The Crowe's Wing

If you read this at the beginning of a story, what would you think?

"In the wide winter world beyond the sunshine of the witch’s home, a wizard and a princeling met for the first time amongst the snow. It was a widely acknowledged fact that the Prince was losing himself to the cold. His name and land are unimportant. They disappeared into the snow soon enough in any case. In the end he was called Crowe by those who knew of his disappearance – he had no friends to give him a happier name and it was given in speculation of his black heart, blacker than night-time which is simply a deep blue wave that sweeps over the world. No, he was truly black as the underside of a crowe’s wing, hidden from light. As is true of almost all persons, good or bad, he had his time of innocence, a period that stretched from youngest childhood and well into his years as a young man. It seemed, to those who were not well acquainted with him, that the change in his character happened gradually and could not be marked to any one moment in time, similarly to the way a flower does not wither overnight but loses its bloom over days. Those often in his presence, however, noted the first day, the first sign that he had lost his heart.
Crowe always loved the sun, the summer, and the way light glinted turning everything to gold. As a young boy, he pretended to be the King of a grand story and all that his child’s fingertips could touch turned to liquid gold, a pool of sunlight held in his small hand. So it came as no surprise to his staff that he lost a little of his heart the day the snow first came. It flew in on a morning mist, seeming to creep with the same steady step. In the early, grayish rays of light, the manservant woke himself to prepare the world for his young master, the Prince. He rushed to the sitting room, stirring a cloud of dust that seemed for a last time to reflect the sunlight and happiness. He stopped in the door, shocked, because there he found his Prince, hunched over the window, hands locked behind his back, many movements of sun before he usually rose. Later, in reflection, the manservant observed that it was almost as if the sun had called a goodbye to the Prince, as he was simply called before he earned the title of Crowe. It shined brightly out to him a last time at dawn before it was smothered by the white.
He stood there for much of the morning, though it was difficult to judge time at all as the sun did not mark a passage through the visible heavens. When at last he turned his folk could see what he had hidden. The shame of tears never came over him, but his face was such a mask of tragedy that they all stopped to comfort their beloved Prince until he raged at them to leave him be. So it was that he shut himself in his apartments for a good sennight before venturing into a world without warmth.
His first appearance revealed a Prince in a decidedly foul mood, terribly Crowe-like, though they would not have known to call it that then. To the staff he was unpleasant to say the least; his orders came fast and restless. When the servants complied with his demands at a regular pace they were reprimanded for indolence, but when too fast accused of carelessness. He was not to be satisfied and few went home without some bewilderment, upset, and thought to where the gentle and loving Prince had gotten to. Over the next days and weeks they continued to try and please, but to no avail – their Prince refused to come in from the cold. Still, all his changes came as a surprise: the first time he deliberately struck one of his own, banished some member of the staff, killed, and took up killing permanently. A great hunter he became. His will was indefatigable - no beast or man could escape his ruthless hounding. Despite these terrible changes, these rivulets of blood red through the pure, snow-like heart of the Prince, a glimmer of gold still shone through. Not often was it visible, but some found it, small flowers of people who felt the warmth of sunlight within him still.
One such was then only a young sapling of a girl, running wild in the winter wastes of the southern plateaus. Pilar they called her. The brutal winds that tore that rock-strewn land gifted her with a mother and father of ice, as well as an indifferent freedom stretching to forever, or at least the Prince’s Black Wood. She was no stranger to this freedom, disappearing into rock, air, a swirl of frost in the jewel-crusted dawn. The mother did not even twitch an eyebrow at this, staring endlessly into the swirling white beyond their hut’s thin walls, the father gazing sightlessly at the flickering flames of the hearth. The only emotion to touch their cold faces was in a watered reflection of the wildness of snow and fire. When Pilar returned, shadows flickered across the mother’s face: a smile, an inaudible question. “Where did you go?”
“Not far. Do not worry yourself.”
“I did not.”
“I know. When have you ever?” and the daughter turned and ran to the cold’s loving arms, warmer even than her mother’s, where the shadowed Black Wood of the lost, darkened Prince waited for her, singing her song, a music that played for few. The mother continued her silent vigil. The father did not look up.
In the Wood, Pilar grew to maidenhood. There was little that she could not find, those old trees worse than all the kingdom’s gossips. Histories were spread from one to the other; even the newest tales of their Crowe-prince shook travelers through the greenery. The moths strong enough to escape the wet frigidity kissed the old faces of bark and whispered new knowledge into their gnarled knolls. All they gave willingly to Pilar who listened and understood their ramblings, not in the human acknowledgment of the groans of aching trees, but in the understanding of snow and cold that reaches to center. So it was that Pilar recognized something of herself in the murmurings of the Black Prince."

Yes, I know that is not how you spell "crow" and that "princeling" is not a word. Microsoft Word (and now, Blogger) remind me of these things daily.