This is a fairy's tale. And it starts in the way that all great fairy tales do. Once upon a timeā€¦

The queen of the White City, widowed by her foolhardy king of four years, held a ball in which every eligible prince or king attended dressed in their glittering finery of peacock green and mandarin gold. Men from Prussia, Checoslovachia, the Orient, and all of Europe came to fill the empty throne and gain the most pleasurable company of the young, pretty queen. At this time the delicate kingdom that the young queen ruled was pristine, just as her capital city, and prosperous with the trade abroad and their many port-towns. So the kingdom was happy and pleased with their young monarchy and the beauty that she seemed to infuse with her very words. So even when she selected a strange older man with dark eyes and body built on the slaughtered nations he had helped conquer, they were pacified by the young queen's love and the two were not slow to proceed forward with their positions of power as the small delicate kingdom prospered under their contrasting styles of leadership.

As the kingdom prospered, so did the budding family of the king and queen. Their first child was a daughter, whom they named Juliana. She possessed her father's dark countenance and severity for rules and logic with her mother's plaintive features and gossamer hair. Their next child was a prince - dark thick hair like his fathers, with the feathery softness of his mothers; wide eyes with the piercing intelligence his father often used to conduct a courtroom but with a throwback to his grandmother's estranged green color; his form was small at birth but still conditioned under his father's militant training. Their next child was long in coming, for a smear began to stretch across the pleasant kingdom, beginning a mere week after the child prince's eighth birthday.