The cries of a baby shook the inside of the castle.
Immediately, the servants prepared the welcome banquet.
The security guards, following the king's prior orders and those who guarded the main gate and surrounded the castle, opened the gates, ready to let in the people who had been eagerly awaiting this longed-for moment.
The king's son was born.
Finally, there was a new heir to the throne, and he was a boy.
Unfortunately, that night, a tragedy occurred that no one expected.
With eagerness and joy, the king approached the bed to get a closer look at his son.
Only to be met with a terrifying, heart-wrenching surprise.
His son, the sole heir to the throne, had been born with red eyes, like a demon's, and not with the purple eyes of his father and mother, which indeed matched their lineage.
What had happened to his son?
The king could not stop staring at the baby with disappointment and disillusionment—the baby cradled in his wife's arms.
The queen looked at her husband confused, hoping he would say something, that at least he would want to hold him and behave like a proud father who loved unconditionally the heir he had so longed to have in his arms.
Instead, the king began to shout in rage, frightening everyone present in the room.
The servants who had helped with the birth, and the midwife, tried not to get involved in the situation; meanwhile they worried about tidying the room for the rest the queen and her newborn child needed.
"How dare you cheat on me with another man! You shameless woman! That baby you're holding is not mine and never will be! You will raise him until he is one year old, and then you will hand him to Giselle so she can raise him as her son and have him work with the servants, and he will never be recognized as our child! Do you understand?"
The king shouted desperately.
The queen had never seen him so angry and disappointed.
For her, there was no explanation for what had happened. Her heart as a mother demanded that she do something, that she fight for her child's love, because she knew he was of her blood; she had never been unfaithful to her husband, and her child's having been born with that eye color was not her fault.
But the king found it hard to understand.
"I don't know what happened. But I can swear on my mother's soul, who rests in peace in heaven, that this child is blood of our blood. This baby is the fruit of our love and our desire to be parents. This baby is yours, and even if he has this eye color, that doesn't mean I cheated on you with another man, because I never have—I'd be completely mad if I had. My love for you is unconditional, and this child will be the only thing that binds us more as a family. Please, come closer, hold him, and you will see for yourself that I am not lying. Just look him in the eyes so you can convince yourself."
The king did so.
He came close enough to sense it: definitely, that baby was not his.
The baby his wife carried belonged to someone else.
It wasn't that the king had some bad premonition; simply, he felt no connection to that child. There was no father-to-son bond when his baby had just been born and had been so long desired.
The king did not feel a single shred of love for the red-eyed baby.
He simply could not, and he ran out of the room as if he had seen a ghost he fled from so as not to become possessed.
The queen wanted to cry, but she held back.
The household began to leave as each person finished their duties.
Except for the midwife, who was the queen's maternal aunt and her only trusted person to talk to about her most intimate problems, because she was her only family in the world after the king.
"Don't worry, just give him time to accept it. These days, it's very strange for babies to be born with this kind of eye anomaly. You know how, because of damned beliefs and legends, they end up being despised and rejected by society, and even by their own parents."
The queen nodded.
The kingdom was living through a deeply worrying social situation.
Five out of ten babies were born with red eyes.
Once the rumor spread—if it reached the ears of the kingdom's mayor, who worked hand in hand with the royals as the highest authority—the kingdom would immediately be declared in quarantine, and the dark guards would go out into the streets, enter every house, seize the babies from their mothers' arms, take them deep into the forest, and there end their innocent lives.
Legend said that when a baby is born with this eye anomaly and is allowed to grow into an adult, at age eighteen the boy or girl will begin to awaken ancient, dark, impossible magical abilities.
The kingdom was already used to living in a fantasy world where every person with colored eyes would awaken a different ability depending on their eye color.
However, those born with red eyes were considered the devil's children and had to be exterminated quickly before a possible tragedy occurred.
But the queen did not want her son to meet such a lamentable end.
Instead of obeying the king's last request before he fled in terror, the queen thought of a better solution to her problem.
"Giselle, listen to me very carefully, to what I am asking you to do for me right now."
Giselle gave her full attention to her niece, curious about what she was about to ask.
"Leave this kingdom, and take my son. Raise him as your own, and never, ever set foot on these lands again. If you don't do this, my son will be killed, and he is a baby—he is not to blame for being born with this damned anomaly in his eyes."
Giselle was in shock when she heard each word fall from her niece's mouth. The midwife stared fixedly into her niece's eyes, trying to decipher her feelings, her true intentions behind the unexpected request, and she couldn't. Her niece's gaze was colder and sadder than anything else, and she was hiding what she truly felt about her uncomfortable situation.
The midwife agreed; after all, she would have no problem leaving for another kingdom with a child who was not of her womb. In fact, she had long been thinking of leaving the kingdom because of how dangerous it had become with the appearance of those demons who would not leave them in peace despite having been reborn with magical abilities that at least allowed them to escape before being captured and devoured by them.
The idea of leaving with that baby in her arms to raise him as her own did not sound so far-fetched after all.
"All right, I will do it. I'll leave right now with the baby, because your husband is the sort of man who, if he finds out you raised him as your son and grew attached to him only to hand him off like trash to the servants, it will be worse for you. So it's better that I take him; otherwise this will bring us more trouble than we already have. Don't worry, we will be fine—I'll send you letters whenever I can."
As a final gesture of love, Giselle leaned toward her niece and kissed her cheek gently, pressing her lips to her forehead for a few seconds before stepping back to look into her eyes.
"Just as your mother did in her life, I learned to do the same. I will always love you and wherever I am I will watch over you for eternity, whether alive or dead. Good luck in your life, my dear niece."
The queen let out a silent cry, handed the baby to her aunt—wrapped in a white sheet so he would not suffer from the night's cold—gave him a small kiss on the forehead, blessed him, and watched as her aunt Giselle, her only living relative by blood, departed with the love of her life.
There was only a brief moment of celebration in the castle for the birth of the new heir, because the guards could not withstand it, and one by one they were killed by a magical power no one had ever seen before since they awakened their abilities.
The guests stopped dancing, the musicians stopped playing, and everyone stood frozen, staring down the corridor that connected the main hall to the great gate of the castle.
A man three meters tall stood there, wearing a black robe with a hood that covered his head completely—even his face was hidden so that no one could see or recognize him—except for his shining red eyes, the only thing that stood out against all that darkness.
The subjects were paralyzed, seeing how behind that mysterious dark man there was a grotesque human slaughter on the floor. The king's dark guards lay scattered, dismembered; their bodies rested in a huge pool of blood and entrails.
"Where is the heir?"
The man spoke in a supernatural voice that echoed loudly through the castle's great hall.
No one dared answer, for to do so would be to betray the loyalty and trust of their royals.
A sinister, masculine laugh reverberated off the walls.
"Isn't anyone going to tell me anything? Very well—you'll see, you've messed with the wrong man."