It began with one map.
But it didn't end there.
What Aerion thought might be a fleeting moment—a curious encounter tucked into the quiet corners of his suffocating schedule—grew like ivy through the cracks of his life. Slowly. Patiently. In secret.
Each week, after lessons had ended and his presence was not urgently required at Court, he slipped away. Not into the hunting grounds, or the courtyards where other nobles trained in swordplay—but through the lesser halls, past kitchens and sculleries, to the old annex where parchment dust gathered like powdered snow and time itself seemed to forget to pass.
Coriel was always there first.
He'd learned to expect Aerion's arrival the way the moon waits for dusk—quietly, but without doubt.
By their third meeting, the prince no longer stood stiffly at the doorway. He'd stride in without hesitation, brushing cobwebs from his shoulders, cloak askew, face flushed from the slight jog. And always—always—the smile waited for him there. Not the polished, insincere kind that dotted court like pearls. No. This one was crooked and lopsided and left a warmth in Aerion's chest that he didn't quite know how to name.
"Today," Coriel had said once, unfolding a fresh sheet of parchment with a grin, "we chart the River of Forgotten Things."
"Sounds dramatic," Aerion had replied, eyebrow raised.
"It is dramatic. It eats memories. The villagers near it forget their own names sometimes. And the fish there hum lullabies in their sleep."
Aerion laughed—a soft sound, but real. "And where does it go?"
Coriel handed him the quill. "Wherever you want it to."
It became their tradition.
Each week, a new map. A new piece of a world not yet real, but real enough to the two of them. They named valleys after quiet jokes and drew cities where no kings ruled. Once, they sketched a kingdom made entirely of bridges, suspended in the clouds—no towers, no walls. Only sky and connection.
Aerion started bringing things, too. A pressed flower from the palace gardens. A sliver of silver leaf paper. Even once, a stolen compass etched with his house's crest.
"For accuracy," he'd said, handing it to Coriel.
Coriel had stared at it in wonder. "You sure? This looks… expensive."
"Only if you pay for it," Aerion answered. "Which I didn't."
That made Coriel laugh so hard he nearly spilled ink over the Isles of Dreamless Sleep.
Sometimes, they spoke of more than maps.
Aerion talked about his lessons, the monotony of heraldry, how his tutor had once fallen asleep mid-sentence while explaining the War of the Sapphire Throne. He described the court dinners where every smile felt like a knife wrapped in velvet.
Coriel listened, but never with pity. He didn't look at Aerion like a prince in a cage—he looked at him like a boy with ink on his fingers and too many thoughts in his head.
In turn, Coriel spoke of the servants' halls—the gossip, the smells of freshly baked seed-bread, how the washerwomen sang sad songs from the western coast when no one was listening. He told Aerion that the world was louder in the kitchens. Realer. It sounded like life.
"I think I'd like it there," Aerion said one evening, as he leaned against the window ledge of the annex. Rain pattered gently against the glass.
Coriel raised an eyebrow. "What, the kitchens?"
"No." Aerion glanced at him. "Where things aren't expected of you before you're even old enough to understand what they mean."
Coriel didn't speak at first.
Then, he reached into his satchel and pulled out a small object—a folded square of paper. When he opened it, it revealed a map the size of a handkerchief, drawn in fine black ink.
At the center was a place labeled simply: Home.
"You can go here," Coriel said. "If it gets too much. Even if it's just in your head."
Aerion stared at it, breath caught in his throat.
He took it carefully, as though it might crumble.
"Thank you," he whispered.
♥♥♥
It wasn't long before Aerion began missing things. Not enough to raise alarms, but enough for the wrong people to notice.
"Where were you during chapel vigil?" his elder brother demanded one night.
"Studying," Aerion lied.
"Studying what? Absence?"
But even scoldings didn't stop him.
Each stolen moment with Coriel felt like reclaiming a part of himself that the palace had tried to drown in gold and velvet. There, in the dim annex, he wasn't a prince. He was a dreamer. A maker. A cartographer of impossible lands.
What neither of them dared name—what hung, invisible, between them—was how Aerion's hand sometimes lingered near Coriel's when they passed the quill. Or how Coriel stared at Aerion's face just a little too long when he laughed, as if memorizing something too fleeting.
They never spoke of it.
But the maps began to change.
They started drawing people—not just places. A boy in a red scarf beside a lighthouse. Another with a crown of stars, running through fields of wind.
Sometimes, they drew two figures standing side by side, faceless, watching the horizon.
Aerion never asked if one of them was him.
Coriel never said.
But both of them knew.
♥♥♥
As dusk painted the walls of the annex with gold and lilac, Coriel rolled up the last of their day's map—a drifting city built on lantern-lit rivers—and tied it with a strand of scarlet thread. Aerion, after one last smirk and a whisper of some duty he was dreadfully late for, vanished through the back corridor like a shadow with secrets.
Coriel stayed a little longer, breathing in the dust and ink, letting the hush of the room settle into his chest. Then, carefully, he tucked the scroll into his satchel, slung it over his shoulder, and slipped out through the servant halls.
The castle was quieter now—candles flickering to life along the sconces, the scent of roasting root vegetables wafting faintly from the kitchen rows. Familiar voices hummed in the background, and Coriel moved through it like a thread through linen—seen, but unobtrusive.
He found his mother, as he usually did, in the laundry courtyard.
Maren stood by one of the wide stone basins, hands submerged in lavender-scented suds, sleeves rolled up past her elbows. Her arms, though worn with work, moved with practiced grace—wringing, scrubbing, folding. Her graying hair was bound in a scarf, and her voice joined the soft chorus of evening songs hummed between washerwomen.
Coriel leaned against the doorframe.
"I'm back," he said.
Maren turned her head slightly, a small smile tugging at her lips. "Late."
"I was with the scroll clerks."
She arched an eyebrow. "And I suppose the Prince happens to borrow scrolls every evening as well?"
Coriel gave a sheepish grin, stepping into the courtyard and taking a towel from the line to help. "Maybe we just like the same ones."
Maren only shook her head, the way mothers do when they know more than they say. "Well, no trouble's come of it yet," she murmured. "But tread lightly, Cori. There's nothing soft about royalty, even the kind ones."
He didn't answer. Just wrung out the towel and passed it to her, the cool linen damp against his fingers.
For a while, they worked in silence—one of those companionable hushes that didn't need filling.
But as the sun dipped lower, and the shadows stretched long across the stones, Maren glanced sideways at him. "You smiled, coming in."
"Did I?"
"Like you used to. Before we left home."
That stopped his hands for a moment. The water in the basin rippled from the sudden stillness.
Coriel looked down.
"I was younger then," he murmured.
"You were happier."
Maybe. Or maybe he'd just forgotten what sadness was supposed to feel like.
Maren sighed and wrung out one last towel. "Do you ever miss it?"
Coriel didn't need to ask what she meant.
He looked up—toward the horizon, even though it was hidden by castle walls. And slowly, memory crept in like tidewater.
♣♣♣
Once—before the marble halls, before the ink-stained fingers, before the eyes that looked at him and saw only his place in a ladder—he lived where the wind smelled like rain and clover.
The Kingdom of Cloveland was not a place of crowns or gilded mirrors. It was a patchwork land of emerald valleys, of wildflower fields and crooked stone paths, where everything bent a little under the weight of wind but stood tall again after the storm.
Coriel had been born in a cottage that leaned slightly to the left, beside a hill that sprouted buttercups in the spring. His father, Jorin, was a messenger—a courier who rode swift as stories between villages, delivering not just letters, but news, herbs, parcels, sometimes even pies if someone trusted his balance well enough.
He remembered the laughter most.
Jorin had a voice like thunder and a grin that made neighbors linger on porches longer than they meant to. When he wasn't on the road, he taught Coriel how to skip stones, how to listen to birds, how to leave space in a story for a better ending.
And then one winter, Jorin didn't come back.
A bridge had collapsed during a flood. A horse's leg snapped. A rider thrown.
By the time someone found him, the snow had covered his trail.
Coriel was seven.
He remembered only pieces. Maren holding him in the doorway. The smell of wood smoke. The hollow hush of a house too quiet.
She didn't cry—not then. She waited until after the funeral, after the villagers had left their loaves and candles and kind words. Then she wept at the riverbank, while Coriel watched from behind a tree and didn't know how to make it stop.
They stayed for another year, maybe two. But the land was no longer kind to them. Without Jorin's income, there were debts. Without Jorin's laughter, there were silences.
Maren spoke often of starting over.
The Kingdom of Hearts needed hands. They paid fair coin. She had a cousin who knew someone in the royal staff.
Coriel hadn't argued.
But the day they left, he'd buried something beneath the crooked hill—a map, his first one, drawn in charcoal on an old recipe sheet. It led nowhere. Or maybe everywhere. He couldn't remember. But he whispered to it:
"If I forget, you won't."
And then they left.
♥♥♥
Now, years later, Maren looked at him in the evening light.
"I know it's not the life we imagined," she said, gently. "But I see something bright in you again, Cori. I just hope whatever brings it doesn't break you."
He didn't speak right away.
Then he stepped forward and hugged her—brief, sudden, but tight.
She smiled into his shoulder.
"All right, now," she said, patting his arm. "Enough of that. Go before I make you start on tomorrow's sheets."
He laughed, stepping back.
And as he left the courtyard, satchel light against his back, he didn't think of the palace or the nobles or even the rules he bent to meet with Aerion.
He thought of green hills and crooked cottages.
And a promise buried in the dirt, waiting still.