Ocean Evans Writer

Current WIP: Medieval Romance When the King of Varenholm is struck by a fairy sleeping curse, his daughter, Princess Aurelia, must flee the palace before she's married off as a political pawn to the neighboring kingdom of Dreveth. Her only companion: Sir Caelan, her knight-protector, who has spent six years professionally pretending he is not hopelessly in love with her. They must cross the ancient enchanted Vethwood, bargain with the Fair Folk, raise an army, and take back a kingdom, while Aurelia transforms from a girl who's never had to try at anything into the queen her people need. slow burn, political intrigue, found family, fairy magic, war & survival, class tension, cozy adventure, strong female lead

[tiredvanprincess]

I can feel my knights piercing gaze from across the room as I put my soft hand into the visiting lords hand for a dance.

Goosebumps crawl up my neck when the lord spins me around and I catch a glimpse of my beloved knight. His hand grips the hilt of his sword tightly but his strong body is completely still.

I wonder who would feel the consequences his jealousy tonight.

Me in my chambers or the poor lord who asked me to dance?

[blanchebees]

Emotional support knight

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[madprincesshours]

The knight had never enjoyed hearing pleas for mercy. It almost always meant war and slaughter, killing others over a nobleman's petty grievance or wounded pride. People begging for their lives, for the lives of their children and loved ones.

It reminded him of bodies piled high in the afternoon sun, a mess that only the crows had the stomach to clean.

Oh, but the way the princess cried for mercy beneath him... It was like church bells and bird song. She writhed under his body like an angel, the slap of skin on skin only growing louder and her pleas becoming more frantic. He wouldn't let up, he couldn't, no matter how pretty her tears were or how she begged. It had been ingrained in him since he first stepped onto a battlefield.

He must never yield to a cry for mercy.

[blanchebees]

Drawing a lot of yearning lately

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[e-mylius-c]

What if I was so exhausted from battle I cannot think properly.... and what if the only goal was to get back to you.... and what if once I reached you to make sure you're okay, I pass out in your lap and you'd take off my helmet and pet my hair, telling me how well I did.... what then

[confirmed-and-contorted]

slamming your knights visor down when you’re finished talking to them, like slamming the phone back on the receiver.

[boucicaut]

[toadtoru-deactivated20260517]

dreamt about a knight coming to you after a battle and getting on his knees in front of you and roaming his hands up your legs and smearing blood across your skin as he rests his cheek against your upper thigh. btw. additionally i would like to add taking his helmet off and hearing it rattle against the stone floor and running your hands through sweaty hair and praising him for protecting your kingdom. anyways.

[trigona-necrophaga]

my devoted but dangerously unstable knight will be hearing about this

[knighted-butch]

her highness's delicate waist and the fabric of her gown held in big, gauntleted hands, metal scratched and speckled with the remains of dried blood, yet somehow managing to be gentle. im normal

[misscryptidart]

Bro this knight shit has got me fucked up. I just knelt at the alter of my maiden beloved and swore my body to her protection like how a hound begs for the calming stroke of his masters hand what the fuck is happening.

[oceanevanss]

You can pry my oxford comma from my cold, stiff, and dead fingers.

[goth-queen]

[oceanevanss]

Chapter Three: What the King Knows

The king looked smaller in the morning light. 

Or perhaps Aurelia had stopped pretending not to notice. 

Her father was at his desk when she arrived, not working, which was how she knew he had been waiting for her. The desk was always covered in papers. When she found it clear, it meant the papers had been moved, and the papers only got moved when he wanted to have a conversation that required the whole of his attention. 

“Close the door,” he said. 

She closed it and took the chair across from him. He looked at her for a moment, not as a king, or really even as a father. Just one person regarding another. Getting the measure of them. 

“The Midsummer Feast,” he said. 

“Tomorrow night,” she confirmed. 

“I’m going to name you my heir.” 

She had known this was coming. She had gathered enough pieces, over enough years of careful conversations, to see the direction of things. She had known, and believed that knowing would spare her the weight of hearing it said plainly. Here, in this room, where she had learned everything real she had ever learned. 

She had been wrong about the weight. 

“The formal declaration,” she said, “before the full court?” 

“Before the full court. Lord Brenn has drawn up the legal instruments. It will be binding by the laws of succession as they’ve stood since my grandfather’s reign.” He folded his hands on the bare desk. “If I wait, the council will begin to make arrangements. And the council, as we both understand, contains men who are making arrangements already.” 

Vessen she thought. And two others from her private register. Lord Carro, of the eastern marshes, had traveled three times to Dreveth in eighteen months on business no one could name. Old Lady Renthe, who had no opinions of her own and so reflected whoever had spoken to her last. Vessen had been speaking to Lady Renth a great deal lately. 

“I know,” she said. 

“If my name is on the declaration, they cannot easily undo it. There will be challenges. There are always challenges, and some will have resources I can’t anticipate. But a named heir is a harder problem than an unnamed one.” He paused. “I should have done this years ago.” 

She had waited a long time for that sentence. She had imagined how it might feel – the vindication, the relief. She had not expected it to feel so much like grief. 

“Why didn’t you?” She kept her voice even. 

Her father looked at her steadily. He had always been willing to be looked at directly, which was rare than people supposed. 

“Because I thought I was protecting you.”

“From what?” 

“From exactly this.” His gesture might have meant the room, or the palace, or the issue of being a king’s only child and a daughter at that. “From the kind of attention that changes a person before they’ve had a chance to become themselves. From men who would have started managing you at fourteen, if I’d given them reason to believe you mattered.” He took a breath. “I watched your mother try to navigate this court. I didn’t want that for you.” 

Her mother had been graceful, and watchful, and had died when Aurelia was eleven. She remembered her most clearly in rooms like this one. Still, alert, doing the invisible work that nobody named and nobody thanked. 

“I’m not my mother,” she said. 

“No,” he agreed. “You’re considerably more alarming.” 

It surprised a breath of laughter out of her, which she suspected had been at least half the intention. She let it settle. 

“I want to say this properly,” he said, “because I doubt I’ll be given a better hour for it.” He did not look away from her. “I have always known what you are. I knew it when you were seven and corrected the Rethmark ambassador at a state dinner, and I knew it every year after. Watching you learn this court faster than men who’d had thirty years’ head start. You were never not capable, Aurelia. I never once doubted the steel in you. I kept it sheathed. I kept you in silk and small concerns and let the whole court believe there was nothing in you worth looking at.”

He paused, turning his hands over on the desk. 

“I told myself it was protection. And it was. But it was also a kind of theft, and I knew that too.” His voice stayed level, as it always did when talking to her. He had never once raised his voice at her. She understood suddenly that this had been its own kind of discipline. “I now believe that was a mistake. And tomorrow I start making amends.” 

Aurelia sat with the quietness that fell between them. She was moved. She could feel the movement, an actual physical thing between her ribs. I have always known what you are. A sentence she had needed for twenty-two years. She was also frightened. Why was he saying this now? He was a man settling his accounts the hour he believed his ledger was closing. And underneath both feelings, familiar and unmistakable, there was anger. 

“You could have told me,” she said at last. Her voice came out quieter than she intended. “Not the court. Me. You could have let me in.” 

“Yes,” he said. “I could have.” He did not defend it. 

“I understand why you did it.” And she did. She could build the reasoning in full. She could see every decision that had led to every other decision. And the love that threaded through all of it. Because it had been love, that was the unbearable part, negligence would have been so much simpler to carry. Understanding did not close the distance between what she was and what she might have been. She set that thought aside, in the place she kept things she could be angry about later. It was becoming crowded. “What do you need from me before tomorrow?” 

“Nothing.” He said simply, a man at peace with his decisions. “I need you to stand in the hall and be who you are. That will be sufficient.” 

“And after?” 

“After, you will need to move quickly. Some people will decide the announcement is–” he chose his next words carefully, “an opportunity to accelerate their plans.” 

She looked at him. “You think they’ll move at the feast itself.” 

“I think they may not wait longer.” He held her gaze. “Which is why I want you to have this.” 

He reached to his right hand and removed his signet ring. 

She had been looking at that ring her entire life. Heavy gold, thick banded, the Varenholm crest cut in dark red stone – a stag over a field of stars, worn smooth at the edges by forty years of a king’s hand. She had seen it pressed into wax on every document that mattered. She had seen it at her mother’s funeral, at every feast, and on the quiet mornings when he worked in his chair while she read in hers, the two of them keeping company without any need to speak. 

He set it on the desk between them. 

“For when I can’t speak for myself,” he said. 

She picked it up. It was heavier than she expected. There were a number of things she could have said. She considered several of them, and set each one down. 

“I’ll need it sized,” was what she did say. “It’s too large for my hand.” 

Her father looked at her for a long moment. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry it took me so long.” 

It was not clear whether he was apologizing for the ring or for the years. She thought the ambiguity was deliberate. She thought it was his kindest way of apologizing, and she loved him for it, in the complicated way of understanding someone’s choices even without quite agreeing with them. 

She closed her fingers around the ring. The stag pressed its small shape into her palm. “Get some rest.” Which was the kindest thing she could think to say back. 

She was nearly at the door when he spoke again. 

“Aurelia.” She turned. He was still in his chair, the light behind him, and he was smiling at her. Not his kingly smile for court. The other one, the one that had always been just hers. “They are going to underestimate you. All of them. It is the last advantage I have to leave you, and I built it without meaning to. Use it well.” 

— — — 

The corridor outside ran long between the private wing and the main hall. At this hour it was empty, except for Caelan. He was at his post beside the door, in his silent way. She had walked past this version of him hundreds of times. She knew it the way she knew the corridor itself. 

She walked three steps and stopped. She wasn’t certain why. She was not given to stopping in corridors. She had places to be, she always had places to be. The steady business of getting from one place to the next had served her for as long as she could remember. A way of staying in motion, so that things could not quite catch up. 

She looked up at Caelan. He had been with her for six years. He had been in the rooms where she was managed, the rooms where she was praised, the rooms where she had performed for people. And the rooms, like the dressing chamber yesterday morning, where she was only trying to find the right color while everyone made it more complicated than it needed to be. He had been there through all the years her father had spent deciding she needed protecting. He had stood at this exact post through several hundred conversations of varying weight, and he had never once, in any of them, given her the impression that whatever waited on the other side of that door was more than she could carry. 

She didn’t know why she was seeing this now. Then again, she suspected she did know, in fact, and was declining to examine it. Which was fair enough. She had a ring in her hand and a feast tomorrow and more important things to think about. 

He was watching her with careful attention. “Your Highness,” he said, which was a question. 

“Nothing,” she replied. “Let’s go.”

She walked. He fell into step. The corridor moved past. 

She tucked the ring into her bodice and did not let herself think anymore about it.

[swordshapedleaves]

Someday your hands will be old and wrinkled, the skin spotted and bunching over your knuckles. And a child will watch you make something. It's a simple task, you'll have done it a thousand times before. But to that child, the smooth, confident way your hands move will seem like impossible magic. You have to keep living.

[swordshapedleaves]

prev these tags have me crying. this is absolutely what it's all about

[myswordsbigger]

A dragon's need to collect everything shiny x the poor innocent knight who just got a new set of armour

[oceanevanss]

getting ready for bed

Maris and Elara were waiting, and the long business of unmaking a princess began.

It was a great deal of work, being undone. The gold gown came off in its careful stages, returned to its form on the stand where it would wait for tomorrow's feast; the pins came out of her hair one by one, dropped into the little dish where they made their small bright sounds.

Aurelia sat at the glass and watched herself be returned, piece by piece, to the person underneath. Just a woman with her mother's mouth and her father's eyes. The candles burned low. Outside, somewhere below, the last of the reception's carriages went grinding away over the cobbles, carrying the evening off into the dark.

After it was all done, she lay in the dark of the great bed with the curtains half-drawn and the last candle guttering on the table. She looked up at the canopy she had been looking up at since she was a child, and turned the evening over in her head.

The prince, who was exactly as dangerous as the reports had promised, and who had said one true thing about directness and meant it, which was the part that troubled her. Vessen in his corner with the narrow-faced aide, the two of them angled toward one another for the better part of an hour over something she had not been close enough to hear. The three quiet men by the doors. The whole evening had the quality of a board mid-game, pieces in motion toward an arrangement she could not yet see the final shape of. 

And beneath all of it, the thing she kept returning to, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth: her father's hand. Thinner than she remembered. The bones of it. The papery give of the skin when she'd closed both of hers around it, and the way he hadn't woken.

There are things I should have said sooner.

She knew that tomorrow was going to change something. She did not know what. She had built, from the available pieces, a rough idea of the direction. The succession, the council, the long quiet pressure she'd felt building around the question of her future for the better part of a year. But the specifics stayed out of reach, behind the closed door of before the feast.

She found she was not afraid, exactly. She examined the feeling carefully and decided it was not fear. It was closer to the feeling at the top of a staircase in the dark. The knowledge that there was a next step, and that she would have to take it without being able to see it, and that whether it held would not be discovered until her weight was already on it.

She thought about her father in his warm room.

She thought, briefly and without permitting it to go anywhere, about a silent man who followed her and wondered if he would continue to do so. 

Then she closed her eyes, because tomorrow would be long, and a princess who arrived at it unrested would be a princess at a disadvantage.

Sleep came eventually, the way it does to people who order it to. It was not deep, and it was not long, and the early summer's dawn was barely at the high windows when she woke.

She got up, rang for Maris, and began the long business of becoming a princess again.