Today's HyperShort mixes a bit of Fantasy with Sci-Fi and results in awesome. This one... is a thinker.
INHERITANCE by Anthony Lawrence
Princess Adriana roamed through the forest as she had done from the time she was old enough to walk. She was only eight-years-old now but she had the confidence and the intelligence of someone far older. She was a sweet and happy child whose laughter was musical. Her hair was ebony-black, skin a lustrous alabaster. Her dark eyes were luminous and her body strong. She was graceful and poised, her energy boundless. Sometimes she skipped or danced under the dense canopy of needleleaf and interlocking foliage, or along the moss-draped pathways. The boreal forest was species-rich, evergreen and coniferous. A delicate rainfall invigorated all the plant-life and turned the colors into brilliant rainbows that delighted the Princess as she capered through the pristine and ancient woodland. She stopped here and there only to admire the bluebells and to scoop up a handful of lichens and to leap easily over hazel that her people grew for coppicing, the branches used for wattle and daub in buildings. Everything the Princess saw enchanted her as if she were seeing those things for the first time. She sat on her favorite rock overlooking the “brook of dreams and remembering” and followed a silk-winged butterfly arcing across the blue sky, then turned to watch with fascination as an insect with four legs that resembled flower petals as it crawled along a branch. After following his journey for a few moments she looked up and admired a strutting gamebird with a golden crest, rump and bright red body as he spread his deep orange coat to attract a female. Then, she dreamed and remembered her father, King Simon, who would someday come back from the other world where he had been born bringing “the gift” for the people. He had come to this world, fallen in love with her beautiful mother who had died soon after Princess Adriana’s birth. The King had been sad for a long time but then became determined to go back to his world and return with the gift of understanding.
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By the time she arrived back at her village, the Princess was bursting with the stories of her adventure, the things she saw in the forest. But as usual no one seemed to believe her. They thought she was making things up. The villagers reacted as they always did, treating her as if she had a vivid and unique imagination but was an absolutely careless little girl who did not stay close to home as they had ordered. Princess Adriana did not understand why the people always walked so slow and carefully, why they did not go far from the village or dance and skip the way she did. They never seemed to believe anything she told them. It was as if they lived in a different world, a world where no one paid any attention to all the beauty around them. She remembered that her father, the King, had tried to explain it to her before he left, telling her that the people here had lost the light of understanding long ago.
So, when the Princess looked up and saw her father’s great ship coming down, she knew that he was bringing the people that gift of understanding, that he would turn on the light so that they would believe all the things she told them were true. King Simon did indeed bring back the gift from the world where he was born, the gift of artificial eyes that turned on the light. Princess Adriana held his hand once again as they walked into the forest and shared the delights of that magical world. The little girl peppered her father with questions and he was happy to answer. When she asked why the people had named him their king, he told her that it had to do with something a wise man named Erasmus had once said, ”In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
