Chapter 1 – The Lost Throne”
Once upon a time, in a house heavy with history and whispers, I was born into a family that carried the weight of a throne. My father was a prince, though the world rarely calls him that openly. His grandfather, my great-grandfather, still sat at the royal seat, holding authority and tradition in his hands. My grandmother, never the queen, ruled her own ways in our family—ways that would forever shape our lives.
From the start, life taught me that titles mean little if hearts are cruel. My grandmother took my father’s belongings, the objects that tied him to his heritage, and moved him and my mother far from the palace and the life he was born to. She believed she could control the family, deciding who deserved power, who deserved respect, and who deserved nothing at all. And in her eyes, we were nothing.
Yet my father refused to let bitterness define us. In the place we were forced to call home, he built a life from scratch. He worked, he dreamed, and he held my mother close, as if sheer determination could reconstruct a throne from nothing but love and sweat. He married my mother, and soon I came into the world—small, fragile, but carrying the weight of that same royal blood.
For a while, it seemed like the stars had finally aligned. My father found success, and with it, hope. He gave everything he had to his family, securing our future with words written in a will, promises etched in paper that should have protected us. But fate is crueler than any monarch. Less than a year after establishing our new life, my father died. And with him went the security, the love, and the authority that should have been mine by blood.
Then came the betrayal that has haunted me ever since. My grandmother, the same woman who had uprooted us once, returned. She sent people—apologies, gestures, attempts to fix what she had broken. But her timing was hollow. The throne that was ours, the assets, the life my father fought to build, had been sold to her sister’s son. He spent it recklessly, as if history and heritage were meaningless, and in less than four years, the wealth vanished like smoke.
I do not exaggerate when I say my mother and I were forced to pick up the pieces alone. We had nothing tangible left from my father’s life except memories and the fragments of love he left behind. Relatives who should have been allies refused to help. Grandmother’s apologies were empty—smoke and mirrors, trying to mend what her greed had destroyed.
Every night, my father visits me in dreams. I see him pacing the halls of the home he built, searching for his wife, his son, and the throne that was stolen. I wake in cold sweats, feeling the weight of ancestral anger pressing down. Friends say the house we once lived in is haunted—and I believe it. The throne, the legacy, the broken promises—they are restless.
At 22, I am unemployed and broke. I smoke to sleep, trying to escape the nights and the dreams, but they cling to me like shadows. I am angry, hopeless, and yet determined. This story—our story—must be told. Because even if the throne has been sold, even if the assets are gone, the truth remains.
