Morning broke over Aeloria like a painting reborn.
Golden light spilled down from the eastern cliffs, bathing the white towers and winding bridges of the capital. From the palace terrace, Prince Leo watched as the banners stirred gently in the wind — each one bearing the falcon sigil of his house, wings open, crown in its grasp.
The people below called Aeloria the Last Bright Kingdom. To them, it was a land untouched by ruin, protected by the legacy of kings who had built it stone by stone through centuries of peace.
But to Leo, peace felt like something fragile — a glass dome that could shatter with a single sound.
He had lived seventeen years under that glass.
And all those years, one name had gone unspoken.
King Thalen of Aeloria — his father — had vanished when Leo was a child. He had ridden out one autumn morning with a handful of guards toward the western hills, to a place known simply as The Hollow Cave, and never returned.
No one spoke of it openly now. The Queen had banned it from conversation, and the council had sealed all records of that expedition. Even the cave itself had been marked forbidden — not for danger, but for grief.
The people called it cursed. Leo called it unanswered.
He leaned against the marble railing, his cape catching the breeze. The city below gleamed with life — vendors shouting, soldiers marching, laughter from the market square. Yet he felt detached, as though watching someone else's dream.
Behind him, the heavy doors opened with a familiar creak. Magister Veyren, his tutor and his father's former advisor, approached with his usual calm.
> "Your Highness," Veyren said softly, "the council requests your presence at midday. There is to be a remembrance for your father."
Leo turned, his face unreadable.
> "A remembrance," he repeated. "For a man no one dares to remember."
The Magister's expression tightened, but he said nothing.
Leo continued, his voice lower.
> "They build statues and sing songs, yet they've never once gone to find him. They fear a cave more than they fear forgetting him."
Veyren sighed. "There was a time when I might have agreed with you. But some doors, once opened, do not close again."
The prince looked past him, toward the western mountains — blue and distant, their peaks veiled in cloud.
> "Maybe it's time someone opened one."
The Magister's eyes narrowed slightly. "Do not say such things where walls can hear. Even stone remembers treason."
Leo almost smiled. "Then let the stone remember truth for once."
The bells of the city tolled faintly, signaling the morning prayers. For a moment, both stood in silence.
Somewhere far beyond the palace, where the fields met the dark line of forest, the entrance to the Hollow Cave waited quietly — nothing strange, nothing magical. Just an old wound in the earth, sealed by fear and time.
But Leo's gaze lingered there, and though the world saw only stone and shadow, for him it was the outline of everything unanswered — a place where his father's footsteps had vanished, and perhaps, where his fate would begin.
The wind shifted. The falcon banners rippled.
And in that stillness, the story of the last prince of Aeloria began.
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