Chapter 1
In the scorching heart of the savannah, where every other beast spent its days panting, hunting, or running for its life, King Leopold lived a life of scandalous, bone-idle luxury.
Now, Leopold was a lion—but not the magnificent, thunder-roaring sort.
Good heavens, no. Those golden glory days were long behind him.
Leopold was turning forty-five—decidedly middle-aged, pleasantly thick around the middle and deeply committed to avoiding unnecessary effort. His charcoal mane had begun to thin, and his stomach gave a cheerful jiggle whenever he walked.
He had one perpetually perturbed wife, Queen Clarissa, and four extraordinarily hyperactive cubs. Four was hardly an overwhelming number, but these particular cubs seemed determined to make up the difference. They were forever climbing trees they couldn’t get down from, asking impossible questions, or using their father as a piece of playground equipment.
Leopold loved every last one of them with all his heart.
The trouble was that loving them took up so much of his life that, somewhere along the way, he had quietly forgotten what he himself loved.
His days had settled into an agonizingly predictable rhythm.
Wake up.
Watch cubs.
Answer impossible questions.
Eat.
Nap.
Wake up because a cub was standing on his face.
Repeat.
Adventure had quietly slipped out of his life without so much as saying goodbye.
Then, one dreadful Friday morning, a marabou stork arrived carrying news that struck Leopold like a wet sack of turnips.
Leopold did not know it yet, but his greatest adventure would begin with news of a death.
Barnaby—his cousin and childhood partner-in-crime—had dropped stone-cold dead.
They hadn’t seen one another in years.
Life had simply... happened.
Barnaby had settled in the northern plains with a family of his own. Leopold had become king, married Clarissa, and found himself permanently surrounded by cubs. Every so often one of them would remark that they really ought to visit the other soon.
Soon, as it turned out, had quietly become never.
Not that Barnaby had gone out heroically, mind you. He considered vegetables a personal insult and exercise an outrageous inconvenience. After years of enthusiastically overindulging in greasy wild boars, his heart finally decided it had had quite enough.
Leopold sat in silence after the stork had flown away.
He wasn’t devastated.
He was... unsettled.
Barnaby had always existed in Leopold’s mind as a constant—as the reckless cousin who would always be somewhere out there, laughing too loudly and making spectacularly poor decisions.
Now he wasn’t.
Leopold suddenly realized that the last memories he had of Barnaby weren’t recent ones at all. They were memories of two young lions racing through tall grass, climbing cliffs they had no business climbing, and returning home covered in scratches with absurd stories no sensible creature believed.
When had those memories become old?
Leopold looked down at the softness around his middle and felt something he hadn’t expected.
Not shame.
Urgency.
I am forty-five, he thought.
If Barnaby can simply... disappear... what exactly am I waiting for?
