Chapter Text
Many years ago, a King and Queen ruled over the land, and with it, they spread their joy to their people. The King and Queen welcomed anyone into their lands and often visited the people. They were very beloved, and the people were so familiar with them; how could they not be loved?
Everything was brilliant until the Queen became pregnant. Halfway through her pregnancy, she became very ill and couldn’t even get out of bed. This caused strain on the kingdom, not just because the Queen was seemingly dying but also because the couple stopped visiting the towns of their kingdom. The King couldn’t bear to do it alone.
Instead, the king threw himself into the studies, looking for anything that could help his wife. Still, he found nothing that helped. Every remedy, medicine, and doctor did nothing.
As the Queen neared the end of the pregnancy, in worse shape than ever, the King had a dream, A dream of a bird with feathers made of gold. The bird flew around his wife’s stomach in his dream before flying into it. As soon as he woke, he claimed it was a sign from the Watchers and that he had to find the bird with golden feathers. He left the palace on his horse that afternoon and set out to find it.
He spent a whole week searching for this bird. It was as he neared the end when he began to give up hope, but then saw it, behind the window of a house was a bird with golden feathers. He asked the women who lived there if he could take the bird, explaining the situation and why he needed it.
He thought it would be easy to get it from her, with how much everyone in the kingdom seemed to love the Queen especially, but the women fought with him, declaring that she wouldn’t give it to him no matter what. This angered the King, and within the next day, he ordered knights to her house. The woman was enraged when the knights pushed past her door and took the bird. She cursed all of them and said that she was going to pray to the Watchers to send them nothing but bad luck. This did nothing, though, and still they took the bird with them.
The next day, the bird arrived at the kingdom in a cage, its golden feathers shining in any light that hit it. The King sent an order to have it cooked perfectly for the queen.
The Queen ate the cooked bird, and immediately she felt the effects of it. She began to feel better, the pained look on her face being replaced with the smile she always wore before she became sick.
And just like that, the kingdom became as it was before, cheerful and celebratory to hear that their Queen had returned to health. The King and Queen presumed to visit their people in the towns again, and all was better.
The day the child was born was supposed to be one of celebration, one of happiness.
The Queen died right after childbirth. The last thing she saw before her eyes fluttered shut was her husband holding their child. A beautiful baby boy. But the strange thing about this baby was that he had a pair of golden wings attached to his back.
The King had only taken one glance at his child and the wings he bore before handing him off to his trusted friend, Sir. Jumbo, and rushing to his wife's side. The man cried as he held her cold hands and felt her last breath.
In true romance, he died that night, too. Around 5 minutes after his wife, the King died of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as “Broken Heart Syndrome”.
This left the newborn an orphan. He had just come into this world and already lost everything, even if he didn’t know it.
Sir. Jumbo volunteered to take care of the child and took a temporary rule as King until the child was old enough to take over.
Not much thought was put into the child’s strange condition, everyone saying that it was a blessing from the Watchers, or perhaps it was the effects of eating a golden bird.
Sir. Jumbo began to raise the child as his own, which worked perfectly since he had a kid that truly was his, just a little older than him. Although the happiness of the kingdom didn’t return, everything settled into a still, as if the kingdom were a pond waiting for someone to jump or splash in it.
It was only 4 years after the passing of the King and Queen when the child with golden wings was playing in the garden of the palace grounds. His friend, who currently had a mustache drawn on his face with a black marker, was chasing him around the flowerbeds.
The child’s wings currently weren’t golden, but instead red, yellow, and blue, and they flowed behind him as he ran.
He didn’t see the cloaked figure in front of him before he ran into it. He didn’t have any time to react as they picked him up and ran, forcing a liquid down his throat. The liquid tasted horrid, and it made his eyelids heavy.
The last thing the child heard before losing consciousness was the sound of his best friend shouting his name.
“Grian!”
No one knows what happened to the child. Theories spread across the kingdom, between saying he was killed for the wings that he bore or saying that he was taken by the Watchers because he was never meant to live with the humans. None of them mattered.
Sir. Jumbo remained in power, stating that he was confident that the winged child would return, and when he did, he would be crowned King. Every year on the child’s birthday, he would have the capitol throw a festival and launch lanterns into the sky, all in hoped that the child would come back.
Unfortunately Sir. Jumbo didn’t get to see that day, as he grew too old and died of illness. He passed the responsibility to his son, and his son became the temporary king.
The kingdom prayed to the watchers to send their true king back to the kingdom.
The temporary king especially hoped for this.