Morning arrived without announcement.
No trumpets. No guards. No summons to stand before men who decided the fate of nations with ink and signatures. Only the soft sound of wind moving through prayer flags and the low murmur of chanting beyond the stone walls.
For a moment, I forgot who I had been.
Then I felt the ache in my wrists, and memory returned like a blade.
I rose before the sun, fully claimed the sky, and stepped outside. Mist clung to the hills, turning the world pale and unfinished, as if creation itself had paused to consider its next move. The monastery stood firm against time, cracked stone, narrow windows, doors worn smooth by centuries of hands seeking refuge.
A young monk swept the courtyard. He nodded to me, neither curious nor fearful. To him, I was simply another soul who had arrived with nothing.
That anonymity was a strange mercy.
After prayer, the elder monk, Abba Tesfaye, called me to sit with him beneath an ancient fig tree. Its roots broke through the ground like veins, stubborn and exposed.
"You carry grief," he said, pouring coffee into small clay cups. "And fear. But also restraint. That is unusual."
"I was taught to be careful," I replied.
"By whom?"
I hesitated. Even here, even now, the truth felt dangerous.
"By my father."
He nodded, as if that answered everything.
"Men who survive the fall of power often believe silence will save them," Abba Tesfaye continued. "Sometimes it does. Sometimes silence is only another kind of prison."
I watched steam rise from the coffee. "What should a man do when the world erases his name?"
The monk studied me for a long moment. "He must decide whether he wishes to be remembered, or to remain."
That day, I worked alongside the monks. I carried water from the spring. I helped repair a wall broken by last season's rain. My hands, once accustomed to parchment and ceremony, learned the language of stone and soil.
And in that labor, I felt something unfamiliar.
Purpose without permission.
Yet even as my body tired, my mind refused rest. News traveled even to places like this. Whispers carried by traders. Rumors shaped by fear.
Executions. Purges. The rewriting of history.
My father's name spoken only in curses, or not at all.
That night, I dreamed of the palace.
Its halls were empty. Portraits stared down from cracked frames, their eyes accusing. At the center stood my father, robes faded, crown resting on the floor beside him.
"You live," he said.
"I didn't choose to," I answered.
He smiled sadly. "None of us do."
I woke with tears on my face.
Before dawn, Abba Tesfaye found me preparing to leave.
"You are not safe here," I said. "They will come eventually."
"They always do," he replied calmly. "But this place has survived kings, conquerors, and forgetful generations."
He placed a small object in my hand.
A wooden carving of a lion, simple, worn smooth by time.
"Not a symbol of rule," he said. "A reminder of responsibility."
I closed my fingers around it.
As I stepped back onto the road, the sun rose fully, casting light across the land. Villages stirred. Fields waited to be worked. Children laughed somewhere in the distance, untouched by proclamations and bloodshed.
Ethiopia lived.
And as long as it did, my silence would not be enough.
The world believed the prince was dead.
For now, I would let them.
But silence, I was beginning to understand, is only the beginning of a voice.