In the capital city of the second smallest kingdom in Europe, there is a lake that exists between worlds. The park that it lurks within is frequented by nannies with their young charges in the mornings, and wealthy young people seeking social advancement in the afternoons. Within a little time of the day giving way to darkness, the only folk in the park are criminals, prostitutes, and their customers.
The lake is easily overlooked, and its very existence slips the mind as soon as one isn't directly beside it. It appears on few maps of the city, and on those that it does appear, it is unnamed.
Sometimes people passing the lake will remark upon the darkness of the water, the unruly tangle of high grass and brambles surrounding it. On the brightest of days, the lake has a mist upon it, and the far side is somehow ever out of sight.
Out of this lake was born a band of swans. Truly, they were reborn, as the creatures now formed as swans had existed for centuries prior as small gods; minor deities of the wilderness, the hunt and hearth, honored by the tribes roaming the plain long before the city had been founded. With no more belief directed toward them, they lost their rooting in the mortal dimension and wandered across the city, lost, until they touched the energy surrounding the lake and were pulled in to be transformed.
Once upon a time, an uprooted spirit was drifting in spirals, slowly, toward the lake. The summer was young enough that the grass was still dewy at midday, sparkling in the sun that had just crested the tips of the trees. A human came trundling down the walkway, with a much smaller one running back and forth beside it, darting out to touch things and darting back just as quickly at the scolding it got.
Their paths intersected. The small human ran directly through the spirit, and they both stopped cold.
warm hungry love need fear happy
The small human - he - in his head there was a swan. A toy, that he held and cried to, whispered to, soundlessly. Loved.
The trees rustled in a rising wind. Figures flicked in and out of visibility around the spirit. A tendril of energy reached out from the lake. It sought the spirit out and, distracted as the spirit was by absorbing the sudden imprint of the young Prince, grabbed hold and drew him under.
"How you've grown up, my dear," his mother lied in The Prince's ear as they danced around the brilliantly lit ballroom. "You are truly quite the young man now. All it took was being encouraged to cast off your childhood things, didn't it?"
He bit his tongue but the shudder and the hurt in his eyes were impossible to hide from her. She laughed gaily, and those around them looked on with approving eyes. What a beautiful pair they made! the expressions seemed to say.
He shuddered again and ducked down to hide his face. His mother's eyes grew grim and under the guise of smoothing his hair, she pinched the curl of his ear between her long sharp nails. Shocked, his head flew back up and he looked at her all white-eyed, to see contempt and rage trapped behind her fixed public smile.
"Why don't you retire now, dear?" she cooed between gritted teeth. "Your mother has business to take care of this night and it is past time for children to return to the nursery."
Angry hot tears rose to his eyes but he smothered the emotions harshly and danced her out to the last pattern, fingers fluttering as they parted. He bowed with the precision trained into him since birth, excusing himself as she had directed.
With nowhere to go but inward, the emotions surging within the Prince every day broke out into his dreams. He relived times of his early youth in some of them, cuddling the Swan in his arms and fantasizing that it changed form, that it grew into a man who wrapped his arms around the Prince and held him. The Swan, in human form, laid a warm hand upon the Prince's head and drew it down to rest on his broad chest, fierce and protective.
The dreams returned throughout the years of his schooling, and while he never had to deal with roommates who might be disturbed by his odd starts and sleepy muttering, he became ever more paranoid about the constant recurrence. He sought, quietly, every way to make them stop; all that he could try without letting anyone in. The dreams only strengthened, as though the concentration and energy he was putting toward stopping them had lent them strength instead.
Thinking that his bed might be somehow enchanted, or that he might at least search for the place and creatures that he dreamed of - somehow it always seemed so familiar - he sought an excuse to travel. But all such requests, however cleverly made, were denied, and he was told that he would never travel beyond the city harbor. The guard upon him doubled and he felt eyes, everywhere, watching him at all hours.
The Swan became more real to him as he spent more and more time lying abed, throwing himself into this other existence. The Swan now had legs, had a scent to his feathers that hypnotized as much as it frightened the Prince with its distance from the scent of other humans. They would roll across the ground sometimes, he and the Swan, and although the Swan's dark eyes regarded him only with love and warmth, the Prince would wake with strange feelings throughout his body and a terrible sense of loss and longing.
When he was twenty-two, there was a ball. There was always a ball - but at this one, the Queen became blatantly public in her conquests of men even younger than he was.
That night, he went mad. This was the only explanation he could find for having run off, for having - it must have been a dream. It must. Even though his memory still insisted it had been reality, that he had truly found his Swan in life. That he was not, actually, going mad.
The next night, the Prince dreamed that he himself sprouted feathers. They grew and spread, and suddenly, wings arched from his changed shoulders. The Swan twined necks with him, eyes lit up with joy and steady love, then nudged him across the lake and taught him to fly.
They flew beyond the city walls, crossing the harbor and watching the waves glow beneath the moon, until they set down upon the rooftops of a strange city. When he woke, his elbows were bending at strange angles and he felt the shadowy rustle of feathers down his arms.
Freedom, he thought. Freedom...
The hollow horror of his days stood in ever greater contrast with each night now spent with the Swan.
Am I going mad after all, then? he wondered, flexing his fingers. The joints were stiff and he could feel every pore of his skin prickling. He ran a hand across his arm and it was raised in tiny hard bumps.
Another ball tonight. He dressed swiftly, shoving his hideaway pistol into its holster before walking out the door.
His memory of the night was never clear. The Swan, but not the Swan; overwhelming despair; his mother. Shots. Pain.
He woke again and again, always confused, nightmares of abandonment and death intermingling with the sensations of being poked and prodded by doctors. At last his mind cleared enough that he stopped fighting. They informed him that he had gone mad, which was, to him, old news. Then they locked him into his room and left him to sleep alone for the first time since his attack.
The Swan looked up at him, and as swiftly, looked away.
He stumbled forward, reaching out for the Swan with both hands just as he had that night, just as he had in every tangled nightmare since. The Swan evaded him easily, and he fell to the ground, sobbing.
The sense of warning struck his mind again and again, heavy and dark. Leave. There was fear there, in his beloved Swan's dark eyes, so much fear, and no little confusion. Leave or we will die. Never return.
"I can't leave you," the Prince whispered. "How can I - "
He woke screaming, covered in sweat that ran in cold trickles down his back. Desperate, he staggered off the bed and ran around the room, searching beneath the bed, inside of wardrobes, behind the mirrors. Finally he tripped and almost smashed his head on the bars added to his window.
He stopped to stare at them. The bars were not, alas, carelessly installed. But they were built to keep in a human body, a man of his build or greater.
Dropping to the floor, he closed his eyes and dreamed.
Searing pain arched his body off the ground. It became overwhelming, obscuring the image before his mind's eye of the Swan, and he fell back, limp. But as his arms crashed onto the floor he felt the bumps raising along the skin and -
He doesn't trust me. He knows that he has no reason to. He knows me.
Isn't he strong enough for us both? something whispered in his mind. Isn't that enough?
"No," the Prince said aloud, staring with blood-filled eyes at the ceiling. "No. I will... I will stand... with him."
Is that what courage is? his thoughts raced wildly as the pain began anew, burning, making him scream. He didn't stop. Mother... He shoved her out of his mind, held the vision of the Swan. Felt the sudden brush of something cool, and then there was a rushing inward and-
In the morning, when the double doors to the Prince's bedchamber were thrown open, screams of shock echoed through the palace.
The Prince was not in his half-destroyed bed; was in fact nowhere to be found in the ransacked room. The window had been shattered. The bars, however, remained in place.
And on the windowsill, two feathers. One white; one grey.
Somewhere far from the second smallest kingdom, a pair of swans roam the skies. Sometimes they dream. In the dreams, they take human form, and dance.
In those dreaming bodies there is a memory of terror, and fear, and coming perilously close to disaster. But once they wake again, taking flight together across the grey of dawn, there is only love.