‘The Prince Who Gave Up Her Empire’

‘The Prince Who Gave Up Her Empire’

Terasadh arrived in the world with a force so abrupt that the resin womb holding her split in two, cracking as she took her first breath and cried out from the shock of being alive.

Her aunt, King Nadjana, was the sole witness; she cleared the infant’s throat of birth-fluids and warmed the infant’s breath with her own. For a week the king secluded herself. In that week she fed the newly-made prince with the juice of ripe language-fruits, the milk of wisdom-orchids, and the nectar of doorway birds. Royal birth is a delicate matter, and she would trust no other to anoint her heir.

This one’s a big story for me, literally: 7,200 words. For the record, I never thought I’d be able to place an epic fantasy at Apex.

I describe this story as ‘queer desert Arthuriana’, though its connections to Arthuriana are extremely loose. I picked apart some of the base components and transposed. There is an Arthur figure, but not exactly; there is a Mordred figure (and Mordred’s mom), but not precisely. The analogues are intentionally very rough. What I wanted to play around with—rather than ‘King Arthur, but queer’—was the idea of prophecy, agency, predestination, and the lost monarch who’ll return to serve her land in its time of need.

More forefront is that I wanted to work with pronoun fluidity, the gendering of nouns. I don’t like gendered common nouns, as a rule, and a lot of them are aesthetically ugly: authoress, stewardess, policewoman. Many are outmoded and have fallen out of use, but others remain firmly gendered: queen, princess, mother, niece, sister.

I don’t think the genders of the characters in ‘Prince’ need spelling out—that’s part of the point—but it’s probably worth saying that Terasadh is non-binary. (A story about deconstructing gendered language where everyone is cis would, of course, be absolutely lazy.)