise you for your quickness, your ability to digest difficult texts, far beyond many of their teachings: the truth is the books feel like a lifeline and you want to know everything.
You become so enamored with the tales of these travelers that you inform your teacher you wish to leave the palace and visit the Vlder mountains. You want to see the Vlderians for yourself, people with ears like a fox and senses just as sharp and cunning. You want to ask if the things you read about them in books are true. That they are excellent hunters, excellent workers, excellent fighters, and most of all, if they loved the State of Iria, too. Your teacher looks startled at the request, shakes her head and laughs it off, and it's never brought up again.
Confused and young, you bring it up to Caris at dinner. She smiles at you, placidly, and tells you she'll look into it, but life carries on.
You ask her again, weeks later, and she's much too busy to take you herself, and you're too young to go travel right now, your highness. You ask her again, a week later, about the Irian River, and she says, The guard can take you to the fountains. Is that flowing water not the same?
It sits badly in your chest, and you stare down at your dinner, silenced by the phrasing, stunned by the artful shutdown, by Caris' kind smile across the table. Even Leonide merely nods in agreement, and the conversation ends as soon as it starts.
To make up for the sadness on your face, Caris buys you a bird for your eleventh birthday, a lovely little lark to keep in your tower room full of books and toys and anything a young man could want. "I so love to hear you sing at services, Your Highness." Caris says, kind smile, kind eyes, "I hope that your songbird brings you just as much joy as you bring to me."
The first time you leave without permission, you are twelve. It's a minor infraction, but nevertheless. You see Caris walking around the gardens with a young girl your age - and the sight ignites you, enough that you rush down the stairs and past the guards, and stop in front of her and Caris with no plan what to say or what to do. After all, you've never seen anyone your age up this close, before.
The girl, with thick, dark hair and proper clothes of a student of the church, looks at you in surprise, before her expression melts into a kind, if shy, smile. You open your mouth to say hello, to properly bow, and Caris looks down at you. Her nose wrinkles, a blink and you'll miss it flash of disapproval that's like being struck by lightning, and you shut your mouth again.
In the end, she allows you to join her and the girl - Samantha, the adopted daughter of the Hierophant - on their walk, but Caris walks between you. You're afforded no time to talk to her, and hastily brought back inside once the walk is done.
The next time you see Samantha and Caris, you try to leave again, but you're stopped by a guard, who informs you that you're to return to your lessons. They don't leave until Samantha and Caris are gone, and you watch them turn to pinpricks in your vision as they move past the palace walls.
Later that night, you climb the roof of your tower and sit there, and you stare at the horizon. You desperately imagine a world where you can traverse all the land that you can see, the world that you'd never know. Where you'd make memories. Adventures. You'd explore your homeland and every land beyond it, and maybe you'd meet others on your journeys, and learn their stories. Maybe you could finally have a friend.
You dream of campfires and shared stories, and your loneliness drags you to earth and binds you there, threatens to pull you completely under. You cry on the roof of your tower curled up with your arms around your knees, with the stars and the moon as your only company.
And when you pull yourself together, hollow as the bones of a bird, even still, you drag yourself dutifully back inside to your room, close your windows, and obediently go to sleep to meet the morning. You are lonely, but you are obedient. Maybe Caris will let you out to make a friend, soon.
The days meld together to weeks, to months, to years. Lonely years with your books and your teachers, and the beautiful walls of the palace in Lightgloam City.
The first time you try to sneak out of the palace altogether, you're thirteen. And you do it again, when you're fourteen. And again, and again, and again, and eventually, you are rebuffed before you even make it down the side of the parapet where your room resides, as a Radiant Guard member who looks tired and annoyed marches you back inside by your shoulders, and grumbles about your behavior. After all, you never want for anything. You are dressed in the finest of clothing. You eat the finest of food. You take the finest of lessons, have the finest of tutors, live in the most beautiful palace in all of Rodinia. The bishop cares for you as if you're her son. "You should be grateful," the guard grumbles. "Not everyone has it so nice."
You smile and apologize, bowing your head and promising you'll be obedient, but it's not a real smile. You haven't donned a real one of those in some time.
One night over dinner with Caris as usual, you ask her, in a last ditch request of desperation, if you can travel back to Iria to see its beauty for yourself. You've prepared the perfect argument for this moment - you barely remember what it looks like, your homeland, and it makes your bones itch. You're almost old enough to rule, now. If you're their prince, and they want to see you, shouldn't you be allowed to at least visit now that things have settled down? Shouldn't you know the land you'll rule over someday? How will you be a good ruer, if you don't?
"It's for your own safety that you stay,", Caris tells you. Her smile is sympathetic. Kind even, and she gets up and crosses the room, then cups your face gently in her hands and tells you she understands your sentiments, that she understands why you sneak out. That she's sorry, but she explains - "There are far too many watchful eyes that want you dead, Your Highness. I would be devastated, if anything ever happened to you."
Caris is kind, and she cares for you. You swallow down your disappointment, and you nod. Maybe you are just ungrateful.
The lark Caris bought you, in its cage, never once sings a birdsong. You free it after one of your nights sitting on the roof, and you watch as it soars up, up, high into the sky until it's beyond your line of sight, never to be seen again. You can't blame it.
No matter how beautiful a cage, no matter how kind the bird's owner, a cage is still a cage, after all.
When she finds out the lark is gone - assumes it escaped, so you don't have to lie - Caris buys you a bluebird. This one sings.
By the time you're nearing adulthood, you have at least convinced Caris to let you go to the market. You're delighted at the prospect, even as you hide your silver hair under a hood, and you take your first steps out into Lightgloam City with a spring in your step and hope renewed in your heart. You make it four or five steps down the main thoroughfare, before you feel a pair of eyes on the back of your neck, and you realize you're being watched.
It's like that everywhere you go. When you look out at the gate of the city, you note a member of the Radiant Guard standing among the locals, watching you through his golden helmet. As you walk to the market, to examine the produce and spices and goods from other nations, you note a shopkeeper staring at you, pin of the Radiant Guard on his chest. You can't escape. You can't escape any of them. They watch you like a hawk, keep you safe, keep you pampered, keep you, keep you, keep you.
In the end, you purchase an apple, and more importantly, a book from a merchant from the State - no, from the Kingdom of Iria. It is a rare and precious purchase, a book for your own personal library and not a gift from Caris, and the merchant is all too happy to part with it for the absolutely exorbitant amount of money you offer for it, unaware of the precious treasure they had. You hug the book to your chest as you hurry home, and when you make it back to Caris, who smiles her kind little smile and huffs when she notes your purchase, she teasingly calls you a bookworm and asks what it is. You tell her shyly you bought a book of fairy tales, and she nods, and sends you back off to your room.
It's the first time you've ever lied to her.
Your heart pounds as you shut the door and lock it, then throw yourself onto your bed and dive under the covers, opening the book in your lap and lighting up a simple spell to use as a reading light. This is not, in fact, a book of fairy tales. It's a history book, a brief account of some of the events of the last Radiant War. You grab another book to set this one inside, just in case, and you curl up, and you read.
The book describes events you're familiar with in your studies - you've always loved to study history, more than anything in this world. It goes on past the history of the last Radiant War, past the earthquake that uncovered rare and valuable luxite in Iria's rich lands. A chapter near the end details the story of a rebellion, fourteen years ago.
You know this story - General Faris' betrayal. The people who yearn for the Papal States' protection, for the Radiant's light to dawn across the land and keep them fed and safe. The chaos and lawlessness in the reign of now King Faris. Still, you read, and as a passage catches your eye, your blood stops cold.
T
he Papal States' subjugation of the Irians reached a boiling point in 985. Mistreatment of the nation's peoples and resources under the ruthless rule of the States sparked a rebellion, and Iria declared its independence from the Papal States and reclaimed its rightful ownership of its land and luxite resources from the interference of foreign powers.
The royal family of Iria was killed in the ensuing siege of the castle, including the king, the queen, and the young prince, and thus marked the dawn of an age of independence for the Kingdom of Iria.
The Papal States have attempted to encroach upon Iria's sovereignty multiple times, claiming legitimacy, but the deceased royal line proves it - there is no other legitimate king than the one who sits on the throne today.
No one is looking for you.
No one is hunting you down. The Papal States are no savior of a country in desperate need of protection, but a ruthless, cruel empire. And you, the scion, the final survivor of the original bloodline, have been kept in this cage your entire life not for your safety, but for her use.
Caris has been lying to you the entire time.
You rise from your bed in a flurry, tossing your blankets in a heap as you climb your shelves and get out your history books, and in a fervor of a madman, you compare the two stories - the propaganda of the Papal States, and the story in front of you. You question it, too, is it real? Is anything real? What's the truth? How will you ever actually know which story is the right one?
And further than that. What else has she lied to you about? What horrors have been committed? And worse... what horrors could she commit, using you as her proxy?
All these questions coagulate, and the answer to the last crystallizes. the desire to leave, to get to Iria and ask, to learn their histories, burns in you like a pilot light.
--
A thorough examination of your collection of books and the palace's library's books reveals half-truths and unknowns. There is no complete history of Iria available to you. Large parts of the State - no, of Iria's existence are blacked out or simply unknown. Unverified, unsolved, and it becomes your purpose. You have a purpose. You cannot fly from your cage. Not yet.
You cannot fight back with weapons. She is too powerful - the Papal States are far too powerful.
But what you can do, as you begin to chronicle the histories bit by bit, undertaking a research project that consumes you for the next several years of your life, is learn. You will unravel every atrocity. Every lie. You will shine a light on the mistreatment of the Irians, the Vlderians, the horrors of the luxite experiments done to Vlderian children and innocent men. You will unveil all of it. Even if it kills you. For the first time, you don't hope that it will, because you have to finish this book. You have to expose Caris for who she is, from inside her gilded cage.
What you can do, what you will do, caged bird that you are, is sing.