Flower of Steel

“You seem bored. Do you want me to tell you an old story?” The Crown Prince asked me.

“Old story? What is it, Your Highness?”

“Well. I’m sure you’ve never heard about it.”

He spoke with his hand holding his chin in a taunting way that made me feel challenged. I’m quite confident in myself, as I got a perfect score on the literature section of the officer’s exam. I know most of the stories out there, so I spoke confidently.

“Well, we shall have to try and see.”

The Crown Prince smiled briefly, then fixed his purple eyes as he opened his mouth, “A long, long time ago. There was a noblewoman who was shunned because she refused the fiancé that her father appointed for her. The land that she was sent to was a desolate place that was very challenging for a living being to survive. But the woman gave the place life and turned the land so life could flourish.”

“She must have started farming,” I jumped in.

The Crown Prince frowned as he nodded, “Close. Now, don’t cut me off and listen.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

The Crown Prince scolded me and continued, “But she was lonely. No matter how hard she worked on the land, the land was infamous for being the land of the dead, and no one came to visit.”

Yeah. It’s not like she was by herself from the beginning. A human who wasn’t alone before will find it hard to survive alone. If you know the warmth and stability that another person can give, you will feel like dying without it.

“Then one day, a man appeared. He was king of the nation, and they fell in love with each other at first sight.”

Love at first sight? Characters in stories fall in love so easily. The thought made me feel bitter. Love in reality is very hard to achieve.

“The man tried to bring her to his castle to get married. But the woman refused. The woman’s father was so powerful that he could kill the man if he wanted.”

A man who could kill the king of a land easily… Was the father a legendary Grand Sorcerer or a Sword Master? Oh, but a Sword Master isn’t legendary anymore.

“But man didn’t care. He tried to bring her to his castle. That’s when the fiancé that the woman’s father appointed appeared in front of them. The fiancé was very powerful and brutal.”

Oh, I think I can see who these people were. So the woman was like a princess shunned from an empire, and the man was the king of a small nation. The fiancé was so powerful that the princess’s father wanted to keep it to himself. But still. The story never made sense at all! In most stories, the king is the man of absolute power, while here, he is nothing… It made me feel sad for him.

“The two fought over the woman. It was a fierce battle, but the fiancé was winning the fight. That was when the woman attacked him. But the fiancé didn’t falter. Instead, he was infuriated that he cursed the woman for attacking him. At that moment, a worthless, red flower bloomed over the land. The fiancé thought that if he turned her into it, and transformed her back to herself later, she would be loyal to him.”

The story enraged me. So, he thought of breaking her to make her loyal to him, because he couldn’t have her? That’s not love! I was about to be furious over these feelings that seemed like they were mine when the Crown Prince’s voice dissipated my anger at once.

“The fiancé smirked at the devastated man and left, but the king didn’t want to leave his beloved woman to live in suffering. So he threw away everything he had and went as far as he could so that the woman’s father or her fiancé couldn’t find her, and planted her there. The man, after sending the lonely woman to a place where many people were around but couldn’t be harmed easily, died from the wound that the fiancé inflicted on him.”