👑THE LAST THRONE 👑
{.🩸some crowns are paid in bl00d 🩸. }
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© 2026 vision story— All Rights Reserved
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🩸episode 1🩸
The Oranfe family is the second richest family in the entire world.Not second in Africa. Not second on the continent. Second. In the whole world.
King Oranfe grand king of Eshara and the man sitting over 18 surrounding kingdoms built the Crown Group from the ground up. His grandfather had started something small.
By the time it reached King Oranfe’s hands, small wasn’t a word that applied to it anymore.
Right now the Crown Group owns 85 high schools in different countries. Over 100 universities.
Their construction company has put up more than 300 major roads and bridges. Around 200 streets in different cities carry the Oranfe name on their signboards. 180 hotels and luxury suites worldwide.
They supply water, electricity and basic needs to dozens of cities because almost every powerful king you can think of is a partner in the Crown Group one way or another.
And with all of that all that land, all that money, all that influence King Oranfe still hadn’t sat down and decided which of his three living sons would inherit everything.
Three sons. One throne. One king who kept finding reasons to delay the answer.
The Oranfe estate was the kind of place that made people quiet when they first saw it.
Ten mansions sat inside the compound some of them fully staffed and occupied, a few just standing empty like the family had run out of things to fill them with.
A wide blue swimming pool stretched across the front of the main palace. Another one sat at the back.
The first and biggest building was the king’s alone.
The last building at the far end of the estate was where the household workers stayed. The Crown Group kept over 200 domestic staff on the estate most of them housed in that last building, many of them from kingdoms that had come under Eshara’s rule after old wars and ended up in service as part of the agreements that followed.
Only 10 of those workers actually lived and worked inside the main palace itself.
The second building sitting close to the king’s was the queens’ residence.
But the building that made guests stop mid-sentence when they walked past it for the first time was the Princes’ Wing.
The best architect in the region had designed it. You could tell. Everything about it was thought through the way it sat on the land, the work carved into the outer walls, the lighting, the balance of the whole structure.
It was the kind of building you didn’t just look at. You studied it.
Kofi, the first prince, occupied the top floor. He was the eldest, the loudest, the one King Oranfe had always pointed to when people asked about the future of the throne.
Darius, the second prince, had the middle floor. Quieter than Kofi, sharper than most people gave him credit for.
The kind of person who didn’t say much but stored everything.
Emre, the third prince, had taken a section closer to the gardens peaceful, sunny, matching his personality almost too perfectly.
And then there was Zaran.
The fourth prince. The youngest. The one born on the same night as a twin who didn’t make it past four hours.
Zaran’s section of the princes’ wing faced the back pool. His back wall was almost entirely glass floor to ceiling so whatever sky and light existed outside came directly into his space.
His wardrobe room was right beside his main room, packed floor to ceiling with clothes sorted by colour and season.
Two personal guards were assigned specifically to assist him when getting dressed, because getting dressed came with its own complications when your legs didn’t move the way they were supposed to.
Zaran had been born with both legs formed wrongly. His left side was weak at the joints. His right was worse the muscles had developed incorrectly from the very beginning. He could move.
Over the years he had built his own way of getting around that looked, from a distance, almost controlled. But it was never without pain.
And the pain was something he had learned to carry quietly, folded up somewhere deep inside himself, since around the time he was seven years old.
Nobody who looked at his face would ever guess what his body dealt with daily.
He had his mother Queen Yemisi’s complexion deep, smooth, the kind of skin that catches light. His face was structured and clean, jaw firm, eyes dark and steady under heavy lashes.
His hair was woven back neatly against his head. He had on a white tracksuit that sat on him like it was made for exactly him, diamond-studded slippers, small studs in his ears, two silver rings on his right hand. A quiet tattoo on his left wrist.
Another one along the side of his neck. Both of them looked like they meant something private.
He moved through a room the way someone moves when they are always, always aware of how they are moving.
He was the kind of person a room noticed before he said anything.
Queen Yemisi had spent years years looking for something that would help him. She had gone to healers in far kingdoms, brought in foreign specialists, visited the river shrine more times than she could count.
She had spent money, spent energy, spent hope in every direction available to her.
The legs stayed the way they were. And every year, quietly, the condition became a little harder to manage.
Zaran never brought it up. Not to her. Not to anyone.
That afternoon, Nkem his personal aide, assigned to him since they were teenagers walked with him through the main compound back toward the princes’ wing. Nkem never grabbed his arm unless asked.
He had learned that lesson early. He just stayed close. Present. Ready if needed.
The domestic staff along the path bowed as they passed. Heads down, posture straight.
Zaran and Nkem turned the corner and disappeared from view.
The moment they were gone the bowing stopped.
“That boy.” Amaka turned to the others with her hand over her chest. “That boy is not from this earth. I refuse to believe it.”
“The way he carries himself.” Titi shook her head like she was in genuine pain about it. “Even with everything he still moves like he owns the floor. Where is the justice for the rest of us?”
“Crippled or not,” Bisi said, without a single ounce of shame, “I will collect that man. Somebody is going to be very, very lucky and it should be me. I said it.”
Before anyone could add anything else Mama Efe, the head of domestic staff, materialised from around the corner like she had been standing there the whole time.
She said absolutely nothing. She just looked at the three of them with the kind of tired, flat expression that communicated everything without a single word.
The three maids found very urgent tasks to attend to immediately.
Nkem had helped Zaran settle into the large armchair by the window in his study the one that faced the back pool directly, with a side table within easy reach.
He poured a glass of water without being asked, set it down, and reached into the cabinet drawer.
“Your medication, my prince.”
Zaran was chewing gum quietly. Looking out at the water.
“My prince, yesterday you also—””Will they fix the legs, Nkem?”Nkem stopped. Looked at the bottles in his hand. “They manage the…
“Fix. Will they fix them?”Nkem was quiet.
“Then I don’t want them.”
Nkem stood there a moment. Then carefully, like he was placing a card down in a game he knew he could win he said: “Queen Yemisi called me this morning. First thing. Before I’d even had water. She asked me personally if you’d taken them.”
Zaran turned from the window and looked at him.
Then he held out his hand.
Nkem put the tablets in his palm. Zaran swallowed them with water and said nothing.
“Your loyalty is a strange thing,” Zaran said after a while, settling back. “Everyone else around me just agrees with whatever I say. You actually push back. How come?”
“Because agreeing when you’re wrong doesn’t actually help you. Somebody has to be honest with you, my prince. Might as well be me.”
Zaran looked at him for a moment. “You may go.”
Nkem bowed and left quietly, pulling the door behind him.
The room settled into silence.Zaran looked out at the pool.The question that lived permanently somewhere behind everything else came forward the way it always did at quiet moments not loud, not dramatic.
Just steady and constant like a sound you eventually stop being able to ignore.
Why me? What did I do? What did any version of me do to end up in this body in this family?
He didn’t realise sleep had taken him until the nightmare pulled him down into it.
Same one. Always the same one. Dark and loud and full of a falling feeling and when he jerked back awake he was gripping the armrest with both hands and his breathing was all wrong.
He sat forward. Pushed his hair back. Waited.
Then he picked up his red phone and called Sena.
She answered on the third ring. “Zaran? Baby is it the nightmare?””Yes.” He kept his voice level.
“Did you drink the chamomile before you slept? I keep telling you—”
“I drank it. Sena.” He paused. Rearranged. “Can you come to the estate? I just got back and I just… I need someone to talk to.”
A pause.
Then from somewhere in the background of her call a sound. Low. Close. Not a TV. Not children. Not anything that had an innocent explanation when you listened to it carefully.
Zaran went completely still.
He had spent his whole life listening hard to the world because he couldn’t always navigate it by sight alone. He knew what different sounds meant. He knew this one.
“Sena.”
“Yes I’m here, sorry—”
“What is that sound?”
“What oh, that’s just the fan, it started making this noise, I’ve been meaning to—”
The sound again. Closer this time. More specific.
“Can you come?” He asked it one more time. Quietly. Giving her the chance.
“Tomorrow Zaran, I promise. First thing in the morning. Tonight is just complicated, there’s a lot’
“Okay.” He said it flat. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight baby, I love.
He ended the call before she finished.
He set the phone on the side table and looked at it for a long moment. Then he exhaled long, slow and pushed himself up to standing.
He needed air. Real air, outside, away from walls.
He made his way through the princes’ wing toward the back corridor that led to the rear gardens. It was the route he preferred fewer people, no steps, ground level all the way out.
What he didn’t know was that Kofi had been watching him from the corridor above since he left the study.
Kofi came down the side passage and appeared at the far end of the corridor casual, hands in his pockets, like he just happened to be heading the same direction.
“Zaran.”
Zaran slowed. “Kofi.”
“Where are you going?”
“Gardens.”
Kofi nodded, fell into step beside him. For a moment it was almost normal two brothers walking the same corridor. Kofi even held the heavy side door open when they got to it, let Zaran pass through first, followed behind him.
The back garden path was uneven in one section old paving stones that had shifted over time, one of them raised at the edge just slightly. The estate groundskeepers had been asked to fix it twice.
It hadn’t been done yet.
Zaran knew about it. He always stepped around it carefully.What he didn’t account for was Kofi stepping in close on his right side at exactly that moment close enough to disrupt his balance and saying something in a low voice that made Zaran turn his head just slightly to hear
His right foot caught the raised stone.
He went down hard. No railing to grab. No warning. Just the ground coming up fast and the crack of his shoulder hitting the paving stones first, then his head catching the edge of the garden step.
He lay there for a moment not moving.
Kofi looked down at him. Straightened his collar. Then turned and walked back inside through the side door pulling it shut behind him with a quiet, careful click.
Like he had simply stepped out for some air and was now heading back in.
The garden was silent.
Bl00d began to move slowly from the cut near Zaran’s temple, finding its way along the side of his face and dripping onto the old pale stone beneath him.
