Page 73 of Somber Prince

The big cave made me feel less claustrophobic and confined. But I longed to see the sky.

I climbed up the stairs to the floor above and into Rha’s private dining room. It was empty. I assumed the guards outside the doors wouldn’t let me go out, so I turned into Rha’s sitting room instead.

The cat lay curled up in the cushions, like a blot of pure darkness against the gold-and-purple silk. As I approached, she raised her head, squinting her golden-green eyes at me.

“You’re not going to tell your master on me, are you?” I whispered to make as little noise as possible in the perfect quiet of the room.

She kept watching me as I made my way to the window. It was closed with shutters. The moment I opened it, the cat jumped off the cushions and beelined to me.

“Do you want to go out, kitty?”

A red and orange glow fell on my face when I moved a shutter aside. The vivid colors of sunset splashed across the sky. I yanked the window open wider, letting the bright hues spill into the room.

It’d been so long since I’d seen the sky, even longer since I saw a sunset.

The cat slinked by my legs, her back rubbing against the hem of my robe. I followed her out onto the open patio.

The black desert sand crunched under the soles of my slippers. It covered the mosaic floor of the patio in a thick layer that almost completely hid the tiles from view. The sand must’ve been blown in during the day because I’d never seen so much of it here at night.

The patio was on the outer wall of the palace. It opened to the unobstructed view of the horizon and the spectacular sunset. The sloped wall ran downwards, overgrown with long soft grass. The wispy ends of it undulated like waves in the evening breeze.

The grass grew shorter as the wall descended toward the black desert floor far below. The sand broke the turf into patches and grassy knolls the further from the city it went, swallowing it completely just a few paces from the place where the city wall met the desert.

With a brief purring sound, the cat leaped on the banister around the patio then disappeared into the tall grass beyond.

I gazed out into the desert where the ocean of black dunes replaced the gray waves of the grass of the oasis city.

The desert looked ethereally beautiful. The smooth ridges of the dunes wavered in the heat, rising from the heated sand into the cooling air. The dying sunlight glistened in the grains, making the desert floor look as if sprinkled with diamonds. But the sky presented the most magnificent sight, bursting with purple, orange, and red.

The lingering heat scraped against my skin harshly, but I tilted my face toward the light, desperate to hold on to the remnants of the day. Unused to bright light by now, I had to squint, but I wouldn’t turn away.

The light was rapidly slipping away to disappear behind the horizon. Just like my past life had been shifting further and further away from me. With it, I was losing a part of me, never to get it back. And I didn’t know whether to mourn or welcome that.

Was my life before the shadows took me worth it to be upset about losing it? As far as Melanie was concerned, it was a failure. I chose to do what I loved for a living, and it led me nowhere. It wasn’t just Melanie’s opinion, either. As supportive as my parents had been, at some point, they both had tried to talk me into doing something other than dancing.

My life never fit into the mold of what conventionally would be considered a success. And now that it was gone, I felt more at a loss than ever. In the dying light of the sunset, all emotions were felt much more acutely.

As I stood there, on the border between day and night, between my disappearing past and worrisome future, sadness filled me, darker than the black desert. A tear rolled down my cheek, quickly followed by another.

“Dawn!” Rha’s voice sounded from the window to the sitting room. “Thank gods, there you are.”

I quickly wiped off the tears with the sleeve of my robe before turning around.

The prince stood in the open window, keeping to the shadows and squinting in the sunset’s blood-red glow. He grabbed the upper layer of his skirt and drew it over his head. Holding the dark fabric like a shield against the sun, he ran out to me.

“You shouldn’t be here, my sweet. The servants haven’t even swept the sand after the day storm—” He stopped, giving me a penetrating look. “What happened? You’ve been crying.”

How did he know that so quickly? His tendrils weren’t even anywhere in sight.

“Did someone hurt you?” His voice dipped with menace. “Tell me who?”

“No one hurt me. And no, you can’t hurt anyone in retaliation to restore your precious balance. Just…” I swept the sky with my arm. “Look at these colors. What do you see? Beauty or a disorganized mess?”

He peeked at the sky from inside the shadows of his fabric shield and grimaced.

“You hate it, Rha, don’t you? You, just like everyone else, prefer the predictability of an order. A pattern. But what if it doesn’t fit in any pattern or any order? What if I’m not shaped like a perfect piece for your puzzle and there is no place in your mosaic for me?”

“Dawn.” He came closer and drew the fabric over both of us. “If only you knew how much it hurts me to see you upset.”

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