PROLOGUE
CARVES IN THE KING’S HEART #1
by: L.V
Author’s Note & Historical Context
While the story of Cosimo, the King, and Leandro is a work of fiction, the world they live in is deeply rooted in the gritty, brilliant, and dangerous reality of the Renaissance period
The smell of wet clay and marble dust was the only thing that ever truly belonged to me.
In a kingdom that worshipped beauty but trampled on the poor, my life began in the dirt. I grew up in the slums just outside the palace walls, where the mud swallowed your shoes and the cold seeped straight into your bones. My hands were always chapped, my stomach always hollow. To the nobility, people like me were just background noise, the invisible machinery that kept their pristine world running.
But I had a secret. While the world around me was ugly and loud, I found a strange, quiet peace in the shape of things.
Whenever I could steal a scrap of discarded wax or a lump of river mud, my fingers would move on their own. I was completely fascinated by the human body. To me, it was the ultimate masterpiece. I would sit on the curb for hours, unnoticed, just watching the way a worker’s forearm muscles strained as he lifted a heavy crate, or how the collarbone of a passing noblewoman caught the midday sun. The curve of a spine, the delicate arch of a foot, the intricate web of veins on the back of a hand—it was all a beautiful, complex language written in flesh. In my mind, I didn’t see a miserable slum; I saw a world made of hidden statues waiting to be freed. Sculpting wasn't just a hobby; it was the only place where I felt alive.
But the universe has a way of shattering whatever peace you manage to scrape together.
I was only ten when the fever hit our district. It wasn't a quiet passing. It was a horrible, agonizing tragedy that turned our tiny shack into a house of horrors. I had to watch, utterly helpless, as the sickness violently took both of my parents within days of each other. I still remember the sound of my mother’s gasping breath, and the way my father’s strong hands the ones that used to pat my head went completely cold and rigid. When the plague collectors came, they threw their bodies onto a cart like trash, leaving me alone in the dark, shivering and waiting to die next.
I didn't die, though. Instead, the universe threw me a lifeline in the form of a ghost.
An old, eccentric man found me curled up near the market, clutching a half-finished clay torso I had molded to keep from crying. He didn't say much. He was a known artist, a man who had long since fallen out of favor with the royal court and chose to live in the shadows of the city, drowning his forgotten talent in cheap wine. He saw something in my muddy hands that day. He adopted me, dragged me to his cluttered, dusty studio, and gave me a chisel.
He didn't offer me a luxurious life, and he certainly wasn't a father figure. But he gave me a roof, blocks of stone, and the freedom to create. He taught me how to make the marble bleed, how to make the cold stone look like soft, breathing skin.
Now, years later, the old man was gone, and I was left alone in his crumbling workshop, surrounded by white statues that felt more like family than any living soul. My clothes were still frayed, and my fingers were calloused and scarred from the blade, but I had my peace. I was content to stay hidden forever, capturing the beauty of the human form in absolute silence.
Until the royal carriage stopped outside my door...
