The queen always said that something was wrong with Roez. It wasn't very hard to see what. When the prince of Kuzhur had big, brown wolf ears, and a fluffy tail that got in the way of everything, it was hard to ignore. Roez was raised thinking of it like a condition or mutation while almost the entire castle staff avoided him like he had flees.
When they couldn't avoid Roez they glared at him or stared as if he were a monster or disgusting creature. They often addressed him with a bitter mocking tone.
Not another soul in the kingdom was a mutant like Roez, some sort of unlogical hybrid. As his name implied, people considered him a mutt (as that is the translation of Roez into common). So he usually kept to his room and drew pictures of his family and wandering people in the streets, but wearing all sort of animalistic features. It was better than being addressed by people that despised him and silently mocked him and his countless flaws.
Roez considered his drawings to be a form of comfort it almost made him believe he wasn't alone in the world.
The prince brushed his shaggy brown hair out of his face so that his amber eyes could gaze out the purple-curtained window of his room. But alas, it was late. It was dark, and not one person wandered the streets.
The boy fell back onto his bed with a sigh. He hated nighttime, especially on a night like this, with the full moon out. It felt to him that he should be up and about. He didn't want to sit in silence. Nonetheless, he was confined to his bed for the next several hours before staff began to get up. Roez felt restless and there was nothing he could do about it.
It felt like his own bed would swallow him, the sides of the mattress began closing around Roez in his mind's eye. The red sheets didn't help comfort the feeling, the color reminded him of the inside color of the mouth of a beast. He hated the color red. The head and foot of Roez's bed were ordained with silver. The twisting thin patterns of metal stood to show the wall through them, with a small space that books fell into all the time.
Roez grabbed the prison bar-like metal and peered through it, dramatically. The bed was like a prison. No, the whole kingdom, maybe even the world was a prison for someone like Roez. How was there never anyone like me? In all 14 years of my life, he wondered.
The wolf boy felt the moonlight on his face as he lay sideways, still gazing out the window at the moon. Roez felt charged by the moon's gentle beams. As if his thoughts didn't do a good enough job keeping him up. There was a time Roez comforted himself by crying out to the moon at night, but his howls drove his stepfather mad.
His mother, the queen, told him to stop on countless occasions, but it was hard to break the habit. Years later, Roez still felt like he needed to let everything out like that, but resisted, bottling up his emotions like he'd learned to do long ago.
Silently, the prince yearned to go out into the moonlight and run. Run as far as his legs could carry him. It felt like he could even take on the Yazdar Forest. Roez longed to feel the wind in his hair. To run wild and free.
Hours later, Roez finally closed his eyes and drifted into a strange dream. He was in a field and chased a small black house cat up to a cliff face before it vanished. Roez began to howl up at the full moon until the moment demanded quiet, adrenaline still on high.
Moonlight flooded his senses as he breathed deeply, tail wagging. An embarrassing quirk.
Once Roez forced his tail to stop moving, he felt cold on his finger and looked down. On his right ring finger, there was a silver band with an emerald embedded inside.
Under the gemstone, Roez could almost have sworn he'd seen the darker outline of a skull.
Still, despite the dark sights and images, Roez smiled down at the ring. He felt powerful. The ring caught the moon's reflection and Roez held it there, barely breathing as he stared at the sight. His wolf ears pulled back as his gaze was drawn in.
* * *
There was a sense of de-jah vu as Roez ran through the same field. This time, he was a brown wolf in entirety. The canine caught glimpse of a female figure. An ordinary woman, he believed, that is, at first.
The moonlight seemed to light everywhere except where she stood. Roez's fur stood on end as he looked at her, trying to make out any features. He wondered if she really was normal, but something felt so off about her.
When the hooded woman ran off, her black cape flowed behind her. Roez could have sword he saw extra movement beneath.
A shadow was cast over the moon, turning its beams an erie green color in the places it still cast. The young wolf looked up at the moon to see what had happened and saw a black skull seeming to radiate the green glow itself. It matched the one Roez wore on his finger before, but when he gazed at it, he heard screaming. The panicked shrieks of hundreds of souls before Roez jolted awake again.
The prince rushed to his window and drew open the curtains. Roez looked up at the full moon, heart pounding. But all was still in the night. The moon remained its usual pale white self, glowing and gazing down back at him, or so it felt.
Roez didn't go back to bed after that. He wouldn't have been able to sleep for certain now, despite hours left in the night.
Roez walked over to a small bookshelf and picked up a book filled with monsters in the forest. It felt right for the moment. Something about the dream didn't feel natural. Roez told himself that he would be train himself to be prepared for whatever happened, starting with the knowledge of creatures that might be out there.
* * *
The next day, Roez addressed his mother and father in the throne room with a bow. He looked up at his mother, the head of all Kuzher and looked her in the eyes. It took a moment to gather the courage to ask.
"Your majesty, I... would like to begin knight training."
She looked down at him as if he'd just growled at her, when in reality his voice was meager and nervous.
"No," she said simply.
"But-"
"Don't talk back to me, Roez!" she snapped. She seemed to force her voice to calm down as the king looked at her with the same startled expression Roez wore. The king looked more like he could be Roez's biological parent than Queen Zhaohar ever did, the only difference in he two being the wolf features and the King's emerald green eyes.
Queen Zhaohar on the other hand had black hair that was beginning to turn grey and stormy blue eyes.
"If you sign up," Zhaohar explained, "every trainee will see your ears and tail. They'll eat a mutt like you up!"
Roez's shoulders sagged, but he shook off the feeling of defeat and gathered some courage. "If I don't start learning to fight, no doubt someone will try to attack me anyway! I have to know how to fight!"
The queen thought deeply for a long moment.
"You will receive private training from Sir Loz on weekends in an empty wing of the castle," she said with reluctance.
Roez's eyes sparkled with excitement, burning with passion as if the amber irises were really drops of sun.
"Now go back to whatever you do all day," she said, shooing him away. "We're holding a states council in an hour and we don't need fur all over the castle. Just stay out of the way."
Roez nodded and hurried away before she could change her mind. He went back to grab the book he'd been reading the night before and made for the library.
* * *
He wandered around the quiet space for a while, searching for anything and everything related to dangerous creatures. He even noticed a book that had fallen off of the shelf, but he couldn't find a spot for it on any of the bookcases nearby. He brought it along to return to the book managers once he finished his current research.
Had he read the page the book was previously opened to, he would have learned about a purge of all anomalies 100 years ago, which sparked a war with a strange country deep in the Yazdar forest. But after closing the book, it seemed like a normal, dusty history book that Roez had no interest in.
The librarian was one of the only people that didn't seem to mind Roez's presence. She was a young hire since the last librarian died of a hearattack within the castle. It seemed to happen the first time Roez wandered in, which, clearly wasn't great for his self-esteem.
But the queen insisted that if they even hired another librarian at all, they couldn't be old in case another died in the castle. She seemed more bothered by the bodies than the loss. So they hired Anna Page, a 13 year old that came from an assistant librarian position somewhere in the boarders of the 5th wall.
Roez was surprised that his mother would be willing to hire someone of such low birth, but he didn't mind in the least.
In fact, there was one time he put a few scrapes of paper he'd bound together himself into a book on her desk where she was the main character and she found a wolf reading a book on the plains. The wolf was able to talk to her and only her, due to fate bringing them together so perfectly.
She found it quiet amusing, but she never seemed to speak more than a shy hello, and only to him did she ever say that much.
Anna had never seen Roez carry so many books at once and became instantly curious. She made her way over to him and nodded at the stack he'd placed on a table.
"Oh! I'm studying creatures of the Yazdar Forest to..." Roez knew Anna didn't like violence in the least, as one time she looked over his shoulder while he was reading a violent story about a party of adventurous fighting a dragon and she reeled back in horror before rushing back to her desk. "To write about!" the boy finished.
She smiled and nodded, seemingly excited. She pulled out two books that seemed bound with inexpensive leather, but much more finely than Roez's own and handed them to him.
The first was a sequel to his original story with a witch and transformation potion that Roez promised he'd read very soon. The second was empty and she nodded to Roez and the books.
"For- for me? Thanks! I'll let you know when I finish writing in it."
A light brush of pink dressed Anna's cheeks as she nodded. Roez didn't understand the strange color on Anna's cheeks, but it made him feel funny inside.
That night, the library grew very dark. There weren't very many windows in the library, and Roez admittedly didn't know his way around all that well yet, but soon Anna saved Roez from the darkness by leading him to what must have been the only noteable window in the entire library.
Loads of moonlight shone through. It cast a soft glow over Anna's skin and Roez couldn't explain why he couldn't look away from her smooth dark skin and orange-red hair. Her brown eyes seemed deep and thoughtful.
They stayed like this for what felt like an eternity before Anna finally made her way back to her desk and gathered her things. She stayed in a room in the opposite wing of the castle, she she had to get moving. Roez knew this and so he followed her and offered to help Anna gather her few things.
Anna shook her head and nodded at the pile of books he left out.
"Oh, right," Roez said going back to them. When he dropped them in the return place, Anna had already left, so Roez walked back to his own room, having to climb a long flight of stairs. He was exhausted, and despite the full moon, he was miraculously able to fall right to sleep.
However, this did not last long as he was tortured by the same dream he had the night before.
* * *
These nightmares occurred for the next 4 years, but only on nights bearing a full moon. Occasionally they were different shortly before something in the dream caught his attention during his waking hours. He could never explain them, and when he tried to bringing up these dreams to anyone, they ignored him and went away.
His mother and stepfather dismissed the dreams as being purely coincidental without letting Roez explain them fully. Anna listened though.
Even at 17 Anna still seemed fascinated by Roez's cheesy stories and she was always the only one who seemed to like his presence. But Roez wasn't sure if Anna thought these dreams were fact or fiction, as she was still quite quiet.
In fact, there were times she acted even more shy than usual around Roez, though she has slightly opened up to the other few library regulars. (Ie: High mages and royal physicians.)
Roez had gotten far stronger and skilled in swordfighting, but as always, he wasn't trusted to have weapons around the castle unless he was specifically training under Sir Loz. He'd just gotten his claws shaved down and dulled when he walked back to his room for the night.
"Another full moon, great," Roez muttered to himself sarcastically as he glanced out the window. He took off his hirt and flopped onto his bed with a groan. He'd recieced many bruises from a duel with his mentor, who decided to go extra hard on Roez due to a.... little disagreement earlier.
Roez was making fun of Sir Loz for not proposing to his girlfriend yet. It'd been 16 years, almost as long as Roez had been alive. But Roez sure as heck paid the price for his mockery.
Roez pushed up a little bit and took the sleeping pills from his side table and took the perscribed dosage to help him combat his energy on nights like this, though he didn't want to go to sleep by any means.
It meant seeing that strange woman and hearing those screams all over again, just like every full moon. It drove the prince mad. But eventually, he did fall victim to sleep.
* * *
As usual, Roez jolted awake half an hour after he'd fallen asleep and groaned at himself for his failure to get past these dreams. No amount of therapy helped the nightmares either, especially since every therapist seemed to hate him and clearly had to force themselves through examinations on Roez.
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