Plight of the Prince

Chapter 1: A Shoe in the Dead Garden

Kellan gasped awake. His eyes flew open and his vision filled with the sight of his childhood bedroom. His old four poster bed and the nursery rhyme painted on the ceiling provided him with all the proof he needed to accept this dream as reality.

He lay still under the covers for a moment, trying to process everything that happened, his mind twisting around the astounding impossibility.

He drew his hands to his face and saw that they were trembling, but more than that, he focused on his small pale fingers. These were a child's hands, so different from the pair he was used to.

He slowly pushed his limp body up from the bed, and peeled back the covers to reveal his small pale legs. He slid down from the high bed and walked across the room. Staring at his reflection, he found a little comfort in his familiar grey eyes, and inky black hair, rather it was his body that startled him. He was no longer a man, but a child again, small and frail.

Once again the delicate little prince he used to be.

Too shocked to rejoice, Kellan just stared at himself in his silk pyjamas.

Against all the spell had worked.

For all his life he had been under the impression that he didn't inherit any magic from his mother, when in reality it was just the poisonous potion he was being fed that concealed his magic for all those years. Just as he was about to die, his magic broke free to save his life.

"Time magic..." Kellan whispered, a dark grin curving up his lips.

For all those years he thought he was just unfortunate, but really an ancient and powerful magic was locked up inside of him - the magic to control time. It was a magic that had saved his life, judging from the state of his body and his surroundings, had taken him back to when he was a child.

He sucked in an anxious breath realising that he didn't know what date he had returned to. A flicker of hope flashed across his dull eyes, there was a possibility he had been taken back to before his mother was killed. With everything he knew now, he could definitely save her this time.

Kellan forgot about his frail body and dashed over to his wardrobe. He thrust aside his hanging clothes to check the panels at the back of the wardrobe.

His heart dropped as he saw the lines carved into the wood. His eyes grew hot and moist remembering the quill he used to scratch the wood as a child, each stroke marked a day since his mother's death. From a glance he could tell that there were more than one thousand strokes already.

His magic had taken him far into the past, but not far enough.

It was already a miracle that he was able to go back to this point, and yet in that moment he wished more than anything that he could go back further and see his mother again.

Three gentle knocks tapped at his bedroom door.

Kellan swiftly shut the wardrobe and turned to see the door to his room swing open. In came the butler and a few other servants.

"Your Highness?" The butler hurried over to the Prince and kneeled before him. "What are you doing out of bed? You are still too weak to move around."

The moaning butler looked up into the prince's eyes expecting to see that weak and feeble expression on his face, but he almost gasped when he saw that Prince Kellan was glaring at him with a stare as cold as ice.

The butler blinked and the prince's face was back to normal. He concluded that he must have imagined it.

"Don't worry, Bas. I'm feeling a little better today." Kellan smiled meekly just as he used to when he was in his isolation.