The Prince in Moonlight and Blue

He lived in a land that was wild and where there lived ferocious beasts.  It was dangerous to walk out, even in daylight.  There also were good creatures that could be there to help – but they themselves had to worry about their own safety from the wild beasts who were all kinds of monsters you could imagine out in the dark if you lived in this land.  And even all those you couldn’t imagine but was there lurking and sinister and about to attack any moment once you left your hut.  Some might be great beasts with wings as wide as a 400 year-old oak tree’s branches reaching out side to side.  There were pythons that dropped from grey stormy clouds if you stayed out when it was going to rain soon.  Their hisses were as loud as thunder.  There were hags that would jump out from behind the bushes just as you neared your front door.  They were terrifying with dark venom dripping from their mouths and their long nails hadn’t seen any clippers for a thousand years.  They would begin eating you on the spot even with just using one or two tooth in their mouths or maybe two and they say the foul smell of these witches would be worse than their killing.  Then there were freakish flying goblins with nastily yellowed wings that would come and land on your shoulder and begin tormenting you with how they talked about you.  And you would believe everything they said and that would drive you insane and you might as well be dead.  Also, in this land, sometimes you could not know who was good and who was bad.  It wasn’t just the ferocious beasts to watch out for.  A shining maiden in white, floating across the glade towards you with long fair hair might guide you with her smile along a shorter path home but which led to quicksand.  And just the same could a dwarf woman wearing dirty rags around her head, looking at you with angry eye brows and an ongoing gleaming, insidious stare rescue you from a sudden tide of road piranhas – piranhas flying through the air (a mutation from the river piranhas, meat-eating fish and this road mutation with much sharper teeth and human-like faces.  Or, a man dressed and looking like a vampire, blood-drained face and glancing at your neck every so often could be watching you because of the stealth of robbers undercover trying to befriend you on your short journey to visit your aunty.  The vampire-looking man could in deed be a vampire but at the time he was more concerned about the gold chain you were flashing from your neck and that’s what the robbers were after.  The vampire would rescue you, and as long as it wasn’t his dinner time, he would bow and wish you safe travels to your destination.

  Or, when the Donkey Bandits came, a talking ordinary domestic working donkey might offer to save you from being kidnapped if you promised to release him into the wild after.  If you agreed, then off the muddy road the domestic donkey would produce some manure which you would quickly use to mark your wrists with – and this the Donkey Bandits were more terrified of than the Shapeless Monster that was the one who first gave the idea for people to make donkeys into salami centuries ago.  The donkey bandits all had once been domestic servants – or slaves as you can put it, and loathed their former lives and hardly ever wanted to remember or admit what once they had been.  They would never take any person with them who had a domestic slave donkey’s smell around their wrists.

  Besides all terrifying and unpleasant stuff in this wonderful land of perpetual danger, there were also very calming and pleasing creatures.  Who were the ones who made anything beautiful that anyone had seen? – which wasn’t made purely by nature of course such as the flowers, the sunlight and the sea … well, in this land, all the jewellery and crowns and combs to wear in your hair and any fine fabrics or lace for table cloths and wedding veils, any fancy wrist cuffs or collars or hems could only be made by the fairies.  In this land, only the fairies had fingers adept to making fine things that required skill.  They did not make weapons though and they couldn’t make silver finery either.  They only made fine fabrics and embroidery and maybe some made cobweb traps for the giant flies – the giant flies which bit by the scent of any annoyance they smelled out from you – and this bite killed you in three days.  The fairies were the most trustworthy for being doubtlessly good, though since they could disappear from sight of a predator at any time they wished, they were quite carefree and living in puritan isolation between the top leaves and remained unseen unless they chose to appear to you.

  As humans, the only skill for creating finery you could have would be making weapons.  And silver finery.  And there was the confectionary, of course – but not even the fine art of painting, which was done by the moths, butterflies and pixies as a team.  The only creatures that could make weapons in this land were the humans.  There weren’t very many humans; they were some of the most vulnerable of all the creatures here.  And they were the only ones needing weapons.  They kept disappearing more and more to become slaves as smiths to make weapons for those creatures that threatened and murdered such as the road-robbers (who usually weren’t human, by the way), and of course, also, slave smiths were constantly required and recruited unwillingly because the wars that raged in parts of the land and had been raging for thousands of years.  In case some of you don’t know, wars need weapons.  It isn’t just fist or a kick which humans fight with when it comes to war, they have always been requiring so much more and it is that which caused all the terrifying creatures and animals and just normal animals like the donkey domestics lose their esteem or admiration for humans a long time ago.

  It was well known that human beings were specially adapted to skill, working with their fingers which were each separated and thin and nimble.  They didn't have claws like the racoons or the ghouls and didn't have effective incisor teeth or talons like some of the vicious creatures of the air.  In this way, because their fingers had no talons, claws, and could be very gentle and light, they could make tools that very intricate, even beautiful, and their weapons were just the same, intricate and beautiful.  Precise and efficient too.  In this way, they possessed a way to protect themselves, in this wilderness land – besides relying on good kind creatures to come to their aid or besides simply hiding in their huts and caves.  Even when they lived in these caves there had always been a creature living there first and often humans lived there in symbiosis along side the creature and its mercy.

   Were there any princes or princesses who lived in this land?  Any king or queen to rule and keep the land in order?  Was there any human here who could escape in dream and fancy like the fairies who were safe in their little realms protected by invisibility?

  There was a little Prince who wore moonlight – which was a silvery turquoise –   and blue and had light brown hair curled in round and round his rabbit fur collar.  This was a prince who was prince because he was just that.  There really was a king for this land, just like in any land.  However, the king had to hide and in fact did not rule.  He was still king though.

  The Prince’s father was lost somewhere, in the kingdom, and had not been seen for five years.  And five years in this land are five decades.  The Prince in moonlight and blue was already nine, though he had lived for nine decades.  He had no mother.  She had died when he was born.  She had been one of the children hidden with the fairies before she grew up and had to leave.  She had been of the rose-pink sunrise and her son the prince was the moon at midnight. 

  He who was the Prince in moonlight and blue did not care much about anything except for his walks inside his courtyard – and this courtyard was also where his cottage was which was his castle – inside which an earthquake had once created a wide crack running along the rock of a mountain.  This was the royal hide-out and had been for nine decades.  Sunshine came down, and there were a few trees growing and there were plenty of flowers and climbing vines . . . even cascades of water; a stream bubbling and flowing which made it a perfect idyllic place.  The Prince in moonlight and blue could not see far from anywhere; there was no look-out point, and he was not allowed to climb up to the top because it was very high up, nearly a kilometre.  And also, there were spiteful creatures living at the top around the ridges of the crack who kept away other creatures worse for humans than themselves but even these spiteful birds of prey and goats of prey were sure to kill the Prince if he would come near them.

  Perhaps if the Prince would ever have found a place to climb up to find a look-out, then he would long have climbed out over the walls completely.  If those creatures living up on the top would not have devoured him then it would have been because of something else in the brutal wilderness that he would not have lasted half a day.

  The little boy had no playmates who were children.  Humans could not leave outside their huts more than one at a time.  This is why many lived alone.  There could be no more than human in a radius of a mile or they would be smelled out by the man-eating ghouls that flew around.  They couldn’t find the passage to fairyland, since it was invisible, and that was nearly the only place where a child could grow up with other children.  The king could not stay with his son here in the deep crack inside the mountain though it was such a lovely haven and safe from everything.  The King had to leave to allow his son to survive and live without danger of the ghouls.

  The Prince in moonlight and blue didn’t have a real name – his father had called him, of course, “Son”, “My boy”.  The prince had been four when his father had gone away.  There were dwarves living in the royal hide-out.  They served the prince of course; they had been assigned by the King before he left.  They called him “Roamer” – not in a nice way – the dwarves weren’t ever nice to begin with.  They saw the prince always roaming away on his own, even when he had just been on his hands and keens and could not yet stand, walk, and climb. 

  The Prince cared about nothing much.  There were plenty of flowers, bushes, low apple trees, gardening tools left by his father, and a bench here and there.  There was a well in which he had once fallen into staring at his reflection and thinking it was another child – he had already been five and should have known better.  He gave up hope of ever meeting any creatures like himself after that.  But of course, he could never become a dwarf either.  It was no wonder the little prince cared about nothing much except for his walks.  There were lovely carpets of moss to look at, and ferns grew everywhere along the mountain walls.  There was a beetle colony living in one corner in a sort of peat forest ground, under the only fir tree.  There were insects, butterflies and birds.  The Prince lived day to day, quiet, and to the dwarves, almost as if he wasn’t there.

  Little did he know, though he was of little importance to the dwarves, there were other creatures besides the dwarves who thought him very important.  The dwarves had been assigned by the King to watch over the Prince and keep him from harm; that no other creatures find out he was here.  But there was one dwarf who became a traitor.  This dwarf became a spy for the Donkey Bandits, and so the Donkey bandits had known just where the little Prince lived almost the moment his father left.  They were waiting for the right time to invade the Prince’s abode and steal him to make weapons for their robbing widow elves and orphan faeries on the roads, and the old senile wanderer – and of course, the humans who still ventured travelling on the roads.

  There was the head of the Donkey Bandits who actually was not such a bad creature.  He lived in a hideout, in a cave.  He was half human and half ghoul.  The Donkey Bandits were so horrible because that was their nature.  They were unruly, though they needed a ruler for they were actually servants at heart.  Their boss, whom they called “Lord Captain Gold Claw” though they were decent enough to work for him.  They were generous and honest with what they arrived with at his headquarters every fortnight, sacks bulging with looted and robbed goods.  Lord Captain Gold Claw did not care much about how the Donkey Bandits got their goods, so long as they didn’t kill anybody.  He told them, threat was good and knives were the best weapons to use.  But the victim should be let free and not killed.  They would soon later be travelling again with goods, the reason why.  And also, Gold Claw actually had a conscience.

  What did Gold Claw want all these goods for?  What did he do with them?  Lord Captain Gold Claw, you see, had a lion who owned Lord Captain Gold Claw’s life.  With the goods Gold Claw’s bandits brought, captain Gold Claw had to buy victims to fee the lion.  They were mostly humans.  The lion had fostered the Captain from his childhood years.  Long ago, the lion had tried to save the Captain’s mother, a ghoul, from being smashed to pieces by two Boulder-Pack monsters, but had failed.  The lion had saved Gold Claw, though the half-boy and half-ghoul lost his mother and his left hand.  It had been smashed to pieces by two Boulder-Pack monsters.  The boy actually was left-handed, so it was a great loss to him for the rest of his life.  The lion wanted to try all his best and was so compassionate he then pulled out one of his immense teeth, roaring in pain and nearly bleeding to death himself over the following two days.  But the half-boy, half-ghoul had a hand again.  The lion’s tooth, which the lion had pulled out for him.  It was really the size of a rhinoceros’ horn.

  The little Prince had heard tales of Captain Gold Claw from the dwarves in the mountain courtyard.  He was not afraid of him, nor afraid of the Donkey Bandits.  He did not really know fear.  In fact, these tales he merely listened to out of politeness, being a prince and because he was an attentive little person when called for attention.

  The little Prince, when he was nine decades old, was one day told by the secret spy for the Donkey Bandits that he was to dress up as a dwarf.

  “It’s just for fun,” the dwarf told him.  “And then I’m going to show you a new little crevice in the wall I’ve found, my Prince.  A magic one, one that you can climb through at night and appear in another land.”

  The little Prince’s eyes filled with bright wonder, but then dampened again.  “Another land?  There’s no other land.  That’s a fairytale.”

  The dwarf grinned.  “Oh, but there are marvellous things in fairytales that really do exist.  Such as this other land, that other land outside this your home, inside these rock walls.  It is not the cruel, wild land where the ghouls fly around.  No, it is another land.  If you would climb through this special passage in the wall – just behind the vines, it is another land you will come to.”  The dwarf dared to reach and take the Prince’s hand – though the dwarves were not allowed to except if the Prince was in need of help and rescue.  And the dwarf said in his rough rogue’s voice full of promising warm earth in it, “Maybe this is where your father has gone.  I promise you, this is where your father has gone.”

  The little Prince of course, not having been taught to be wary of what someone might tell him if it involved leaving his home, nodded readily – all because he remembered his father.  His father – that was the most marvellous idea and promise he could hear from anywhere and anyone.  His eyes brightened, all the more so that the moon had come into view overhead and it was a full moon.  Its reflection was inside the Prince’s eyes.  It had in deed been many times the moon had shone in his eyes this way that the Prince had thought of and missed his father.  Could his dream now possibly be coming true?

  “Finally . . . Now I can see my father?  Soon?  Taft, you are my friend – I didn’t like you before.  But now . . . you are my only friend.  Nobody before cared to help me find my father or show me the way to where he might be.”  He smiled, with a noble thank you.

  And Taft the spy for the Donkey Bandits smiled back just as the good friend he had just been called.  He handed the little Prince the leather trousers, the moss shirt and pine-cone shingled vest which the dwarves in this hide-out wore, and made the Prince in moonlight and blue learn exactly where to go and in what way to go there – creeping over the ground like a garden snake.  All the dwarves were going to be celebrating the full moon, drinking around the fire.  Life was easy here, besides the hard work they did gardening and digging for stones and metals.  They did not look out for intruders.  And yet, it would be unusual to catch the sight of the Prince walking at a late hour.

  Once the Prince had crept through that opening in the wall, behind the ivy, just a few steps in wonder, looking around him – it was the mountain forest – there were the Donkey Bandits, ee-aawing, their front hooves up and you know they walked on their hind-legs.  Some of them were smoking cigars – it was hay inside – and the Prince had not met with danger like this before, so he stared in astonishment.  That was all he did.  There were no weapons in sight, but those donkeys showed their teeth at him.  He thought it was interesting to see how there were creatures that could be riotously happy and hatefully angry at the same time.   He felt that they liked him and despised him at the same time.

  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue wondered if they knew where to find his father.  He asked them; and their grins grew out farther and they nodded with ee-aws and then threw a net over him.

  “Why are you doing this?”  The Prince tried to fight the coarse rope net but he was pulled off his feet and like a sack of flour dropped over the back of a donkey.

  “We’re going to your father alright!”  This was Taff the dwarf, and after that the Prince heard him no more even when he called out his name later on the journey.

  The Prince was well-used to the rough and gruff ways of the dwarves.  He just thought these donkeys were a bit more or worse than that, and he believed them.  He thought he must just let them carry him – he tried to tell them he wanted to see where he was, when all he could look at was the ground as the donkeys treaded.  The net was tied all around; the Prince could not budge even to the side.  I’m afraid he became quite sick after a while.  This was when he wondered if the donkeys really knew he was the prince of the land or not.

  The donkeys must have smelled that he was unwell.  They then set the Prince off the donkey’s back, pulled off the net.  The Prince found himself in a beautiful open space – it was along side a mountain and a valley and forests below were shining serenely in the moonlight.  He had never seen such distances; he wondered if perhaps it was just an image he was seeing like when he saw his reflection in the well in which he had stared at long ago.  And then he rode on the donkey sitting upright – though he had never ridden before.  He was quite weak, the donkey’s fur smelled terrifyingly, but gazed up and around him, nearly falling asleep most of the time.  But he stayed awake; there were ever so many stars and it was a dome-shaped sky – he had never thought this is what it looked liked outside through the passage in the wall.  He had only known the sky with the perimeters of an uneven rectangular above – he had never felt the sky such an endless, open free space like he saw it now.

  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue had never seen another human before, except his father, five decades ago.  He had never seen a ghoul except for a few primitive sketches made on rocks by the dwarves, back at the castle.  So when the Prince in Moonlight and blue was brought before Captain Gold Claw, the half man, half-human being, wearing a black cloak and leaning on a cane, the little prince thought this must be his father – and oh, how he had changed!  He ran to this creature – whoa, he had grown twice the height the prince remembered his father to be – oh, and flung his arms around him.

  “Father!  Father!  It’s me!  It’s your son!  It’s ‘My Son’.”

  The donkeys saw this and they even lost their grins for a moment and became very quiet.  But two of them knew what to do.

  It took two of the donkeys to pry the childish, tenacious arms away from their Captain.  He did not begin to cry when he realized this was another person, not his Father.  Gold Claw was very sympathetic, though did not need to say anything.  The Prince was crestfallen, yet did not lose heart.  And he was so absorbed beholding this other creature who was very very old in deed and very very ugly, yet very kind and very deep – something which the dwarves did not have – mainly because they had no human soul.  Gold Claw of course had a human soul, even though he was only half human.

  Captain Gold Claw was not used to any children and he was not used to any hugging.  He lived alone in his hide-out cave.  He ate human flesh his donkey bandits brought him once in a while, without knowing what it was.  Smoked, sometimes fresh and to be grilled.  Captain Gold Claw knew the Lion liked to eat humans second best to ghouls.  The Captain, the lion’s keeper, of course was the Lion’s friend and would not be eaten.  This is why the most important thing in the Captain’s life was to keep the Lion eating to its heart’s content.

  This little boy in silvery turquoise and blue, the prince of the land, had not been abducted to be eaten.  Captain Gold Claw had been waiting nine years to have a skilled human being make tools and weapons for him.  He had listened to reports from Taft the spy and the prospect of the prince of the land and one so much finer and genteel than any other humans, quite like a fairy – though without any of the overtly playful qualities so he had heard which would get in the way of doing work.

  So this was him, a boy so small, one so clean and dressed like he really was prince of a land that was beautiful and mysterious – beautiful the land was, yes it was, but its mysterious lay in why there was no order, no mercy in nature for having such a havoc of cruel, relentless beasts and so many of them and so few ways for the prey to defend themselves or hide and to survive.  And was there ever going to be an end?

  Gold Claw had an appreciation for things fine and beautiful, intricate and innocent.  He had very refined ways himself, Gold Claw did.  The child looking up at him was intelligent, not smiling for all his coolness of mind.  Yet it was all mingled with softness only a child can radiate.  And the core of innocence was something Gold Claw had never come across before.  It was the innocence of someone whose closest companion was the moon and beauty of surroundings.  Gold Claw of course didn’t know this.  He only knew it was something familiar – this is because he had something very similar in him – that similar longing, still from when he was a child, for beauty and solace in beauty and finery whether in tools, in weapons.  In nature he dared not, as he was afraid of daylight – as ghouls in this land were.  And the night outside depressed him because he had no friends out there.  His friends however were in his collections along the cave walls.  The cave ran very long; it was a long tunnel in deed, though his abode with the fire burning was in the middle.  His collection of fine weapons and garden tools, kitchen tools, pottery tools, drawing tools, were all along shelves both sides and some things hanging from the ceiling – rows of bow and arrows, the design of an eagle here, a hard white wood that looks to us like ivory which grew only in this land, there was a mountain goat, a sea horse, some bows were just flowers or vines.  There were also bows made of other kinds of wood, not just white – resembling a fairy or faun that was much to be remembered.  And if you looked at the case for the arrows, on the lid there were miniature carvings to match with the bow.  And there were some arrows displayed, the quills being a work of art as well, though simple but as different as there are butterfly wings.

  Gold Claw had never been so charmed by an artefact as he was by this boy, the Prince in Moonlight and Blue.  And more than that, from that moment on, the prince was treated just as a prince is to be treated who is dressed in moonlight and blue and seems to have a soul transparent like moonlight.

  Gold Claw anyway had pity for human beings.  There was something so frail about them, and there was such pathos for suffering and hard work and weariness about surviving, most of them who had come to work for him.  When his human captive proved that he or she hopelessly hated him, Gold Claw would not keep them much longer but let them go.  It did happen once or twice that the Lion had gone without a proper meal for days and Gold Claw put the captive’s service to the extremity of serving him/herself as a meal. Of course – Gold Claw stepped outside of the cave and closed the door, not bearing to be inside while it happened.  Well, the human served for a necessity at least – would he/she have been freed into the wilderness it would have been some other beast to have devoured it.  A human unprotected would not last half a day, and in these parts there were no kind creatures hiding out that might come to the rescue.  It was too harsh here.

  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue somehow became friends with the Lion the moment they met.  Gold Claw was astounded.  The Lion had growled at first when the Little Prince had stepped closer and closer and began to stroke its mane.  It was lying on its place on the ground, beside its cage.  But as the Lion saw the translucent, comely eyes of the little Prince and that this little human had no fear and no worry, the Lion remembered the half-ghoul and half human he had rescued from being killed, and it had been for the same reason, before.  

  After the donkey bandits went away, Gold Claw showed the little Prince the mat on which he was to sleep, in the corner.  The child was so tired, that he fell asleep without any thought to how hard it was to his bones to sleep the cave ground and not on the eagle feather bed he used to sleep on at home.  By the any thought occurred in his mind again it was near sundown the next day, when he woke up.  He felt the discomfort as if his well-being and safety had been pulled out of his gums, but his gums were his heart and very sore and missing all it contained.    

  And then there was that very tall and broad creature – there he was!  The liittle Prince stared at him, the half-man and half-ghoul, who did not notice he was awake.  Captain Gold Claw was assembling all the materials for making the weapons across benches and tables, with models for a beginning artisan to learn from.  In the firelight, the Liittle Prince could identify teeth of great cats, bones, feathers, planks of white wood.  Hammers, chisels, blades, saws, liittle metal polishers you wear on your pinkie finger– it has a metal flap with a sharp edge, you can strum as you work.  There was also the ware of a blacksmith.  The human captives who had set to work making weapons and tools all had known what to do; it was something humans in this land had the feel for naturally, even if they had not been taught.

  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue admired these things as he explored the sight of them in their wide range and even got to his feet with growing aspiration.

  Gold Claw acknowledged him, stepping across to meet him, limping on a cane. 

  “See this here?” the old creature said, his voice hoarse and startling.  The liittle Prince could not help turning away his face from the foul breath.  It was a dagger with a red wood with blue tints, carved with the image of a mythical creature that once lived in this land but had become killed to extinction.  “This is a weapon – a weapon and a tool.  It is my plunder.  My treasure – out of thousands.  You have seen.”  There was a lot of intricate craftsmanship chiselled into this fine piece of work.  Even the blade of the dagger itself was in a shape more of an art than a weapon exactly.  “This sophistication,” the Captain of Treasures said, “is what only a human can craft.”  The Prince did not look to know what the Captain was talking about – how were they crafted?  The Captain motioned in mime language and the Prince gained understanding. “With your hands.  I can’t do them.  Only folk like you can.  No creature in the kingdom knows how and can possibly create this.” 

  The liittle Prince looked back at the Captain a while, bright with interest and surprise.  He had grown up always being the only human living with dwarves.  Of course he felt distinctly human and the only one in the world, yet he had heard and imagined there were others somewhat like him.

  Gold Claw in deed made it sound abstruse and of weighty importance.  And when the Liittle Prince held the mighty bow in both his own hands, a thrill came to his fingers and the bow somehow felt very familiar.

  “My father!  Father had a bow like this . . .” 

  Becoming reflective, the Prince’s head began to hang low.  “Taft, Taft the Dwarf.  He told me I might find my father.”  He looked at the Captain and it was look Gold Claw recognized seeing in eyes of other humans his captives.  “Are . . . are you human?”

  Gold Claw did not like to admit he was half ghoul.  It had been ghouls which had killed his mother.  The Prince was afraid of ghouls, so Taft the spy had informed him.  Taft had said, “Oh, the child has never been afraid of any stories of the man-eating ghouls, Lord Captain.  He’s not afraid of anything.  I suppose that is how the human young are.  His father was not so.  He would sweat and tremble with fear, so I used to see him before, Captain Lord.”

  “Yes . . . “Gold Claw replied to the child.  “Yes, I am human – but not like you.  I have blood of another creature too.  You can call me Gold Claw.  This hand of mine is the claw of a lion – though it looks like a tooth.  I was not born this way.”

  The Liittle Prince was a natural human.  Gold Claw saw the child’s shoulders cringe, though it was half the kind of alienation the other humans had given him.  “There are other humans here in this magical world.  Are there not?  This world behind the secret passage through the wall of where I live, my world.”

  Gold Claw remembered how Taft had abducted the liittle chap.  He became a little angry at Taft the Dwarf for making up stories about magic to a young child.  He told the little Prince the truth that Taft had made up a story.  “There is no world except this one, my little Prince.  You grew up in this same world, the world you saw on your journey.  You never saw the outside world, that is all.”  There was a sting in his demeanour to the Prince and the Prince detected it.  Truthfully, Captain Gold Claw was jealous of how ideally the Prince had been protected from sorrows and sufferings and hardships, growing up inside that crack in the mountain.  “This is no world for humans.  You will not meet another human in this world.  There are only creatures like me – and the Donkey Bandits who were you travel companions . . . and creatures even less human than yourselves, and none of them the same as the dwarves who were in allegiance to the King.  But here, you are my friend.  And that is the one thing a creature like yourself needs, a human, isn’t it?  I am your friend.  And these tools here – everything thing you see, everything inside this cave that you see, is beautiful and fascinating . . . it’s all yours.  While you are here, it is yours.  If you go and leave, it is never to be yours again.”

  Gold Claw limped away to let the Prince in Moonlight and Blue to think about this.

  The Prince was so drawn and captivated by the weapons – being an internal craftsman for just these things as the humans were in this land – even the thought of finding his father again was put on one of the dusty shelves for a while.  He ate something that the half-human, half-ghoul gave him, though he ate only a couple of bites despite his hunger. 

  If there had been a new world he had discovered, through the passage in the mountain wall, then there was a third world he had been absorbed into.  And in this world he remained, day after day, hardly sleeping enough – there was so much work to do.  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue became a slave in deed.  And he was different from the human captives in this cave before him – they had abhorred their captor, Gold Claw, and none of them had been children.  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue for a while trusted that Gold Claw was his father now – though he wasn’t at all like his father the King who was marvellous and kind with blue tender eyes and of course had loved the Prince far more and deeper than the Prince sensed Gold Claw could.

  The Prince could not make as many weapons and tools as Gold Claw had envisioned since the year of the Prince’s birth. 

  The Prince, so very like humans, was getting used to the thrill of the work and the environment which had at first been bright and lit like exploding fireworks.  He thought about his father more and more, especially since having a new sort of father, Gold Claw, made him remember his real father.  There were pleas and questions he expressed to Gold Claw, each day, and every night when the Prince would sit before the fire with a cup of hot ginger tea, but Gold Claw would hear none of them.  Gave it one ear half-listening and the other deaf.

  Besides Gold Claw being a little greedy for his collection of weapons and tools – and them also serving to buy victims to feed the lion – which of course the Prince knew nothing of and never saw – Gold Claw had been wanting to keep this working slave also as his son.  The Prince had become more and more special to him.  This unafraid, clear-souled, inquisitive-minded creature – of all creatures a human – had filled in that gap deep in the old man-ghoul’s heart that was a father.  And he was so proud of his little boy with the little fingers that could bind the tiniest leather strings!  How splendid his mind could work, thinking of the most intricate designs and carve them out!  No creature in the kingdom had the mind, the imagination and the skill to do this. Gold Claw had never been so happy those three days in his life.

  Alas, the fourth day, the Prince in Moonlight and Blue lost interest in his artistry and crossed his arms before the Captain. 

  “Gold Claw,” spoke he.  “If you will not let me go to my father, I will run away from here.  I am angry with you, Gold Claw.  You do not obey my requests.  You think that I am your friend.  But besides us being friends, Gold Claw, I am Prince of the Land.  And you are my royal subject.” 

  Gold Claw became ill at ease and disgruntled, but he bowed.  “Yes, my Prince.  Forgive me.”  Of course, the Prince knew nothing of Gold Claw’s greed – or at least did not see it as a vice.  And the Prince did not know about captivity in slavery.  Gold Claw grimaced in the pain of his greed and what the Prince meant to him.  Gold Claw could be vicious as a human being could and also vicious as a ghoul could, nursing the darkness inside him that made him an alien to the human slaves who abhorred him.  He took in the Prince’s proclamation as the same abhorrence every captive had stabbed him with.  Now it was a blunt weapon but the same old open wound Gold Claw cursed about in the shadows, eyes gleaming.

  The Little Prince was waiting for Gold Claw to come back in the light and express more on what the Prince had said.  Gold Claw would not look at him for a while.  But then when he did, his face then softened.  The Prince was too transparent of innocence and loveliness – it was the Prince who was master of the two.  And Gold Claw was a ghoul-human marked by the mercy of the lion which had saved him and so mercy was the crystal clear and bright in the core of his heart.  He limped out of the shadow so the Prince could see him.  “Yes, you shall have your request, and without delay.”  Though then it was as if the lion’s claw of mercy suddenly clutched his heart.  “But I fear much for the Prince.”  Gold Claw knew the Prince in Moonlight  and Blue had not the terror of danger as the other humans had. 

  Gold Claw had once been a bit like him, before that terrible night his mother was killed and torn to pieces before his very eyes, after an attack on both.  The ghouls knew this cave very well.  They sometimes perched themselves along the rock ridges outside, waiting for a released captive.  The Prince always listened with the attention of one who grew up with sound being his delight and company.  And now Gold Claw spoke with a different seriousness than ever before.  His eyes were with deepest human concern, palest of blue under their strange teary film – a film almost like cobwebs.  Gold Claw really meant the best for the little Prince of Moonlight and Blue.  “The Prince, he knows not the fiendish beasts that will snatch him not a few steps from the door of this cave, my hide-out.”  The young boy’s eyes widened.  “This Lion you are not afraid of, my child – this Lion, here, who is a wild beast and strong, can be eaten by creatures bigger and wilder than he.  He fought for his life many a times, back in the day he was living outside – winning every fight, and he won a fight for me once, long ago.  Now he is very old, so he stays where he is safe.  Here with me.  There is not one lion which has yet lived to be so old as he.

  “But when he was young, he had a mighty stroke of his paw and he had all of his teeth.  You, though, my little prince, have nothing.  Youth teeth are not even sharp enough to make an arrow head.

  “From the Rolling Boulder Animal to the Eye-Picking Hawks, the Fossils you’ve heard who lunge up out of the ground when step on a vein – everything is your worst enemy.  And you are defenceless to them.”

  The little Prince acquiesced for a moment. He did not like the mockery in Gold Claw’s eyes.  The Prince rose to stand as tall as he could, with his bow double his height and he began to strap the bundle of sharpest, fastest arrows, to carry on his back.

  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue spoke, “I have the weapons I have made.  And without a falter of confidence, he said, “And I have you.”

  Gold Claw of course could not leave his lion alone – there would be nobody to feed him.  And he feared that the lion would charge and eat him if the lion would find out he was going to be deserted.  So the poor Prince in Moonlight and Blue stepped out into the treacherous wilderness, all alone.  With his bow and arrows, his pockets full of sling shots, and a few blades and a club with the most intricate design on it which he himself had chiselled.

  “Wait,” Captain Gold Claw called from the door the little Prince, outside in the mist.  What the keeper of the longest living lion was about to say mystified the Prince greatly.  “Tell your father . . . if you find him . . . that I have the crown he needs.  Tell him, the crown.  I have been so selfish to keep it mine, all these centuries.  It belongs to the king.  It belongs to the king and once it rests on his head, the whole kingdom . . . will vanish.”

  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue walked towards Gold Claw after the Prince had thought a while about this.

  “Vanish?” he said.  “But how can it vanish?  I don’t want for this kingdom to vanish.  There is so much I have never seen.  There is so much I want to explore.  Even if you say there is so much danger and treachery and there is not one creature I can trust.  Why should everything vanish?”

  Gold Claw nearly kept the answer to himself, as it had been kept for centuries.  But his heart made him speak it out.  The little Prince’s voice rang so clear and Gold Claw saw his eyes and the Prince’s innocent whiteness of face.

  “That is all every king has ever wished for, My Prince . . . If only you could find your father . . . you would see, this is what he wishes for.  My Prince.”

  Of course, Gold Claw believed the King dead.  He had heard of the King who had went missing and that was five years ago.  Nobody spoke of him now.  But it was the Fairies and those creatures that were good and cared for their young who would warn their children if the y walked or flew too far away, using the disappearance of the king as a figure of speech.  “Don’t go far or you’ll go missing like the missing king.  It had become a popular figure of speech.

  The half-ghoul and half-human lifted his ghoul claw up to wave good-bye to the Little Prince.  His ghoul claw which had no fine fingers and no fine touch to make any of the tools and weapons he had dreamed of.  Well, Gold Claw would return to ordinary life.

  Gold Claw felt pain with the thought of the brutal death awaiting the child he had taken as his own son, and the old half-ghoul felt this so wretchedly that when he returned inside his cave, he howled into his chimney in agony.  The little Prince in Moonlight and Blue heard the sound.  It came from out of the chimney which went out into the outside air.  He thought it the sound of some vile creature.  For the first time, the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue felt dread and it felt like a blow to his guy.

  Yet, with the whole kingdom to explore now, all wilderness, and endless walking and roaming, the Prince in moonlight and Blue could not think of any danger or loneliness.  This was the delight and the best of his life.  He even forgot about his father.

  Of course, little had he walked across the clearing after the copse of wood sheltering the cave, and a gang of ghouls came, encircling, over his head.  They shrieked and raved and were about to swoop down to their prey the Prince in Moonlight and Blue, when they were shot by the Prince with his bow and arrow.  Down the ghouls fell to the ground.  There were four of them.  The little Prince knew that had been the only thing he could do, and not run away or curl up in a ball.  And he had known he had to aim perfectly.  And he had, without any practice before except throwing pears as a hobby, back at his castle.  Spears had been the only weapon the dwarves had had.

  The little Prince walked on.  You can imagine his inquisitive mind which even made him ignore the hunger in his stomach that came.  The Prince actually walked quite a distance, with merely harmless creatures – half squirrel and half hare with long teeth – scurrying by him to snatch a sample of his scent with them.  They were spies for the Boulder-monsters and the Faceless Druids.  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue of course did not know, though harmless, there could be all sorts of different creatures who did him no harm but were treacherous.  And it could mean only a few moments more until the coming of a terrible monster, beast, or a trap – or it was unpredictable what might befall him.

  What happened next however was the most unexpected.  Twinkles fell down from the evening sky all around the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue.  He gazed around him in awe.  And the strange creatures following him, the half-squirrels and half-hares scurried away.  It was the star-children. 

  The star-children lived in the stars, far in the night sky and some of them were just coming out.  Those that saw the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue wandering on in his own recognized the turquoise and blue he was wearing: it was the sign of the prince, the young child who had been predicted in ancient times by the stars themselves.

  There had been quite a many princes before him.  They had all grown to be men.  But it was predicted that there would come a prince one day who wore a moonlight turquoise and an evening sky blue.  A few stars also said one who wore a rabbit-fur collar.  And this prince would be different from all princes before him who had died or grew to be kings.  This prince would become king but he would never grow up.  He would not change even to the body and mind of a man.  And this prince would cause this land to change and only he could do it.  How he would bring it about, the stars could not tell.

  “Prince in Moonlight and Blue, Little Prince!”  It was a star child calling.  Its voice sounded like the twinkle of a star, like a children’s musical wind-up box but ringing even ever so clear and sweet.  “Little Prince, you are safe with us!”

  The twinkles were so beautiful, they lit up the ground before and around him; the Prince in Moonlight and Blue blinked and blinked, and the radiance of every twinkle was just like a star in the night sky.  He looked up at the sky; he could that it was snowing twinkles.  He could not see the star children.

  “You are looking for your father!” cried the two.  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue turned to two stars above the horizon.  It had sounded, like that was where the voices were coming from.  He turned to a mellow, warmer voice.  It was another star, on the other side of the sky.

  “Little Prince in Moonlight and Blue, I can see your father.  Come follow me!”

  The heart in the little boy chest must have been nearly choking him with how it leapt for incredible joy.  He believed this child, the star.  He had forgotten all about Taft who had lied to him.

  And the star children, truth, never told lies.  They had never learned to lie.  They spoke what they saw.

  A light twinkled, off and on, to the left of the little Prince inside the copse of wood before him.  He ran to it, and as he did, it kept moving ahead.  He sometimes thought it had disappeared but then it would twinkle again, ever such a sweet, friendly light.  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue ran into a thicket and the branches were so dense and there were brambly twigs but his eyes did not get scratched.  It became colder and colder in this place; sometimes he wondered if the smoke before him as he breathed out was hiding his vision from where the twinkling light went.  Then, suddenly, there it was: a silver sheen, of a garment.  A child came in view, by a big fir tree.  The little Prince saw it . . . a star child.  It had a smiling face with big wondrous eyes, but the little Prince didn’t see it again, the bright star child’s face.

  The little Prince in Moonlight and Blue followed, and the star child was fast.  The little Prince could even hear it laughing, sometimes, as if the star child was playing – which it was.

  Then the little Prince saw or heard nothing more.  The star-child was gone.

  This is when the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue heard his father’s voice.  And he heard the creaking of tree branches, even a twig breaking off.

  “Over here!” his father called.

  And there he was, bound up by the branches of a tree. It was a hateful tree. And up here the King had been bound for five years.  He had been fed by pigeons, so he said.  The little Prince dared not climb up and get him out of it.  He couldn’t.  However glad he was and crying for joy to find his father again, his father was telling him the only way he was going to be freed was if the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue would find the crown that would make this kingdom vanish.

  There was a little lamb that was meandering nearby; there was an owl.  It was the owl that helped convince the little Prince what the King was saying.

  “If the tree dies,” the King said, it will shoot poison into my body, everywhere where it is holding me fast.  You cannot chop it down, you cannot cut off one of its limbs, or I’ll die.  I already have one type of poison in me, which is the reason why the vultures don’t come to eat me, and no ghouls or any man-eating beast come near either . . . they can smell that I am poison.

  “It has been agony, my son.  I don’t know … I’ve thought it’s been a century I’ve lived here like this day after day, my son.

  “But you will free not only me, but all of us, my son.”  And there was the vision of a freedom in the man’s eyes which frightened the little Prince.

  The little Prince in Moonlight and Blue lifted the lamb in his arms and cuddled his cheek on the fleece where his teardrops had fled.  He did not want to put the crown on his head because he did not want the kingdom to vanish.  That would mean the lamb would disappear … and everything.  The Prince wondered if his father would disappear.  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue was becoming too perplexed and angry at his father for wanting everything to disappear.  This wilderness with the evil deathly creatures was the Prince’s home.  The Prince’s father had abandoned him, many years ago.  The Prince in moonlight and Blue would rather have his home stay the way it was and if his father wanted to be gone forever, then just he must vanish and nothing else.

  “I am not going to put on the crown,” the Prince said to his father.  “I’m not doing what you say.”  The boy started to walk away.  A careless little lad he was, after all.  Yes, he had cared so much about his father, but he did not like what his father was saying.  And he felt he was being dragged into death inside his spirit the way his father had become Despair in person.  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue loathed how his father had become.

  “Where are you going?” called the King after him and began to panic and the tree creaked and groaned.  It was a sinister tree.  Had the tree any mercy, the tree would have let its prisoner go, having witnessed the purity of such a child as the little Prince, dressed in moonlight turquoise and a star-night blue.

  The young boy walked way and went away.  Alone and angry.  The stars above twinkled in despondency and the star-children began talking to each other, far away, from one galaxy to another.  But the Prince could not hear them.

  The Prince walked and walked.  The creatures that could smell him from a distance – the ghouls, the pythons, and the goblins, the witches, also smelled the sparkles from the stars that were still sticking over his head, his shoulders, wherever the sparkles had fallen on his face: nose and eye-lashes.  And this, the creatures were afraid of.  Many of them came within view of the boy.  They seethed and grimaced in the darkness, behind the bushes and in the treetops, following the solitary prey that they never could reach.

  You might wonder why the star children did not protect all the human beings before the little Prince, every child and human that had been walking, lost in the forests – or be it just before they met with danger.  All it would take was a sprinkle from their twinkles, which the star children had plenty of up there.

  Well, I don’t know but the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue was a favourite of the star children.  And maybe they did not know themselves why they had never helped anyone before.  They were very much in their own world up there in the universe.  Entirely in their own universe.  Seldom did the star children look down.  And if ever the little Prince would go back to Captain of the Donkey Bandits, the half-ghoul Gold Claw (who the Prince would never find without help) and put on the crown for the King which would make this entire kingdom vanish, then of course the stars and the star children would still remain as they ever were.  After all, this kingdom with the good and the vile creatures was only one country on this Earth, and there are many others.  At this time during the empire of Charlemagne there were many kingdoms across the earth.

  Of course, nobody in this kingdom knew about the other lands.  Nobody had ever crossed the borders.  Those that had tried to – and many had, were immediately sucked up by the borders – which consisted of a vacuum; and you would disappear.

  The Prince in Moonlight and Blue then got the idea: it was the star children that could help him!  He looked up and started calling them.  He called and called.

  They finally heard him – or, were it two or were it three who sent word from one galaxy to another for everybody to be quiet.

  “Listen you all!” cried the prince.  “You’re the only ones who can help my father.  Why have you done nothing?  Why is it me you have helped and not him?  Why did I live, since I was born, in the crack of a mountain just so nothing would do me harm?  Why is every creature here in hiding, afraid of being attacked and devoured or tormented by another creature?  Why did you never come before and put a stop to this?

  The stars could not answer.  They were only children and busy at play all the time.  They even did not take the Prince in Moonlight and Blue very seriously, though he was angry.  However, when he sat on the ground started to pick up a sparkle here and a sparkle there, telling the star children that they were going to have to see him get torn to pieces by a ghoul or a pack of them like the ones that had tried to attack him, the star children sent down a comet.

  The Prince in Moonlight and blue at first was afraid it was an evil creature and he tried to run away from it, but he had noticed it coming at him too late and the comet pushed the prince off his feet.  He fell over it, holding onto its arms.  It shot far up through the air with him.  The little Prince had to gasp for air, so beat the rush of air across his face.  The comet was very fast.  But it was too wonderful to soar and fly.  This was a comet that did not just shoot down through the universe to earth.  It was the trained pet of some of the star children.  It did as a twinkling, bright ringing voice directed it, and the Prince in Moonlight in Blue could hear it.

  The comet’s twinkling, bright, ringing voice was saying: “Swirl around!"  Then, “Do a twister!”  “Speed up that mountain.”  At one point, “Hover still!  Still!”  

  “Still!  Let the Prince see the view.  Candla, I said, hover, still, still!”

  And then the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue was brought up to the universe to visit the star children.  He even lived there for many a year.  He also became a star child, though he still stayed much the same on the outside appearance.  However, living there amongst the children and becoming one of them too, playing all day and forgetting anything he had ever known down on Earth, the Prince in Moonlight and Blue would never grow up.  Even when he was sent down again, after the many years to live on Earth, he never grew up.

  And since he was a star child now, all the wicked creatures that would do him harm could not go near him.  He went to his father and the tree let his father go the moment the tree smelled the star child.  The Little Prince in Moonlight and Blue felt sorry he had stayed so many years in the universe playing and having forgotten all about his father leaving him to hang in the grips of the tree branches.  He had already turned quite old and grey, the King.  But with a sparkle form the stars which still clung all over the little Prince, the King turned young again and never died.

  The little Prince in Moonlight and Blue and his father went to explore and discover the whole kingdom, which took many months.  It was springtime, and the little Prince never had seen spring, except how it was inside the confinement he had grown up in, within the mountain walls with the little waterfall and the stream.

  “Let’s visit Gold Claw and the Lion.”

  The little Prince had been quite excited.  His father wanted to give Gold Claw a reward for not having done his son any harm while he had been in Gold Claw’s hide-out.  The reward the King had to give the half-ghoul half-human was a present that the elves had given the King and the Prince in Moonlight and Blue.  It had been a whole village’s present, hand-made.  The elves had made a little purple pouch of softest suede, full of gold shavings.

  When the first door had opened with all its iron and the second door was opened with all its locks and bolts, there was only a young man who was there.  It was Gold Claw’s fostered son who was living there.  In the time that the Prince in Moonlight and Blue had been living and playing up with the star children, both Gold Claw and the Lion had died of old age.  The foster son had become Gold Claw’s long-sought tool and weapon-maker that stayed and did not leave.  He only spoke well of Gold Claw.

  The little Prince in Moonlight had missed it on time to give Gold Claw and the Lion some star-dust so they would return back to youth and live.

  “I don’t think they were entirely agreeable people, son,” the King said to the Prince, whose tears were streaming down his bright face.  Of course, gold Claw and the Lion hadn’t been people at all.

  And so, the little Prince in Moonlight and Blue and his much happier and confident father reined the kingdom which had never been reigned before by any king or prince, even though there had been a king and a prince. 

  Many of the wicked and vile creatures could not tolerate the amount of star dust that became more and more and so much that the creatures tried to find a land outside the boundaries.

  Of course, the moment they touched the vacuum-boundaries, they were sucked out and disappeared.  This is the fate that happened to almost all of them that would not stand the twinkles.

  Of course, the little Prince lived happily ever after.  He was a child.  His father also lived quite happily and ever after, but of course he could not be quite so happy because he was grown-up.

The End

By Gudrun Sabrina Hirt

November 24, 2006