Character Moodboard for my MMC
𓂃 ོ𖤓𓂃 Crown Prince Adrien of House Riel 𓂃 ོ𖤓𓂃
SHORT PROSE #1 (Adrien)
A heaviness settles over his chest, as though the very air has thickened around him just to bind him in. Day quivers at the edge of the world, a slow, inevitable bloom poised to unravel the cool hush of night.
There it was.
That all-too-familiar dread that begins to hum through his bones, threading into marrow and claiming him before he can claim the morning for himself. His eyes—reluctant and stinging—open to amber moonlight drifting through the lattice of his chamber windows—soft and liquid, washing his room in quiet melancholy.
Years have passed in which Adrien Riel has known only sleepless nights, no matter how tired he was or how deeply his body sank into the crater worn into his down-feathered mattress. Rich brown eyes greet him in every dream, hover behind his lids, stare down at him from the mosaic scattered across the ceiling above. He’d vowed long ago—with the kind of stubborn devotion grief carves into a person—that he would die before he forgot how those eyes had glowed. How they turned to golden pools of honey beneath the high summer sun of Solvena. The secret wish that he had died with her remains buried tight beneath his chest, letting those eyes haunt him. In some morbid way, it has felt like the only gift he had left to give. The only way he’d been able to save her.
With a slow breath, he rubs the sleeplessness from his face. Carefully—allowing the hollow ache to lodge further beneath his ribs—Adrien sits up and slips from his bed. The cool stone greets him under bare feet, grounding him in a way nothing else in this palace ever quite managed.
Reaching beneath the bed for a small parcel hidden there, his fingers brush against stone before finding the rough linen wrap they’d been searching for. Pulling it free, he unravels its contents without ceremony onto rumbled sheets. Plain clothes spill out. Garments the court would sneer at—unworthy in a palace of floating silks and sun-bright brocades. He marvels at the oddity of it all: that he is deemed one of the most important people in the kingdom, and yet only those permitted through the palace gates even know his face. How easy it would be to disappear. How tempting—how wickedly sweet—the thought of slipping into the wildwood towns where he could simply exist. How selfishly delicious to dream of such a thing. As he dresses, every movement is deliberate; even now, grown and nearly old enough to rule without anyone’s guiding hand, he tiptoes like a child afraid of being caught moving through his own room.
Court ladies wake before dawn, and some mornings he swears he can feel them hovering outside his door, waiting to pounce at the first sign of movement. His insomnia is a well-known affliction, whispered about by attendants, fretted over by his father, and—he suspects—used quietly against him by the queen mother, who sees in every weakness a string she might pull to her advantage. Maybe that was why he still moved so soft and unseen through his own home. Stealth gave him a fragile edge, let him outrun prying eyes and chirping tongues long enough to pretend he wasn’t their future puppet king—another hollow-bodied son with a crown pressed tight over his head.
He pulls the flowing white shirt over himself, the fabric settling like a sigh against his skin. It drapes loose, disguising the sharpness grief has carved into him. He tucks it into the high waist of the trousers and pulls the laces until they bite. He’s more than aware of the unruly mess atop his head—shaggy dark curls sticking every which way from sleep he never truly fell into. He drags a hand through them, achieving nothing but a more chaotic halo. He doesn’t bother with the mirror—refuses to meet the green eyes reflected there and whatever may lurk in them.
He wonders what she would think of the version of him that has been left behind. This adult-boy prince. This almost-king still half-running from himself.
He tries not to wander too far down that path, but the thought clings to him like cobweb silk as he wipes his face with a damp cloth. If they had married as they were meant to… if she were here now…
Quietly, the prince slips through his chamber doors into the gilded corridor beyond and pauses. Stillness greets him, much to his relief. The only sound being the faint trickle of fountains in the Sun Garden and the soft crackle of solar braziers resting in their sconces.
The palace—meant to feel airy, open, bathed in light—has long since pressed against him like a jeweled cage. Heavy. Breathless. Too full of memories he never learned how to live with or without. Sometimes, moving through these halls, he swears someone walks beside him. Not in footstep or shadow, but in presence—like a memory given shape, keeping pace with him. Even now, as he keeps his footsteps impossibly light, that presence feels so close the back of his neck prickles. As if a ghost is trailing its fingers just shy of his skin.
The moon hangs pale and thinning beyond the tall windows. Even fading, it seems to watch him—unblinking, intent—as though it refuses to lose him even as the sun lightens the sky. As though he is the one being kept in sight. A ridiculous thought, maybe, but he could not shake the feeling that somewhere beyond the veil she’d asked the moon to keep an eye on him. To not let him wander too far from who he was. Some nights, when he manages to dream—when the dark sky is full of white bright light—he swears he feels her gaze, gentle and steady, as if she still insists he’s worth looking after.
The air shifts as he nears the eastern cloisters, where the stone cools and the scent of crushed herbs lingers. He follows a path stitched into him since childhood—restricted quarters, narrow servant corridors Adrien is sure even his father doesn’t know exist. At this hour he narrowly avoids a Dawn Rite priest rounding a corner and a pair of Knights trading shifts. Quickly, he slinks into the blind spot of a patrol and presses his palm to a sigil-marked door hidden in shadow as he waits for them to pass.
Beyond its passage lies a lesser-used garden gate, mostly reserved for healers and cooks, tucked into a spill of vine and moon-bloom lilies. If he can reach it before the first true light breaks—before the palace wakes and remembers him—he can slip free into the city that cradles the castle like a bowl of light.
At least for an hour or two.
