Brothers
pearlydewdrop
In the beginning there were two brothers. There were two brothers in the beginning.
Not brothers by blood. Never born from the womb of the same mother were they, nor sired by the seed of the one father...but still brothers all the same.
Raised among the court of King Hamlet, one was the lone son of the king himself, sole heir to the throne and beloved prince to a nation.
(A scholar, a soldier, a saint and a sinner.)
The other was born to the King's most trusted advisor, bred for success in the royal court and surely destined for a seat at the foot of power's cradle when the time should arrive wherein Denmark's next generation should take the helm of their country.
Fate and time leaves them grappling for each others throats in the corpse corrupting earth over the bones of a woman most precious to them both.
Forgetting all sense and logic, only after one thing...one brother's vendetta towards the other and how it ate away at every other thought in his mind like a starving man at his last meal.
All this while the royal brother's angry and vengeful sights are set on another man entirely, a man who stands by the graveside pulling the common brother's grief stricken strings like some villainous puppeteer.
Both brothers equally consumed...both equally blind.
I have shot my arrow o'er the house and hurt my brother.
A bond of brotherhood broken by revenge, a thirst to right wrongs done onto their much admired fathers and to wipe clean the stain that besmirched the reputations of a beloved mother and a dearest sister.
A bond between the two young men once remembered was too late to heal.
They would have been brothers, perhaps, in law should fate have been kinder.
But in a country, far from Denmark's prison, a cherished sister to one brother and fairest beloved to the other welcomes them, in a bride's garments, with open arms and restores in them the sight that they, along the way, had lost.
Brothers.