The youth had realized long ago that the title prince meant very little. Princes couldn’t slay dragons. Princes couldn’t revive the fallen. Princes couldn’t beg their mothers to stay. Princes couldn’t entreat their companions to remain nestled in peaks, valleys, snow, and wind. Princes could watch and beck and call and scream, and still, nothing would happen. He was the son of a King – but in days, seasons, months, and years spent in a world that could be collapsed by the brush of chaos, by the sting of corruption, a moniker was naught. It didn’t lend him any accolades. It didn’t anoint him with wisdom. It didn’t reward him with crowns or jewels, garb or armor, noble intrigue or fundamental truths. He’d only been granted with the sagacity of his sire and dam; who’d spent their lifetime carving, sculpting, and reigning (raining too he wanted to say, watching his father still look for Huyana on the horizon), with stories, with notes and sketches, with traces and foundations – he’d been privileged, but he’d also wandered from heathen cliff top to eldritch fountains, drawing on what he’d been taught and what he could discover. The boy took what he could, snatched and held and grasped and tore, swearing never to let go (and he didn’t, that much was certain, when he visualized the Colossus toppling, the giant’s dragons falling, everything crashing and burning because that was going to be his role in life – avenging those who couldn’t do it for themselves), to always cling to those memories, those people, those beloved, cherished whims and moments. When she spouted about birthrights Erebos wanted to scoff and snort, for simply being born didn’t mean one was entitled to greatness, to empires, to thrones; a beast had to earn their regime, had to challenge the world. When she drifted about tales (of Psyche the DarkEmpress, about a woman who had led them from refugees to mountaineers) he wanted to hear them all, again and again, let those legends pierce through his ears and ricochet along his skull (because they’d been about defeat, but also glory, a chance to snatch what had been destroyed). When she wanted answers, he simply remained silent, allowed her to boil over, to simmer, to wash over her layers of calm, dainty composure. The scion knew went to be quiet too, to permit the world to play its part, for the earth to unravel or shades to collide.
 
After she’d succumbed to the ferocity, to the agony, to the pinnacles of her frustration, Erebos dared to stare, wondering over the girl who was so infinitely lost, pondering over the child of another luminary and what she was supposed to do with her life. His features were rendered stoic, nonchalant, and he could’ve been a picture of his father, a chiseled miniature of death and damnation, of corruption and chaos, had his eyes not held a glimmer of kindness, a gallant intrigue delving into their chassis. The words formed along his tongue were quiet and blunt, balanced and simple, truth spilling over his mouth before he’d even had a moment to stop them. “Princes and princesses aren’t entitled to anything. They have no claim.” They didn’t cease, rolling like a wave, like the pools that could gather beneath his feet and lift him above the water’s edge. He thought of Rikyn, once a prince, and then only an Outcast, wandering and wandering and wandering in search of something – professing only the things he’d acquired for himself. “We have to earn everything we crave just like everyone else.” His head tilted a fraction, devilish and mercenary in the forest’s nocturnal bloom (and he might’ve looked savage, wild and untamed, a foreshadowed bout of misery and disaster – how he’d lead himself to ruin, or how he’d topple towers, cast his sword deep into the chest of his enemies). “I don’t expect to be Lord of the Basin because my father is.” He sighed on the wind, casting his eyes elsewhere, curious and seething. “I’ll become something on my own – because I wanted it, because I obtained it.” And then he softened, the glimmer of tears along her eyes, the bitterness, the rancor thriving along the edges, gave him pause, and he proffered, bestowed, a more lionhearted gift. “But if you still hope to know about your mother, you should come to the Basin. I’m sure my father would tell you everything you wish to hear.” Orsino sneered amidst the brush, and the boy still gave him naught to go off of – tying together his proclamation for the girl who seemingly had waited and waited for the right moment to fall in her lap. “You don’t have to stay, but you can listen. You can see if it’s the right place for you.” Sjal would be able to view the world in which her mother had thrived, then seemingly fallen – if it’d be enough to stand under her old shadows, or carve the way to creating her own.