Seventh Chapter : Princess Bahar
Princess Bahar. She was a woman of strange beauty—long, mahogany-coloured hair, and eyes that carried the shadow of gunpowder waves.
But Bahar was not known only for her beauty—she was a seeker of knowledge, a silent, solitary explorer of the past.
Through the corridors of the palace, by secret paths, she had entered that forbidden council, and she had heard Aelthen's words.
Deep night.
When all was silent, and only a soft breeze carried the fragrance of flowers, Bahar opened the first page of her diary.
There she wrote—
"Today I saw a history within history.
Aelthen—are you truly the last dragon?
If you speak the truth, then we who now stand at the gates of this royal palace stand upon the body of a lie.
What my father wishes to hide,
I shall record.
If one day my voice, too, is silenced,
let these pages remain as the witness of my soul."
From that day on, every day Bahar preserved in her diary the torn fragments of ancient history. In utmost secrecy, far from every shadow of the Balan Empire, hidden from every curious gaze, Queen Bahar wrote with deep devotion her "Aelthen Records."
It was not merely a collection of paper and ink—it was a profound secret document, a compilation of epoch-shifting truths.
In every line, in every word, flowed those unspoken and unacknowledged truths of the kingdom, which for countless ages had been covered beneath layers of deceit.
If this record were ever revealed, the glorious yet tainted history of the Balan Empire could be changed forever, and upon its ruins might arise the foundation of a new truth.
That record was like the silent eruption of a blooming volcano—calm on the surface, yet boiling within, ready one day to consume everything and create a new land.
But by the cruel irony of fate, before the document could be completed, Queen Bahar herself vanished into the deep abyss of history.
Her sudden and mysterious disappearance remains the subject of whispers and murmurs across the Balan kingdom—through palace corridors and even distant villages. Rumour and quiet sighs are forever entwined with the story of her disappearance.
Many hold a firm belief that it was King Oril himself who erased Princess Bahar from the face of this world, from the realm of the living, forever.
Perhaps he feared those dreadful truths which the "Aelthen Records" were about to unveil—truths that could shake the very foundation of his throne.
Her disappearance was not merely the vanishing of a princess, but the loss of a great part of the truth itself, which still lingers in the pages of history as an unresolved question mark.
Some say she fled towards the forests of Zhathar. And some say—she is still somewhere, with the diary in her possession, for Bahar once said—
"If truth hides, I will seek it.
And if truth dies,
I will write it down,
so that one day it may live again."
******
When King Oril Balan came to know that his daughter Bahar had written down, with her own hand, the secret story of Aelthen—a history that could cast doubt upon the sanctity and glory of the Balan Empire—then within him, the father's inner flame turned to stone in a single instant.
But this father was one crowned in iron.
He was angry, but his anger was silent, poisonous, and royal. He did not send Bahar to prison.
He did not sentence her to death.
Instead—he chose for her a long reign of humiliation, a rule of exile.