Once upon a time, there was a ghost in love with a pirate.
Oh dear, I've only just started and I'm already getting ahead of myself. You see, at the beginning of their story, she wasn't yet a ghost, and he was nowhere near a pirate. And I suppose one should always start a story at its beginning, yes?
In that case, at the start, our princess was certainly born a lover, but she was definitely quite alive. And our not-yet-pirate, he was indeed quite fond of adventure and the sea, but where treasure was concerned, he found it only in the heart of his princess, our princess—a princess he was forbidden to love.
The Princess Evangeline was a melodic soul, and we will talk about her body later, but it is scarcely seen in the middles of this story, for her twisted king of a father had gotten it in his head that if she were to marry "for love" like he had back when his hairs showed no grey, she would fall to the gutters and poverty most poor. The King Jerome wanted what he thought was best for his daughter: the wealthy and comfortable life he had done unspeakable things to achieve. But Evangeline wanted nothing he could offer (and out of respect I will no longer refer to her title unless completely necessary). To her, more priceless than a thousand acres piled to the clouds with gold, was love. And she had found it, this rarest of rare riches, and it had found her.
Her father, however, would have nothing of it. He tried locking her up, but love always found her. He tried sending her away, but love always found her. He tried running and hiding and disguising and rewriting, but still, love found her.
Nothing could keep dear Killian from his princess. Except, the king thought and prayed and hoped and dreamed—except, perhaps death would keep him away.
Now, as awful a man as King Jerome was, my friends, he was not, in fact, a murderer. But he was a crafty fellow, with a good bit of bad sorcery up his sleeve. So he sent his daughter into a deathlike slumber, and Killian could see—or so he thought he could see—that his love was no more. Outraged with the terrible king, and rightfully so, believing he had killed his own daughter (wrongfully so), our not-yet-pirate fled the kingdom to began his search for the fabled key to resurrection magic. That wasn't the brightest idea on his part, for as he gained more and more clues to the key's whereabouts, he lost more and more sanity and the fog piled up in his mind like dust on a dictionary.
Evangeline wasn't much better off, and one might argue she had it worse since she knew exactly what her father had done to her. She could see him clear as day while she herself was clearer still. Her spirit detached from the magicked body, she was cursed to watch and never be seen, hear and never speak, love but never live, to kiss death but never die.
Her lover, too, became cursed, purely from his own passion driven foolishness. A wrong word and a right turn led him to what he thought he was looking for, but the life it promised was not a new one, rather a doomed and eternal youth. His body ceased to age with his mind. He grew old but not up, captive in time and maddened by it.
Gone insane and torn apart, believing each other dead, they spent decades upon decades searching for their own minds. They ached to go back to the lives they had lost and the love they had shared, failing time and again, spiralling deeper into madness till they all but forgot who they once had been.
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A hop, skip, and a century away, the Princess Eilene was indignant. She did not want to live with her aunt, and she did not want to be a princess.
She had been fine all these years with the duke and duchess and she very much did not want any even remotely royal responsibilities thrust upon her now. But the queen had sent for her—her aunt, the queen, had sent for her. She didn't even know she had an aunt, much less a royal one.
Eilene had grown up with a quiet noble family, very boring but very kind—as well as very old. They passed not too long ago, just as Eilene turned nineteen, almost too old to be a child any longer anyways, so she was a mix of excitement over her emancipation and grief over her great loss. It quickly turned all to begrudging, however, when a summons from the palace arrived the day of the funeral.
A summons was astounding on its own; it was completely out of season for such a thing, but the reason for it left Eilene more dumbfounded than the royal seal itself. She couldn't believe it, refused to believe it. There was no way she was a princess. She would never be a princess.
But, according to her aunt, the queen, she was always and would now have to be a princess, for Queen Jael was barren, and her late sister's only offspring had finally been found.
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Eilene was the kind of young lady who was never very ladylike, but the duke and duchess didn't mind all that much, for she reminded them of the son they had lost to sickness long before Eilene's conception.
As it stands, she'd been born out of wedlock to Queen Jael's sister Jaime and a rapscallion only ever known as Kent. Princess Jaime had been arranged to marry into a neighbouring kingdom, and planned to run away from a surely loveless union before Eilene decided to arrive early. She was born on the streets and left hastily in a basket at the gates to the duchy. She was discovered by a gardener and the duke immediately decided to keep her as his own. Her caterwauling sounded awfully like that of his son's, cried so very long ago that it was a miracle the duke remembered, but we all know that once a man becomes a father he is never the same again.
The castle was cold. The Queen's smile was colder. Eilene choked back her personality; no need for Jael to know the real her. Her voice echoed sharply, vibrating the girl's skull. Eilene heard none of it and simply followed the directions of her escorts.
It must have been hours. Mere hours and yet, the sun had already disappeared. The funeral was yesterday—yesterday! Eilene could hardly bear it. As soon as her chamber door was shut, she picked up the nearest object and threw it across the room. It happened to be a volume of poetry off of one of the many bookshelves and it fluttered indignantly before landing with a thump about six feet away. She ran to kick it, heels clacking angrily, but before her foot made contact it shifted to the left and her shoe flung off across the room instead.
Eilene blinked. She kicked her other shoe off for good measure and snatched the book off the floor—or at least she tried to. Her fingertips grazed the leather cover and her blood fairly froze in her arm, as if she had plunged it into a bucket of ice.
She hissed and recoiled, and as soon as the feeling had come it was gone and another unexplainable occurrence was playing out before the new princess's eyes: the poetry book flopped open on its own accord, stopping on a page near the end.
There, a poem sat defaced, almost all its words blotted out with inky fingerprints. Eilene's nerves had been jangled, sure, but she was nothing if not curious. Her lips moved as she read the remaining words in a breathless whisper:
Not dead. Lonely. Tea?
And from across the room, a tray with a kettle clattered shakily through the air.
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To be continued…
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A/N: Go check out my sister Dani’s work of the week, Cargo Hold (a story separate but connected to my princesses)!