❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ an heir to hunger

Instructions

i was born to a crown i never asked to wear, the child of absence, the heir to dust. my mother weeps behind doors she won’t open, a goddess in retreat — skin like cold silk, eyes turned inward, she mothers grief more tenderly than she’s ever held me. i am a relic of a man who vanished, a statue in a house full of wolves. of course he looks at me like that— with those eyes that know they own the room, like the sun rose just to kiss his cheekbones, and the gods carved him with sharper hands than they gave the rest of us— as if my breath was his by right, as if i owed him the air in my lungs and the pulse in my throat. sometimes i dream he spares me— not out of mercy, but out of something crueler, softer: curiosity. the way a lion might wonder how long a lamb can look at him without running. he speaks and the air bruises. he laughs and i forget my name. mother prays for the gods to end the feast, for the suitors to scatter like crows— but i pray for his shadow to linger, for his hands to find me, for some small proof that i exist to him beyond the trembling. i think he knows. i think he tastes the hunger in my silences, sees the way i flinch when he touches my shoulder too long, not long enough. i think he likes it— the power of it. the sweet rot of it. but when he speaks, my bones stop hiding. my shame forgets its name. he calls me “little prince” like a weapon and a whisper, a sin he wants to taste again, and i ache to be his casualty. i am not blind— i know what he is. sharp-tongued and golden-eyed, his love would be a battlefield and i'd beg to lose, because to be broken by him is still to be wanted. he leans close, and the whole hall fades— the suitors, the servants, the smoke and the song. it’s just the space between us, thick with what we don’t say. his breath smells of figs and fury. he says, you’d make a poor king, and i whisper under my breath, i know, because all i’ve ever wanted was to kneel. mother does not see. or maybe she does, and turns her face away, as she always has— the queen of silence, the patron saint of almost-love. she sits at her loom and weaves absence into every thread, each pattern a wound that never closes. so i seek warmth where i shouldn’t, in the mouth of a man who’d burn my house down and call it divine. when he laughs, it sounds like prophecy. when he smiles, i forget the gods are cruel. his hands promise nothing— and still i’d give him everything. maybe it’s pathetic— to crave cruelty in the shape of attention, to build temples in your chest for a man who would burn them just to warm his wine. but gods, i am cold. and no one else has lit a fire in years.