Heart of the World

Mature for adult content!!

The world we live in is a beautiful, mysterious place. My home, my country, has been my world my entire life, living as the cursed princess of Iris is all I have ever know.

Just as the only eyes I have known in the mirror were my own.

And my hair was always white as snow.

Iris has always been my home, its people my family.

The kind smiles of villagers and the curious looks of children seeing me for the first time, the contrast of myself against the rest of my family in portraits. The whisper of the trees and the laughter of the flowers has always been what I lived by.

"why are you so sad?" I rested my forehead on the cracked bark of the Soul Tree. My second home from the palace.

The tallest tree in all the king's forest.

Today it was deeply saddened, rumbling with a sort of bitter energy that leaks coldly into my bones.
I wondered what it knew that I did not as I sat perched in its branches, it is not often that it's strong mass wavers.

When it does it can only mean change is to come, nothing small. Something altering the kingdom itself.

I sighed, my fingers brushing over its leathery leaves, it wouldn't be long until someone else noticed its unease, it will sicken the forest.

By then it will be too late.
~~

Flora Duval, the cursed princess of Iris was always a quiet girl, working through her duties as princess and caring for the life in her country. Seeing beauty in the things most could not. Never has she expected an offer for marriage, not with her hair and her eyes the same pink of the Fenni flower.

But then, she receives one. Less of a question for her hand and more of a demand, a demand caging her like a white rabbit in a deadly hunters trap.

Trapped by the king of Taragon for her unusual features and the rumors of her life, Flora is stranded in a country she has never known, captured in cold castle walls without an ally in sight.