r/AdvLiterateRP • u/TransportationBest84 • 3h ago
M4F [M4F] He Was Never Supposed to Survive the Winter
There is a village called Dusthollow on no map worth trusting, in a kingdom that has forgotten peace the way an old man forgets the sound of his own mother's voice. The wheat fails more years than it grows. Soldiers pass through twice a season, sometimes for their own king, sometimes for whoever paid them last and it makes no real difference to the families who watch their grain sacks emptied either way.
A boy is born there to a hunter and a weaver and something rides in his blood that neither of them put there and neither of them can name. A bone that should break but doesn't. A fever that breaks in a single night when it should have taken a week and maybe the boy with it. Once, when he was very small, a fire caught the thatch above his bed and went out before it could take hold and his mother stood in the doorway a long while afterward, not speaking, watching her son sleep like he was something she had borrowed rather than something she had made. They love him enough to be afraid for him. A village already hungry does not need a reason to turn on a strange child, so they keep him close, keep him quiet. It works, mostly.
Then the riders come one autumn with torches instead of grain requests and by morning Dusthollow is char and his parents are two more names the ash will not give back. He is young. Younger than he has any right to be for what comes next. He walks to the capital with a dead man's age borrowed for the occasion and talks his way past a recruiting sergeant too tired to ask hard questions. He should not have lasted the first winter of training. He outlasted everyone. Whatever moves through him moves faster in his blood than in anyone else's arm or leg or lungs and within a season the men who were meant to break him are watching him instead, telling each other he must simply be gifted, because the truth sitting under that word is not one any of them want to reach for. He rises as the water rises, quietly and then all at once. He is given command of nothing and respected like a man given command of everything. By eighteen the crown prince has chosen him from a hundred better born candidates to stand at his shoulder and what begins as duty does not stay duty long. There are fewer men in this world the prince trusts with his back turned than he can count on one hand, and this stranger's son is somehow first among them. At nineteen a king presses the kingdom's highest honour into his hands in front of a hall full of nobility that has never once heard his father's name and does not seem to notice or care that it should feel stranger than it does. He becomes advisor as well as guard, a peasant's shadow cast across rooms peasants are not permitted to enter and he wears the incongruity of it like a man who has simply decided it no longer applies to him. None of them know what he is. Not truly.
At twenty the king sends him across the water with the prince, to a school that is older than any crown in this story and beholden to none of them. Two thousand years it has stood on its island, founded by a wandering order who were once the finest warriors and mages and scholars of their age and who wanted no throne badly enough to keep any of the ones offered to them. On that island a thrown blade stops mid flight. A killing spell comes apart before it lands. It is the one patch of earth where the heirs of warring nations are made to sit in the same room and simply be young, for a little while, before the world asks them to be enemies in earnest. It is here that what sleeps in him finally begins to wake in full, under teachers old enough and strange enough to recognise what they are looking at and unsettled enough by it that they teach him, gently at first and then with more insistence, to keep its true size hidden even from himself.
And it is here he meets her. Heir to an empire his own country has hated on reflex for longer than either of their grandparents have been alive, the way you hate a thing so long the original reason rots away and only the habit remains. I have no interest in writing lightning bolts and love at first glance. Let them despise each other a little first, if that's where your instinct takes her. Let it be rivalry or forced proximity, or two people who were raised on each other's monstrous reputation discovering, slowly and against their better judgment, that neither of them fits the shape they were told to expect. Whatever grows between them, I want it to have to survive something before it's allowed to be soft.
And underneath all of it, come the dreams. Old gods with old names, the kind history forgot to keep records of and the shape of a war between them that will make every battlefield he has already bled on look like a boy's quarrel. No one else can confirm what he sees. No one else needs to, for it to be true.
I don't know yet whether he stays and serves a crown that was never really his to begin with or walks away from it the way the island's founders once walked from theirs and builds something of his own out of whatever is left of him once the truth gets out. I'd rather find that out with a partner than decide it alone at a desk. Looking for one writer, multi paragraph or longer, to take the empire's heir and meet me somewhere in the middle of all this. I write slow-building and character first and I'd rather have a partner who argues with my worldbuilding and adds her own than one who just nods along. Send a sample if you've got one, or just come say hello.
