Fairy Stories & Other Tales

 I set sail once, aboard a ship, bound for unknown waters, as many had done before me. Perhaps they too expected mermaid lagoons and the caves of water dragons. Monsters with all number of heads. I expected, as well, an island run by the spells of sorcerers and a fruit, maybe, that surpassed all my prior tastes. I anticipated storms and calm and to meet several mad people. I wondered when we would come upon islands sodden with the victims of witches, where we would, of course, make a clever escape. Surely it was not too bold nor too strange to expect an island haven where heaven might have come to lay its head. Nor to expect sun-drenched sands bordering a haunted forest, nor chilling winds that carried nightmares. Naturally the ship would break, wreaked by storm and magic and its own hubris in thinking it could plunge through a tempest. Not long after, almost certainly, we would be thrown upon an island with the necessary timber for repairs, where I expected such repairs would make...

 Once upon a time there was a prince who would be king, save that a usurper did as usurper's do and took the crown from him. The prince had been a boy at the time, always an easier job for a usurper to levy, and so the prince found himself thrust into the wide world with only a horse and a bag of gold.      The prince wandered, and as he did, he grew heavy with it. From each town and each village he took away with him far more than a usual passerby. For a prince that would have ruled, he saw the failures of the usurping monarch's reign as did no one else. At first, he bemoaned his lost throne with a sorrow and an anger that filled him with a rage that had no where to go. And then he set his hand to the till, and worked.      As the prince worked, he improved, ever so slightly, the form in which he worked. Agricultural yards gained steadier yields. When such improvements spread, he turned to mill wheels, and to villages and their small communities' comm...