"Oh Caxton, I want to believe in your enamoring words. But you have professed them before. How do I know this time will be different?"
"Ayleen . . ." the king suddenly paused. His dolesome expression is accurately portraying the mood. He releases her, not sure of what he could say that will bring his wife, his queen, better comfort than the truth. Deep down, he wanted to be free from his torment haunting his past; and the resentment he held towards his late father: Arising from the humiliation of being stripped of his title, the pain of being evicted from his home, and the anguish of being told he can never see his family again. Nevertheless, there was still a part of him, not ready to bear these burdens. Feelings, even he did not want to admit to entertaining.
"My love, there's nothing you can tell me, nothing you can say, that'll frighten me away from you," she vowed. "You can unburden your sorrows and speak openly of what ails you. What has you so
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The touch of his lips on her knuckles almost made her swoon. "I want to show you something," he said, walking arm and arm with his wife to the window. "'Death will never triumph in extinguishing life from the world. For life has a habit of returning, even in the smallest of forms.' My mother taught me that saying, a few days before she died," he recalls, peering down to the garden. "It is why she loved flowers. The star-shaped blue ones were her favorite. I remember, she told me, on the day of her and my father's wedding. He gave them to her as a gift. And out of all the gifts bestowed to the royal couple, it was her most cherished. After the battle had ended, my father ventured to the Bacarri Wilds to gather some to plant in the new garden he had created in her name. But sadly, he returned hours later, disappointed. Where they grew, the area had been trampled on, and there was no trace of them to