The War Of Crowns | #ONC2023

Chapter 5

Gentle warning, there is a part in the chapter where things get a bit.. intimate :)

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Dakath's POV

Prince Dakath was actually afraid. Not only was he going to have to rethink his plan to stop the war, but he also felt a pull in his heart seeing Leia so helpless. She sat on his wolf, Arkin, licking her arms and giggling to herself as he sat behind her, keeping Arkin at a run across the island.

Nightingale, he thought. A dull, repulsive fruit of the trees that sprouted from the dead. They made faeries sick when ingested but it was the opposite for humans. They instantly lost all their sense and wanted nothing more than the very essence of pleasure that the fruit provided.

When he lived with his father, the humans would sometimes stumble upon the fruits and even as a little boy he knew they would not live long after consuming it. No food would satisfy them and they could not leave the castle to search for more fruit. It was always a sad sight to see them consumed by it. Something about it was worse than when they were under glamor. At least with the glamor they were quiet and obedient.

"My prince! May we stop for some fruit? I am famished!" Leia said. She leaned into him and he could smell nothing but the vanilla and salt of her hair as it whipped at his chest in the wind.

My prince, she had said. It awakened feelings inside of him that he hardly recognised. Leia was naive at best, a bit annoying at worst. He would hear her pacing in the room above his throughout the day and sometimes the night. The repetitive noise of her footsteps drove daggers through his skull. It was an endless torture.

What a nervous little thing she was, even with the bold act she put on, walking into the Land of Faeries and trying to kill him.

Leia had licked herself clean of the fruit's juice like one of those furry animals the humans claimed they could domesticate. She even purred as she relaxed further into his chest. He kept his face stern but there was an odd squeezing in his heart as he tried to ignore her warm skin pressed against him.

"Our destination holds many trees with the fruit you seek," he said. Trees that he would have to keep her away from until his brother could make an antidote.

She ran her hands along the back of his neck and sighed which made him shudder by the surprising gentleness of her touch. The response shocked him really. Her hands were delicate but he felt the calluses on them, a reminder of who she was: of what the war had turned her into.

Arkin let out a wailing cry of fatigue and Dakath reached down to pat his beloved pet. Just a few more leaps, boy. He sent the thought to Arkin who wailed again in protest but kept running. Leia had somehow made it to the southern coast of the island and they were now traveling at full speed to the opposite coast. Arkin would need weeks of rest after this, if not more.

He halted before a castle, much like the one Dakath had grown to call home. Two identical castles on an island made by the king for his outcast sons. Dakath grunted to himself, he could have at least built them closer together.

He wasted no time sliding off Arkin with Leia in his arms. "I can walk," she mumbled, swatting at him. He placed an arm around her waist to support some of her weight as she giggled and stumbled her way through the large oak doors. Dakath had never met someone who, even under the fruit's magic, still stubbornly insisted on refusing help.

"Brother! What is the meaning of this? How dare you bring a human consort in here! Father will have our heads!" Dakath's charming brother shouted at him from the top of the staircase in the entryway.