we know sapphic knight x princess ships, we love sapphic knight x princess ships, the dynamic is unimpeachable. HOWEVER.
to spice things up might i suggest, submitted for your approval: introducing a jester character. princess x jester. knight x jester. knight vs jester. princess/knight/jester love triangle. princess/knight/jester throuples.
if we wish to maintain sapphic knight x princess ships for longer than the forseeable future we must write responsibly and focus on innovation such that we may sustain the dynamic for years to come.
The palace juts from the Terminus; a spire of glass, centrepiece of hundreds like it, stapling down reality's torn edge to prevent any more from shredding and unravelling into the void. On one face, the ocean; on the other, infinite screaming black.
In the throne room, highest chamber within the spire's peak, the princess sits angular and expressionless. From further up still, webs of gossamer tendril weave downward, thousands upon thousands, twining into thicker and thicker amalgamations, unbranching into ropes, cables, knotted trunks; melding finally into a great semi-sphere hollow of crystal, gold, and flickering light. At the epicentre is aligned the seated princess's head, nestled within the jagged crystalline starburst of the crown.
At the touch of it upon her brow every day, her eyes turn fathomless black, her skull turned by it into a conclave, a bellowing overlay of every monarch's mind from her immediate predecessor backward to the first. This constitutes, so they say, a greater-than-human concentration of wisdom and experience, decision-making augmented beyond the petty perspective.
Ser Glorie sits in a smaller seat beside the throne, at the princess's right hand, her tall head coming to the level of the great throne's armrest. She is armoured and armed; she is ready to give her life on any necessary day, at any hour. Every day of her duty, she has sat at the arm of the throne, while the princess provides the small enfleshed focus of the massive palace-apparatus, and the vast sweep of the rim-stabilisation array outside it, and suffers the unceasing thousandfold screams of mad ancestors within her brain. No danger from outside the princess's person has ever approached, nor within the lifetimes of a hundredfold predecessors of her own.
No dangers; no petitioners; scarce human presence at all. Except—
Low-heeled boots clack sharp on the glassy floors. A louche figure in tight leather breeches wanders into the great throne room, idly juggling three bread rolls from the breakfast table that morning.
The Fool is a mystery. She has been here longer than Glorie; looks younger. Looks unchangingly young. There are records of a Fool here — well, always. They seemingly never thought to mention where the Fool came from, or when a new Fool arrived. If they ever did so.
"I say, I say, I say," the Fool says, and Glorie's throat clicks in a swallow. The Fool's sharp moods come, sometimes; they meet head-on with the princess's own, and everyone is lacerated.
The palace, the towers, the helm — none of this was meant to last so many ages. A preservative, while the world was otherwise properly cured.
The world was never cured.
"My dog," the Fool says, juggling; every word a viciously pointed dig, a pressing thumb on ages-old bruises, a deliberately picked utterance causing and inflaming and banned by raging arguments, time out of mind, all parties knowing them instantly for the primeval provocation they are — "hath no nose."
The princess widens crown-darkened eyes, fingers whitening with knee-jerk rage on the throne's arm. "One more word from your mouth," she spits, "and Ser Glorie will strike off your insolent head."
Glorie swallows hard, unsure what might happen if, one day, the order actually comes; as some days it feels it must, inevitable.
The Fool snatches one of the bread rolls out of the air and puts that hand fluidly behind her back, continuing to juggle the remaining two with only one hand. She grins, slanted and mirthless, and swaggers over in front of Glorie; lifts one booted foot to rest the point of the heel on one of Glorie's armrests, and languidly stretches her hamstring. Puts her foot down, the other up, repeats the stretch. Drops to her knees, and then catches the rolls, one then the other, with the hand that was throwing them into the air.
She takes the other hand from behind her back, finally, and stretches both out, theatrically slow, to rest on Glorie's knees. She directs her gaze pointedly down, between her hands.
"Marry, naunt," the Fool breathes. "Thine sword is to be buried in my little throat. Think'st thou my neck can even encompass such a knightly weapon?"
"Jester, th'art provoking too far," Glorie says, soft and warning.
"Why, only a fool would provoke her Highness," the other drawls, and — eyes still conspicuously fixed on Glorie's crotch — takes a sharp-toothed, relishing bite of one of her bread rolls.
