Chapter 1
🌹 The Silent Prince and the Boy with the Thorn-White Hands.
Once upon a time, in a forgotten corner of the world where the mist never quite lifted from the woods and the moon was always full, there lived a boy named Charles. He was the youngest son of a tailor, with pale hands and quick eyes, and he was said to have been born under a thorn moon — a strange and silent omen. His brothers played at swords, his sisters sang for coins in the square, but Charles sat alone, pricking his fingers with rose thorns and muttering spells no one had taught him.
They called him strange, but the old women in the village left little offerings at his doorstep anyway.
Far, far away — beyond the sleeping forests and rivers that ran like ribbons through the mountains — there was a tower built of glass and sorrow. And in it lived a silent prince named Bonnaire. He had not spoken a word since the age of nine, when a jealous court mage stole his voice and buried it in a silver box beneath the roots of the oldest tree in the kingdom.
He could only write, and even that with trembling hands. The King, his father, declared that whoever found the prince’s voice and returned it to him would win his hand in marriage.
A thousand knights tried. A thousand failed.
But Charles — whose hands had thorns and who whispered spells into his tea — heard of the prince and did not laugh. Instead, he packed a velvet pouch of bones, thread, and honeycomb, wrapped himself in his mother’s old cloak, and set off into the woods, whistling a tune only foxes could hear.
