1001 Nights in Their Garden
The Third Night- The Hunt I
Author's Note- Finally got over one thousand views! As my gift to you, there will be two chapters this week, expect "The Hunt II" at the scheduled time.
My name is Steven Universe, and in my continuing effort to make up for my mom's mistakes I am a prince in a vaguely western European town. All of this is to entertain the gem who holds the power to destroy everything that I love. I no longer consider her insane, just deeply hurt. She waited an eternity for a friend that never returned to her. Maybe, just maybe, I can convince her to come to Earth with me. Hope springs eternal.
It was early morning in the town of Riverside and spring was in the air. The plant life that had weathered the long winter was now in full bloom. Out in the fields of my fief, the serfs were hard at work tilling the fields for planting. It was not a large estate, and all told only a few dozen families live on my lands. Even so the great patchwork of the individual farms stretched on for hundreds of acres.
My loyal servants and I had set out that morning in search of the mythical fox that I had been told stories of since a small boy. Pearl who had been my nurse as a child had told me most of them. The story she told me went something like this.
"Once upon a time, when your great-grandfather was a young man of seventeen. This was long before they cleared out the magic wood and banished the fairy folk to lands far away. Your Great-grandfather, the first prince of Riverside, came to these lands to seek his fortune. He spent his whole life in the presence of Diamond Empresses and was quite unprepared for life on the frontier." She would say.
I was a young boy and playing with a wooden train at the time. I jokingly replied with the old phrase, "Long may they reign!" As a boy I heard all the adults say it at official occasions.
"Yes, most certainly," she said, making the symbol of the diamond salute. I stood, in the way a four-year-old might call "dignified" and failed to make the same salute before falling over. She cleared her throat before continuing, "Oh… Where was I? Ah right!
"Your great-grandfather Steven was the first of his kind and quite unprepared for life outside of the imperial capital. He came here in a covered wagon with a dozen men and Garnet, Amethyst, and…"
"Pearl!" I interrupted; this made her smile. She tickled my belly and I screeched and rolled on the floor.
"Right as always milord. We all came out here to the wilderness and sought to carve out a home for ourselves. He took great pride in his garden, and one day, while tending to t some hard-earned blisters, he saw something."
She walked over to my bed and pulled down my favorite sleeping companion, "A pretty young vixen with two tails!" Pearl teased me by holding it over my head and making me reach for it. "He became so enamored with the creature that he would chase after her for hours on end, only to be eluded." She relented and gave me the stuffed toy. Even to this day I keep it underneath my pillow, the story meant that much to me.
"Through that whole year," she said, "He enjoyed the company of his friend, though she eluded him. For a man of peer with the aristocracy his servants and serfs just wouldn't do. That was why he was so grateful for this marvelous creature that appeared to him one fine spring day. At length he abandoned the chase, and just found contentment in observing her from his garden. It made him laugh as she chased butterflies across his newly cleared fields."
"A whole year passed, and the first fruits of the harvest came in. Your ancestor was glad for the harvest, but his heart wasn't in it. Even as the townsfolk danced for the harvest festival. Oh, Steven you should have seen how happy everyone was. There were fifes, harps, and I played my violin for the first time." She stopped and closed her eyes, reminiscing on happy times, and then continued. "It was there that a little dark-haired woman stole his heart." They danced, first around the maypole, and later as the night wore on, more intimately. I personally played their first gavotte." She hummed a few chords.
Not one to leave it at that, her gem glowed, and she pulled from it an elegant violin. This prompted me to clap in the off-time way that a toddler does in his eternal pretending to be an adult. So strange that after all these years my memory is so crisp. It's as though it all happened yesterday. She made the music sweetly sing in glorious vibrato. Pearl spent many frustrating nights teaching me to follow her, and it was well worth the effort.
She finished, "At twilight they bid each other a found farewell, and your grandfather was melancholy at the thought of saying goodbye. The little dark-haired woman was just as sorry to leave, she stole a kiss when she thought no one was looking. It was a scandal among all of his servants," she giggled mischievously, "but I digress."
Pearl ended her story, "After they parted, he saw his vixen one last time. She came up to him and licked his hand in the twilight, before running off, never to be seen again in his lifetime."
My grandfather saw the vixen, as did my father. Both saw the vixen, and both thought they would be the ones to capture her. Deep down though, I have always fancied that I would be the first one to hold her down. Maybe, just maybe, today is the day that the family phantom comes home.
Next time: "The man at the Bridge," The Hunt II