The Witch shrugged and offered a sassy pout. “I asked him what he was willing to sacrifice,” the Witch said.

“I was not willing to sacrifice my heart to those who seek to persecute me any longer.” The Prince unlocked the cell and took the Knight in his arms. “But I am willing to sacrifice all this. The throne. The crown. The kingdom that I am promised. Because a promised kingdom without you by my side is no kingdom of mine.”

“What of the rivalry between our lands?” the Knight said.

“Perhaps we can mend old wounds,” the Prince said, holding his love in his hands. “Wounds that seem to have no point of infliction aside from hate or unreason.”

The twin sparks flew upward from the Witch’s palms and swirled around the two souls, fusing and imbuing them with a golden light.

As the Prince and the Knight were about to kiss, the sounds of galloping hooves and boots marching on stone slabs echoed through the dungeons.

“We must go quickly,” the Prince said.

The Knight turned to the Witch, but she was gone.

“I know the way to the Temple,” the Prince said as if he could read the mind of his love. “There’s a secret passage through these dungeons that leads out beyond my kingdom.”

As they took off under the guise of darkness, their paths lit only by their love, the Prince told the Knight about how he would sneak away as a child to lands beyond his parent’s borders. He would wish for only three things: a warm hearth, a small plot of land for sustenance, and happiness. He held the hand of his love as they climbed hills and slid into valleys.

They made their way across the lands, eventually reaching the Temple of the Sky Titans, at the border of both kingdoms. It was a grand stone sanctuary with towering marble pillars carved from lightning bolts and the hammer of thunder, weathered by rains that once breathed life into a landscape now dried by a centuries-long drought in the absence of the titans.

“What do we do now?” the Knight asked, holding tight to his Prince.

In the center of the temple stood a stone slab in the shape of a heart, broken down the middle. Beyond that stood the Witch.

“Mend the heart,” she instructed.

The Prince stood on one side and the Knight on the other. On the count of three, they pushed the stone slab together until the two ends fit neatly into each other.

As they waited for a sign that the curse had been broken, soldiers from the two rival kingdoms flanked the temple mountainside, ready to wage war. The two armies hurtled unintelligible and nonsensical insults back and forth. The Prince and Knight looked at each other in confusion because none of it made any sense. It was never clearer that neither kingdom knew why they hated the other.