Her kingdom
A Kingdom Written in Starlight
Built by her knight, who could not ride out this month.
I — The Kingdom
Her kingdom sits somewhere the exams never happened.
It runs on candlelight and river water. Nobody here has ever heard of ICT.
The geography is invented. Everything else in it is real, and most of it is hers.
Someone left a light on.
The path is not in a hurry either.
Gates are open. They have been for a while.
II — The Journey
She takes the lantern path at her own pace, because in this timeline nothing is due on Monday.
Touch a lantern
III — Choose a Chapter
Five rooms. Take them in any order.
You are the indecisive one, so pick badly on purpose and see what happens.
No deadline.
No one watching.
It opens at night. Same as you.
Nothing here is graded.
The Lily Garden
The garden asks for nothing. It does not need to be checked on, it does not want an update, and it will not apologise for taking up the space it takes up.
You could learn something from it. So could I.
Linger on a lily
30 July. Confirmed the eye can catch a candle at fourteen miles. Did not believe it. Believes it now.
7 August. One woman's cells, taken in the fifties without asking. Still dividing. Have been to space.
8 August. Something large is out past Neptune, pulling things sideways. Nobody has seen it yet.
12 August. Most stars are red dwarfs and none are visible. The sky is showing off.
14 August. Mapped the oldest light there is. The universe is not as evenly random as it should be. No explanation available.
The Observatory
The princess is not decorative about this one. She keeps a logbook.
Half these entries are hers. She found them, she brought them to me, and on the fourteenth she got hers in before I had finished mine.
I run the castle. She runs the observatory.
Open the logbook
A Book of Small Wonders
Watermelon in the rain. Kiribath, the second favourite kind, which she remembered and I did not. A cat with pink ears.
The Chess Record
Sealed by royal decree. The princess knows why.
Notes Toward Understanding Biscuits
The subject likes one or two and rejects the rest. No system has been identified. Research ongoing.
On Being Told What To Do
Warm towel on the head. Eat something. Sleep before twelve. Get a check up. Move your ass. The knight has followed roughly sixty percent of these and intends to improve.
The Library
Small things only. The hour she lost hunting for one note and reported to me like a crime. The way she asks about my work before she gets to her own day.
It is a very full shelf for five weeks.
Open a book
The Fun Fact Library
You asked me for one of these every day. You told me off the two times I forgot. So I wrote down every fact I've given you, every fact you've given me, and a lot I hadn't got to yet.
You will not run out. That was the point.
Today's fact
Every star you have ever seen with your own eyes is a freak. More than three quarters of the stars out there are red dwarfs and not one of them is bright enough to see from here. The night sky is a highlight reel.
I gave you this one on the twelfth. You asked how many stars you'd seen and I told you none of them were normal.
Come back tomorrow.
44 facts and counting.
Every star you have ever seen with your own eyes is a freak. More than three quarters of the stars out there are red dwarfs and not one of them is bright enough to see from here. The night sky is a highlight reel.
I gave you this one on the twelfth. You asked how many stars you'd seen and I told you none of them were normal.
Earth is the only planet in the solar system not named after a Greek or Roman god.
You didn't know the others were gods. Now you do.
Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away, so the version of it you can see tonight is 640 years old. If it collapsed during the reign of Henry V, we would still be waiting to find out.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. It takes 243 Earth days to turn once and 225 to go round the sun.
Saturn is less dense than water. Find an ocean big enough and it would float.
Light from the centre of the sun takes tens of thousands of years to fight its way to the surface, then eight minutes to reach your face.
A teaspoon of neutron star weighs about a billion tonnes. Same stuff as the little dot you would point at and ignore.
There is no sound in space but there is pressure. A black hole in the Perseus cluster is pushing out a note. B flat, 57 octaves below middle C, held for roughly 2.5 billion years.
Voyager 1 is the furthest thing we have ever thrown. It is about 25 billion kilometres out and still talking to us, on a signal measured in billionths of a billionth of a watt. Each message takes around 23 hours to arrive.
Shrink the sun to the size of a football and Earth becomes a grain of sand about 24 metres away. On that same scale, the next nearest star would be roughly 6,000 kilometres from your foot.
That is every one I owe you and a few in advance. If you find a better one, you know where I am.
The Hall of Celebration
Everything in this castle exists because of one morning in Colombo, at three, nineteen years ago.
The kingdom has been coasting on that ever since.
Happy birthday, Tharushi
Nineteen. Go and be difficult about it.