It had begun in the Imperial Gardens.
Leonidas remembered the scent of night-blooming orchids, the soft hum of starlight lamps, and the way Illiana moved through the shadows. She wasn't dressed in her usual royal silks that night - just a simple cloak, her hair braided with silver threads, her eyes bright with mischief.
The two of them had been meeting in secret recently. Ten and six, the both of them. Hopelessly in love. They had tried to hide these affections but even a blind begger could see the writing on the wall. So guards were posted to monitor the Princess. Yet this time she had managed to wiggle away from her detail.
"You're late," she whispered in Eldari or Elfspeech to the commonfolk, as she emerged from behind a marble pillar.
Leonidas smiled. "I had to lose two guards and a nosy steward."
"Only one guard" She said.
They laughed, the sound swallowed by the quiet of the garden. It was their sanctuary- the one and only place in the Imperial Captial where neither were an imperial princess or a ducal heir.
Illiana sat on the egde of the fountain, dipping her fingers into the water. "Do you ever wonder what it would be like to live without all this?"
"I must confess I do not," he replied. "Duty is the sacrifice of all who are born nobility" he puffs out his chest to imitate the stature of his lord father.
"That's what father says all the time, and I have tried to live up to his words. I do not know who I would be, if I was not the son of the great lord Aleric Lionhart."
She turned to him, her voice soft. "Star of my sky. I think you'd be someone brave. Someone who chooses his own path. Like the stories written in the great sagas."
He looked at her, really looked. 'You see more in me than I do myself' he thought.
"I love you," he said, the words falling like stars.
She smiled. "Then run away with me."