The Sad Prince

The girl had been wandering along the dusty road for many days. Her dress was of a yellow to outshine the sun, and was embroidered around the hem and cuffs with cherry-red flowers. Long and burnished was her brown hair, twined and tangled through with small red roses. She carried nothing with her save a thin leather satchel, with a little bit of food inside.

        Despite her travelling, the girl was not wearied, and her warm and curious eyes admired everything along the path: from the birds to the flowers to the centipede crawling through the dust, and up again to the wistful white clouds. Everything was a wonder to her.

        One morning she turned a corner and came across a ruined town. The town had not fallen recently: the blackened remains of walls stood poking drearily from a mass of greenery like lonely ghosts confined to a prison of vegetation. Roofing beams, shattered and askew, were bound up in moss and ivy and all but indistinguishable from the branches of the trees that reached possessively over them. Dandelions as sunny as the girl’s dress grew tall and proud from cracks in the paving stones, and nodded their heads at her knees as she passed. To her left, a flock of tiny iridescent birds chittered like eager gossips in a seedy bush that filled the whole interior of a roofless cottage. Rabbits burrowed where floors once were, and unknown eyes were round discs in empty windows that fled at her approach. In the middle of the road lay a large wagon wheel ringed in a lazy blue haze of forget-me-nots: now a plaything for purple lizards with transparent wings that buzzed across her path.

        The ruins were inhabited with an abundance of life.

        But there were no people.   

        There had been no people here for a very long time.  

        After awhile, the girl came to the centre of the town where there rose before her a very great and mournful castle. Ivy had strangled most of the towers and parts had collapsed into mossy rubble. The windows were small black voids as though night were sleeping within, though here and there sunlight streamed through oddly shaped cracks in the walls. Once, guards must have patrolled the crenellated walkways, but nothing of them now remained. The huge gates stood wide open.

        Seeing that the drawbridge was down, the girl ventured across, rotten wood creaking beneath her sandals. Below her, the moat was filled with a bottomless tangle of brambles.

        Beyond the gates lay a courtyard carpeted thickly with brown leaves. The girl picked her way across with rustling steps, looking all around her at the forgotten grey walls. There was a kind of grim dignity to the place, as though the castle were determined to continue standing while time wore it relentlessly down.

        She reached a door and pushed it creaking open.

        She passed through a cold and empty chamber to another, grander set of doors and entered them as well, to find herself in a great echoing hall with shadows in every corner and a white speckling of bird droppings on the floor. Overhead, a chandelier was adorned with spider webs. There were rugs and tapestries and plump seat cushions which once had been rich and colourful, now frayed and spilling fluffy innards. Only the moths ate dinner here. From far aloft in the rafters, a large grey owl blinked luminous moon eyes down at her. The girl closed the door again with a soft apology and left him in peace.

        For the rest of the morning the girl wandered through the abandoned castle, passing lanterns rusted in their brackets and decaying furniture and once, a rusty sword lying on the floor. She was starting to become a little bored with all of the dust, but then she came upon a magnificent door bound with tarnished gold, and thought ah! Here is where the treasures must be kept! Eagerly, she took the handle and opened it.