The Librarian Prince
1283 Words
The library’s dust tasted like ash. Adrian vi Valenor inhaled it as he traced a finger along the spine of *Treatises on Aural Resonance*, the book’s leather brittle with age. Sunlight slanted through stained-glass windows, painting the shelves in hues of blood and gold. Outside, the imperial court buzzed with the Blood Moon Festival—laughter, lyres, the clatter of goblets. Inside, only the whispers of parchment kept him company.
*Third law of aura knights: The blade is a mirror of the soul.* His mother had told him that, long before the executioner’s axe. Now, the words mocked him.
“Prince Adrian.”
He didn’t turn. He knew the voice—**Lady Evandra**, the Senate’s newest sycophant, her tone dripping with faux reverence.
“The Emperor requests your presence at the feast,” she said.
“Does he?” Adrian thumbed a page on **Fifth-Rate Knight** techniques, its diagrams crude. “Or does the Senate wish to count how many grapes I eat before declaring me *gluttonous* as well as weak?”
A pause. Evandra’s perfume—night-blooming jasmine, Selene’s favorite—curled into the air. “Your humor is… unkind, Your Highness.”
“Kindness is a currency here,” he said softly. “And I am bankrupt.”
When she left, he exhaled. *Weak. Bookish. Bastard-born.* The court’s labels clung like cobwebs. Let them think it. Let them all think it.
---
II. The Ghosts in the Shelves**
Adrian’s sanctuary was a forgotten alcove behind a tapestry of the First Emperor slaying the Frost Wyrm. Here, hidden between treatises on **9th Tier Mage** rituals (*”The Sundering of Veils”*) and ledgers of grain taxes, he kept his true work: a mosaic of stolen letters, maps, and poetry.
*Poetry.* His mother’s art. She’d sung ballads of starlit rivers, her voice warm as hearth-smoke, even as the Second Empress’s spies circled. Now, Adrian wrote verses of his own. Ciphered ones.
He unrolled a scroll, its surface etched with innocuous odes to spring blooms. To the untrained eye, drivel. To **General Rykard**, disgraced after losing the Iron Dominion border wars, it was a command: *Secure the western granaries. Await the storm.*
Footsteps echoed. Adrian stilled.
“*There* you are.”
**Prince Varian** leaned against the shelves, his aura sword, *Dawnspite*, gleaming at his hip. At nineteen, he was everything Adrian wasn’t—golden-haired, a **Second-Rate Knight** by twelve, his smile a honed blade.
“The feast bores me,” Varian said. “Let’s hunt boar in the south woods.”
Adrian kept his voice dull. “I’ve essays to revise.”
“Ah, right. The *scholar-prince*.” Varian flicked a treatise on ley lines. It crashed to the floor. “Tell me, Adrian—do you ever tire of playing ghost?”
*Every day.*
“Ghosts don’t tire,” Adrian said. “They wait.”
Varian’s smirk faltered, just for a breath, before he tossed a fig from the feast table. It splattered against Adrian’s parchment. “Suit yourself. But when Father dies, don’t beg me for mercy.”
When he left, Adrian peeled the fig’s flesh from his map. The seeds oozed like old blood.
---
. The Memory: Lira’s Song**
*Flashback*
*Seven years old, and the world was made of song.*
*Adrian’s mother, Lira, spun him through their sunlit chambers, her voice weaving tales of moonlit knights and stardust dragons. She smelled of rosemary and ink, her hair a cascade of autumn fire.*
*“Again!” he laughed as she lifted him, her hands calloused from lute strings.*
*“Hush, little shadow,” she whispered. “The walls have ears.”*
*But even then, he saw the fear in her eyes. The way she glanced at the door when boots clattered outside. The Second Empress’s spies, always watching.*
*One night, the song changed.*
*They came at dusk. Selene’s guards, their armor stamped with the Lirahn viper. They dragged Lira into the courtyard as Adrian clawed at their gauntlets. The Emperor watched from his balcony, face carved of stone.*
*“Please!” Lira begged, not for her life, but Adrian’s. “He is your son!”*
*Cassian turned away.*
*The axe fell.*
*Adrian did not scream. He folded the sound into his bones, where it festered.*
*That night, he vowed: They would all burn.*
---
### **IV. The Blade in the Dark**
The library’s undercroft was a crypt of shadows, its air thick with mildew. Here, Adrian trained.
*Duskbreaker* hummed as he unsheathed it, the blade’s silver glow faint but steady. **Fifth-Rate Knight**—the lowest rank, they sneered. But the tome he’d stolen from the Mage Association’s archives whispered secrets: *Aura is not strength, but focus. A needle’s pierce, not a hammer’s blow.*
He moved through the **Awakened Knight** stances, muscles burning. Sweat dripped onto the dirt floor. *Weak*, they called him. Let them. Weakness was a mask.
A rat skittered. Adrian spun, *Duskbreaker* slicing upward. The blade’s edge grazed a wooden beam—and split it, clean as parchment.
He stared. Only **Expert Knights** could cut so precisely.
A sound behind him.
Adrian whirled, blade raised.
**Lady Seraphine** stood in the doorway, her gown of Veyran silk shimmering like poisoned wine. “Oh, *Prince*. What fascinating… hobbies you have.”
---
### **V. The Game Begins**
Seraphine stepped closer, her eyes on *Duskbreaker*. “The Senate thinks your mother’s blood diluted you. But here you are—a wolf in sheepskin.”
Adrian lowered the blade. “What do you want?”
“Allies.” She tossed him a velvet pouch. Inside: a lock of silver hair—*Selene’s*—and a vial of duskflower poison. “The Second Empress plans to disinherit you publicly tomorrow. A *tragic* scandal, involving stolen jewels.”
Adrian’s pulse quickened. “And?”
“And I dislike wasted potential.” Her smile chilled. “Handle this. Prove you’re more than a ghost… and House Veyra will consider your proposal.”
*Proposal.* The betrothal was Selene’s design, a chain to bind him. But Seraphine’s gaze held a challenge. *Play the game, or die.*
When she left, Adrian pocketed the poison.
*Patience*, he told himself. *Patience.*
But in the dark, *Duskbreaker* glowed brighter.
---
### **VI. The Feast of Fools**
Adrian attended the feast in a plain doublet, his seat at the far end of the table, between a senile duke and a marble bust of the Third Emperor. The hall roared with laughter as Varian regaled the court with tales of his latest hunt—how he’d slain a direwolf with a single strike.
“A **Second-Rate Knight**!” Senator Braxos slurred. “Soon to be First!”
Adrian nibbled a fig, its sweetness cloying. *Focus. Observe.*
Selene sat beside the Emperor, her smile venomous. Cassian, gaunt and wheezing, stared hollowly at his plate.
*Dying*, Adrian realized. *He’s dying.*
A servant refilled his wine. Adrian’s fingers brushed the vial in his pocket—
—when a scream tore through the hall.
A **First-Rate Knight** collapsed, foaming at the mouth. Selene shot to her feet. “Assassin!”
Chaos erupted. Adrian met Seraphine’s gaze across the table. Her lips curved.
*Your move, Prince.*
---
### **VII. The Ghost’s Gambit**
Later, in the crypts, Adrian knelt before his mother’s nameless stone. *Duskbreaker* lay across his palms.
“They think me powerless,” he whispered. “But I see the threads.”
Selene’s plot. Seraphine’s ambition. Varian’s greed.
And the Mage Association’s shadows, creeping closer.
He pressed his forehead to the cold rock. “I will burn it all, Mother. Even if I burn with it.”
Above, the palace bells tolled midnight. Somewhere, a new ghost began to stir.
---
- Writer
