The Roar of a Knight (part 1)

What valor, what splendor, what beauty springs to mind when I spoke their names. The knights who gleamed in the sunlight, rising high above crowds on towering steeds and in the night, the moon and all the heavenly bodies set them a glow, as if they themselves were stars, walking the earth. Was there any position more noble or any cause so great as theirs? In my mind, no. So, I became determined to join their ranks.
At the age of six I was adopted into a royal family. I became a prince. This noble position was given to me, I never earned it. This fact has followed me all my life, like my own shadow, reminding me there is a light around and it doesn't come from me. But with that thought, I watched the knights from my window and envied their glow. I would glow one day.
When they fastened me into armor, my armor, and when they bestowed a sword and shield, my sword and my shield, I felt no time had passed from when I was a boy looking out of my window, watching boys become knighted men. I glanced over my shoulder at the tower window, half expecting to see myself staring down at the procession, envious. When they titled me and caped me, I suddenly became a man in everyone's eyes but mine and I left the square, and then the town, and didn't stop till I was in the woods, completely alone save for my thoughts, whose feet kicked playfully in the pool in front of me. I stared at the ripples, each one a revelation of my present entrapment within boyhood. My mother's milk still clung to me and my face still bore a softness as a result. These thoughts battered the pool of my heart. I felt as though I could not yet call myself a man, and shame rose from the pool floor. I left the woods, resolved to be the man that I as a boy stared down at from my window, honor shimmering off the surface of his armor and inspiring any who dared, to come and step in his boots.
Perhaps this singular inspiration was what drove me those three years I spent fighting battles that seemed to have no end. Often times I was alone when a blade would be thrusted toward my heart, missing its mark only by a moment, and instead, would take a piece of flesh from my arm. I dispatched them quickly enough, but the attacks were quite frequent at that time and the scars from these attacks were adding up. Assassins seemed to drop from the sky to take my life and all because of the cape I wore. They didn't know me, nor did they know the inner turmoil I battled, that was constantly telling me I didn't deserve the position I held. The same position that made me worth the time in the eyes of these assassins. A knight was worth a good deal of money if one could produce their head on a platter to any of the groups who have, for some time, set themselves against us. Every knight learned how to stay just out of reach, though, and assassins had very little success making any profit from knight slaying. But still they tried, aiming particularly for the newer knights. It was a testing time in my life, but after a few years, it came to an end. The attacks on my life lessened and it was around the end of the third year from when I was first knighted, that I looked into a mirror and saw the foggy image of my face, carved into a man's face by blades and trials.
In retrospect, I'm sure that, without that tiring period of my life, I would not have been ready for the greatest challenge I had ever faced up to that point: winning the heart of a young princess. It is of this great adventure I write.