The Princess Who Wasn't

Chapter Two: A Shelf Of Gifts

Many hundreds of miles away from where Merilla had fainted a woman and a man sat on the edge of a small pool in the back of a huge cave. The man put his arm around the woman and pulled her close. Tears ran down the woman’s face as she held the tiny birthday present in her hand. This morning she had painstakingly picked out the gift she would have given her daughter for her birthday, wrapped it and then just held on to it. She wasn’t ready to put it on the shelf with the 13 other gifts yet.

14 years ago, this woman gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, pale skinned with red hair and freckles across her nose. She was the happiest baby. She never cried and her favorite thing to do was giggle. Then she was gone. Lost to the ocean forever. It happened all of a sudden when the small family was spending time swimming, the swell came out of nowhere and separated the three. The man, the woman, and the baby at only seven months old pushed apart by the force of the very part of nature they relied on for survival.

The man and woman searched for the baby as they each made their way back home. Both hoping and wishing the other had the baby. However, once they both reached home the man and woman realized the baby was gone completely. The devastation manifested into the worst pain the parents had ever felt. Physically, they hadn’t been harmed but if you had seen them in that moment you would’ve thought their hearts were being ripped out and wrapped in barbed wire. The child’s mother wailed and clutched her chest as her father wrapped his mother with one arm, pulling her close, and covered his chest with his other hand and sobbed with his head bowed. However, the crippling pain of loosing their child didn’t keep them from continuing their search. Every day for years they searched the nearby islands and land masses on the minimal chance that someone found her. If someone did find her, it was never her parents.

There was only one clue that she was alive, the magic clam shell with the orb that changed colors based on the state of her existence. If the baby was dead the clam shell would have closed. If she was joyful it would be yellow. If the baby was sad the orb would be purple. Shortly after they had returned to the cave the orb had turned purple and stayed that way for years. Then, when the baby would have been eight years old the orb turned gray and hadn’t changed since. That was six years ago.

There had never been a gray orb so the man and the woman had no idea what it meant but it did worry them. What state made an orb loose all color? Could it be a lack of emotion? But what would have caused a child to become that closed off? When they consulted the rest of their family and the rest of those that reside with them in the cave and surrounding waters, nobody knew anything about the gray colored orb. They just hoped where ever she was, she was safe.