Sons of Hellfire: Book 1 [Wattys 2016]

Lucien - 1

He was six years old when he came to the full realization that the palace workers and his mother's court didn't like him at all. It only took a few months after that for him to completely understand why. He was never left unadvised in the castle, but he was given distance. As if his mother didn't think he was smart enough to notice guards blundering around after him wherever he walked. But they weren't there for his safety. They were there to make sure he wouldn't throw himself into a rage and possibly hurt someone else in the palace. They trailed after him because what they saw was not a little boy, supposed heir to the throne. He was a disaster waiting to happen, or so gossiped the court.

When he was eleven, he thought he had grown used to the scorn that followed him around the castle halls. Ladies squealed and fled when he showed his face. Men scowled and turned away. The other children of nobility and servants all found him equally horrifying and refused to let him play their games. Not that he had tried to join them. He had gotten quite beaten up the first time he had tried - when he was five. After that, he didn't dare speak to anyone else his age. Lucien saw them as worse than the adults, for children were fierce.

Lucien liked to think of himself as fierce in return. When he was thirteen, all he had to do was send a servant a look and it had them scurrying out of the way, leaving him in peace. He was unlike any of the other royal children in the different kingdoms, for he didn't have any tutors or mentors to teach him the ways of being a prince. No, his mother wouldn't waste such precious resources on someone like him. Instead, he was left to fend for himself completely on his own. He learned how to read at eight, under the flame of a single candle that he kept in his room. With books that he had sneaked into his room from the palace library, he pored over them deep into the night. There was nothing better to do with his time and during the day, and he would've been scolded for even attempting to enter the library. His only indication that he had read himself dry each night was when the flame puttered out into the large pool of wax that was his candle.

Now Lucien was fourteen, and his only reprieve from an empty palace life was not his nights, but his days. When he was a toddler and threw his first tantrum, angry that his mother wasn't given him any attention, instead of folding him into her arms and murmuring reassurances, he was thrown out of the castle and directed in the direction of the woods that surrounded the norther border of their country - a bit of ways behind his home.

The Wet Woods, as they called it, was not a exactly wet marshland. Instead, it was an eerie sort of place with a find layer of mist hanging over its treetops constantly making everything just a little bit more damp than usual. At first, Lucien had been scared stiff as he ventured towards its edge, frightened by the bare amount of sunlight that penetrated the mist's heavy cover. There were creatures here, he had read, that would waste no time in attacking someone as small as him - as defenseless as him.

That first day out, he had slumped under a tree, still in the view of the castle, and cried.

However, after that one day it became so much easier. Over the years, he began to find solace in the Wet Woods rather than fearing it. He no longer threw fits that had him tossed out of the palace, but instead took the trek out every morning to his only friend, the woods.

He stole food for a day from the kitchens and packed books that he had read again and again. No one stopped the Crown Prince from leaving, nor did they question where he was going. His title was empty, and there simply because of blood. But who he was would never fill the expectation - someone like him was not a person to be praised or adored. In fact, whereas the entire castle ignored him, Lucien was pretty sure that a majority of the people who lived under his mother's reign didn't even know he existed.

Though he had come to terms to who - what - he was, Lucien knew that his presence in the palace was nothing short of an abomination. He defiled the royal line and what they stood for, and he was an insult to his mother's reign. In fact, if the Kingdom of Artus was comprised of more than just a human population, Lucien himself would have been a cause for war.