They say there once lived a girl with eyes as green as a fresh-picked olives.

She was not born a princess, yet people bowed to her as if she carried royalty in her breath.

She spoke little, but often she wondered, and often she dreamt;

“Will I ever paint the most gracious sunrise?”

For in those days, sunrises came and went too fast.

Unlike sunsets, which fell gently, like a blessing,

sunrises rushed in, restless and unfinished,

too quick for hers to hold.

And they say, in the same land, there was a boy made Knight far too young.

His forefathers, and all of his brothers had all died serving a doomed Kingdom that longed to steal the Sun itself.

The King, with a heart as small as a clenched fist,

believed the Sun belonged to his people alone.

So the Knight was sent to capture it,

before it could rise or fall into any sky not ruled by the crown.

At the same time, a Poet was made, young, radiant, and bright as any dawn. He was promised to history, for his talent was unmatched, that even the Queen once wept blood and slitted her hand in sorrow, for a love he wrote but she never gets to know.

Our King with his little heart meant to avenge that sorrow, and so the King commanded the Poet

to seek out the reddest, most burning sunset

and trap it forever in verse.

And so the Knight, the Poet, and the Olive-Eyed Girl, walked paths that twisted into one. They did not know it then, but the Fates had already written their tale.

The Poet, they say, forgot his sunsets.

He followed the girl instead, hopelessly in love with the way she yearned for light, He no longer sought the sunset, in doing so, he betrayed his King, yet he did not care.

Nor did he care of honors, of suns.

The Knight, meanwhile, carried the Sun in his hands, victorious, blazing and bright.

But when he saw her, he passed this Olive-Eyed Girl,

just once;

his knees bent, and his war began. He wanted to give her everything,

sunsets, sunrises, suns not yet born.

But duty clutched his throat.

He turned away, and he cried where no one could see.

The Sun refused to be captured, knowing the Knight heart breaks,

It ignited,

Until, slowly, his bones began to crack from the burnt and silence of his sorrow.

The Girl’s heart, they say, broke into pieces not even the the Hands of the goddess could mend.

She wept for her sunrise, which burnt, and buried now, with the Knight, somewhere deep beneath the Kingdom’s feet.

The Poet sat by her side.

He wrote no more verses,

only waited.

Not for the sun, but for her.

But when a soul knows it will never see the light it was made for;

it quietly chooses not to be.

The Princess disappeared,

The Knight was gone,

The Poet remained.

And the Sun never quite rose the same again.

Even now, they say,

some sunrises are softer than others,

as if grieving.

Even now, they say,

poets search the horizon for a girl with olive green eyes.

And some say they’ve seen her,

in the light just before dawn,

where longing still lives.

And so the tale is told.

Of a Princess who longed for a sunrise,
Of a Knight who gave everything but his heart,
Of a Poet who stayed, even when the light was gone.

Not all love is returned, not all beauty can be kept, and not every soul is meant to stay. But still, love given freely, even in sorrow, leaves behind a light that never dies.