Kaden | ✓

part twenty-two ♚ venerable

The day I went into Angeles with James and Dustan, I didn't expect to meet the girl that I would fall in love with. I didn't expect much of it because I'd done it a thousand times before, walked those streets and breathed that air and saw all of those people. At nineteen, one cannot possibly expect to find something eternal. I was one of the lucky few.

Nearly two years after we were married, we learned that Emmaline was pregnant. That child--a little girl--ended up being the first of three, and she became queen of Illéa after her aunt Eadlyn. Maybe I'm a little biased, but she's the best damn ruler the country has had thus far.

The point of my writing my story out was not to show how the final Selection of Illéa went. It was not to show how things get better, or how someone lonely and closed off can find a way to live outside of the pages of books. It was not my intent to write a story of success or failure, of trial and triumph.

It was, simply, to let us live on.

I'm not so stupid or so selfish as to believe that people truly care about how I, a prince, met and fell in love with a poor violinist. I know that nobody cares other than us and nobody ever will, and my children will cringe for years about the stories of our Selection with hands clapped over their ears and begging cries for us to stop bursting from their small mouths. I know that people will think it's a nice, good story. Maybe someone will be interested in it. Maybe not. I don't know.

But one day, when a distant descendant of mine finds a hidden door in our spacious library and sees a collection of crowns and weapons and armor and gowns and maps, they will search for answers, for clues from the past. They will stumble over the forbidden diaries of Gregory Illéa, who, though not their ancestor, is the man after which our country is named. They will stumble over the crown of a great-aunt or great-grandmother that my father never had the opportunity to meet, because she was murdered in a rebel attack like the rest of her once-expansive family, excluding my great-grandfather. They will find the bloodstained crown of a princess that died at only fifteen. They will find something of my mother's, something of my father's, something of Eadlyn's. And maybe, just maybe, they will find this.

And so, whoever you are--family, friend, foe, or foreigner--that is why I have written out the story of my beloved and I. It is something of me, an important piece, that can live on as a distant memory along with the pieces of my fractured family, for I will join them one day. And one day, I will be little more than the whisper of a memory, the faint shadow of a life long past.

This is the full, real, true account of Emmaline Levitt and Kaden Schreave. Do with it what you wish--keep it, leave it, burn it. But know that here, where the journal and ink stop, the story doesn't end. I have a life ahead of me still. No, this is not the end. It is, in fact, merely the beginning.

Sincerely,

Kaden Schreave.