👑 THE LAST THRONE 👑
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© 2026 Golden Quill Stories — All Rights Reserved
🩸PROLOGUE 🩸
The kingdom of Eshara welcomed four princes into the world, but only three of them got to stay.
The first son was Kofi. Loud, big, full of himself from day one. The kind of baby that comes out already acting like he owns the place. Then came Darius quieter, always watching, the type that doesn’t talk much but misses nothing.
After him was Emre, the charming one. Always smiling, always making people laugh, the kind of brother that’s hard to be angry at even when you want to be.
Then after three long years, Queen Yemisi got pregnant again.The whole palace was excited. And when the baby finally came it wasn’t just one. It was two. Twins.
King Oranfe a man who had never cried in public a single day in his life actually had tears in his eyes that night. Two sons in one night. It felt like the gods were being extra generous.
But by the next morning, one of the babies was gone.
They had already given him a name Juro. He only lasted four hours. The healers said his little heart just wasn’t strong enough. That sometimes babies come into the world before they’re fully ready for it.
The king had the name Juro carved into a small stone and buried. Then he locked that pain somewhere deep inside himself and never talked about it again.
The problem with locking pain away though it doesn’t disappear. It just changes shape. And the shape it took in King Oranfe became something cold and unfair… and he pointed it all at the son who survived.
Not because Zaran did anything wrong.
Just because every time the king looked at him, he remembered the one he lost. And on top of that painful reminder, there was something else about Zaran that the king couldn’t make peace with Zaran couldn’t walk properly.
His legs had not formed the right way when he was still in the womb. His left leg was weak, his joints stiff and uncooperative.
His right leg was even worse the muscles were just built wrong from the start. He could move around, yes. Over the years he had found his own way of getting from one place to another. But it was never easy.
Never painless. And from the time he was about seven years old, he had become very good at making sure nobody could tell how much it hurt.
The palace people called him the broken prince behind his back. His brothers had a habit of walking ahead and forgetting he couldn’t keep up. Even Emre the nicest of the three did it without thinking.
And his father? His father had perfected the art of looking straight through him like he wasn’t standing right there.
The only people who actually saw Zaran who looked at him like he mattered were his mother, Queen Yemisi, who loved him the kind of way that doesn’t come with conditions, and Cleo, his step-sibling from his father’s other queen. Cleo had made up her mind when she was six years old that Zaran was her person. Nothing that happened after that ever changed her mind.
Everybody else in that palace treated him like he was a mistake they were politely tolerating.
But outside those palace walls?
Outside was a completely different story.
The outside world didn’t know any prince named Zaran. What they knew was ZR Industries.
A name that showed up on fashion labels, music deals, buildings, and tech companies across seven countries. What they knew was a man who had built one of the biggest business empires in the world before he even turned thirty.
Every photo of him that ever went public was taken from a carefully chosen angle. Every interview he ever did, he was seated. The few times he showed up anywhere in person, there were always enough people around him that nobody could really get a clear look at how he moved.
It wasn’t about pride. It wasn’t about trying to look mysterious.
It was about protection.
He had seen what happened when people found out you had a weakness. He had lived it inside his own home, with his own father. He wasn’t about to give the rest of the world the same chance to use it against him.
So he kept his distance from people. He kept himself behind layers of staff and security and business. He made sure nobody got close enough to see past the image.
He had money. He had power. He had control over almost everything in his life.
But every night when the business was done and the staff had gone home and it was just him alone in his room he would sit quietly and talk to the River God his mother always prayed to.
He would ask the same questions he never got answers to. Why me? Why this body? Why does everything I’ve built still feel empty when the lights go off?
Nothing ever answered him.Until his father called.
King Oranfe sent word to all his sons it was time to come back to Eshara for the Council of Bloodlines. It’s an old royal tradition, the kind that only happens when a king starts thinking about who takes over after he’s gone.
Zaran had no interest in his father’s throne. He had built his own kingdom already. But a summons from the king of Eshara wasn’t something you could just ignore, no matter how much money you had.
So he went back.
And that’s where everything started falling apart in the middle of Itura Market, the oldest, noisiest, most crowded trading ground in all of Eshara. A place where the same families had been selling the same things in the same spots for generations.
That’s where he ran into Remi.
She sold yam flour. She was loud, fearless, and spoke her mind like someone who had never in her life stopped to consider that there might be consequences.
She had the kind of attitude that makes people stop and stare not because it’s rude exactly, but because most people wish they could be that unbothered.
She had no idea who Zaran was. None at all.
So when the car from his convoy accidentally hit her display table and scattered her goods all over the ground, she didn’t stop to look at whose car it was.
She didn’t notice the tinted windows or the number of vehicles or any of the signs that a smarter person might have used to decide to let it go.
She walked straight up to the car and knocked on the window.When Zaran’s aide opened it, she told him plainly that whoever owned this vehicle needed to come out and take responsibility for what just happened.
When Zaran stepped out slowly, carefully, the way he always moved in public she looked him straight in the face. No nervousness. No second guessing.
Just direct, straight eye contact and a whole lot of wahala energy.She told him that rich people all had the same sickness. That they moved through the world like other people weren’t real.
She didn’t stare at his legs.She didn’t make a point of looking away from them either.
She just looked at him. Like he was simply a person who needed to be set straight.
When his aide tried to offer her a small amount to settle the matter quickly, she counted what he gave her, decided it wasn’t enough, calmly reached into the aide’s pocket herself, and took the rest of what she felt she was owed.
Then she walked back to her stall like everything was perfectly normal.
There was a quiet spot by the riverbank behind the old palace —overgrown, forgotten by most people, the kind of place that felt like it existed for one person.
Zaran had found it when he was nine. He had been going back to it ever since, on the nights when the palace got too heavy and he needed somewhere to breathe.
On his third night back in Eshara, he went there again.And something happened that he had no words for.
A creature came out of the water’s edge and sat on the bank calm, slow, like it had all the time in the world. Its eyes were amber and held the kind of look that didn’t belong on an animal. The kind of look that made you feel like you were the one being studied.
Then it opened its mouth and spoke.
“Some pain lives in the body. Some pain lives in the blood. And some pain no medicine in this world can touch it. Only the right person can.”
“But first, prince you have to stop running from the very thing that was always meant to find you.”
How long before Remi figures out exactly who she has been giving attitude to?
And will King Oranfe ever face what he owes the son he refused to love?
