Most stories start at the beginning. There's an understandable logic to that.

This story, however, begins at the end.

The Prince is dead, or sleeping. The armor is magic, or haunted. The castle is abandoned, or cursed. The faeries are sleeping, or mourning.

Time stands still, but only there.

He lies like the dead, really. And there's a subtle poetry to the lie of his expression. There is peace, there, though a curse tore him from the waking world. There is contentment, there, though the world he had loved so much had been taken from him.

He lies like the dead, truly. But he is not dead.

Curses work in ways the caster doesn't always expect. How could a usurper witch know that his curse was so easily thwarted?

Maybe easy is the wrong word.

Curses work in ways the caster doesn't always intend. How could the Usurper know that his curse could be thwarted, at all? How could he have known that the magic of the Others could react against his own poisoned, twisted magic? How could he know that the child would sleep instead of die?

The Prince slept.

The Prince slept like the dead, honestly. But he was not dead. The world could breath a sigh of relief, knowing that it could, one day, be saved from the Usurper who chased life the way he dealt death: incessantly.

But how do you wake a sleeping prince? How do you wake the Sleeping Prince? Magic has a funny way of doing its business. It doesn't care at all for what the masses believe about it, but it cares in an all-consuming fashion for what those intertwined with it believe. It doesn't care for impossibilities, except when those close to it believe things are impossible.

The sleeping curse was not operating on rules that made sense to an ordinary bystander. There was no physician that could wake the Prince, even for a moment. There was no dawn break that could make him stir, no noise that could make him bat an eyelash, and no person that could soothe him away from his dreams. He was a Sleeper, not merely asleep.

The Prince slept.

The people wept. Then the people forgot. Then the people moved on, the castle abandoned and their once-beloved deep inside. A mausoleum for the Sleeper, the Dreamer, the Cursed. Was he a Sleeping Prince? Was he a Cursed Prince? Was he a Dead Prince?

He was a Forgotten Prince, in the end. Asleep and lost to the dreams of a world beyond the world, beyond the fabric of reality.

In the end.

The end, though, is also a beginning.

This end, which you have become acquainted with, is both the beginning of this story, and the beginning of a new story. The New Story will have to wait until after the Sleeping Prince has woken, however.

This is the end of the story about to begin.

I encourage you, dear reader, to read on, so that you will understand the tragedy that is this End. Why should you care about a Prince you do not know? Why should you fear a Usurper you have not met? Why should you pity a Knight you have never even heard about? You cannot. That is the way of things.

So, please. Read on. Know the Prince, meet the Usurper, and hear of the Knight...