Love comes in many forms.
Speaking about it, imagining it, and melting at the mere prospect of it can leave you giddy with its richness.
But defining it, expressing or experiencing it - that's a different game.
Elijah - the heir to the throne of...
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I despised the darkness.
I've never tried to search the light before. All of them: the books, the paintings, and the victims of it, claimed 'love' hides in the light.
But, it seems that from the exact moment I tried searching for the light, all I came close to, was darkness. It was as if it purposefully shadowed the answers with its tresses like I was never meant to find it.
Like I didn't deserve to find it.
When my father told me I wasn't trying my best, that I wasn't following his orders and doing my duties, that I was failing, I would be blatantly lying if I said I didn't feel a strike of pain. Because all these years, all I had tried to do was fulfil my father's expectations of me. Whatever he wanted, was what I yearned to do. Everything else, even if it was something that I had wanted with my own wish, I forced myself to forget. If my father didn't want it, then it wasn't worth winning.
When he gave me an official order in front of all the kingdom's officials gathered together, stating it will be the last step I'd have to accomplish to attain the throne, to find the meaning of love, I didn't doubt him one bit. I'd always believed him, with all of my senses closed.
Until now.
Because now, I firmly believed that it wasn't my fault if I couldn't find the answer after I had tried my hardest. There was only so much I could do when the response to some questions were only supposed to reveal themselves to particular individuals.
If that individual wasn't me, I had no one to blame except the person who told me to search for an answer in the first place.
I had exited the palace quite a while ago, mentally beaten after my father's words and the outcomes of the dreadful investigation. Even that was something I believed in, but as always, when my father thought it was a meaningless venture without a viable destination, it was to be dropped.
The forest had recently become my place of comfort, not only to stare at from afar while I stood in my balcony but to also use as an escape from reality.
Especially because the female from that night hadn't departed my thoughts. I hadn't told anyone, but I unknowingly found myself visiting that river more and more over the days when getting consumed by trying to find a solution to my predicaments.
As I rode on my horse travelling deeper into the forest, not caring about where I was heading, my reveries continued, and I kept thinking about the girl I knew nothing about.
I had enough knowledge about the forests and the village women to know that no one, nonetheless females, would be daft enough to bathe in the middle of the night in an area where anything could attack.
She was indeed a living mystery and I hadn't even gotten a clear picture of her face. I wished I had paid more attention, despite the darkness, trying more, to somehow shed light on her face with the help of the Moon's rays being reflected off by the Sun.
