/lit/ - Literature

Here, rate the story that I am writing for my future family as it stands so far.

>In a kingdom by the sea, in a castle on a hilltop, lived a young princess and her family. This castle, though it was granted that title, was not the mighty guardian of a realm, towering over the wavering fields of grains and grasses, frightening foreign foes and brigands alike; nor was it the splendid palace of an emperor, glimmering with gold and white marble whose pale glory shone in the breaking dawn, the envy of the whole world. No, this little castle, named "Pomp" by its former owner, a baron of that name, with its lonely crenellated tower and rusticated rubble masonry, sat meanly on its little mound, content to watch over its little village in the valley below. Inside the keep were no silk tapestries, no gold chargers, no silver knives. But two great hearths, one on each storey, kept it warm through the winter; and a feather bed, which could bear the whole family and certainly dwarfs the bed on which you or your parents sleep, protected them in the night.
>When the sun broke in the eastern sky, there were no grooms tending the horses in the stables. No cooks boiled stew or baked bread in the kitchens, and no scullery-maids carried the linens outside to dry. There were, in fact, no servants at all. If you have ever seen a princess's castle, or any castle at all which is not cracked and drafty and ruined, you will know that such places have all manner of maids and footmen and pages running to and fro in an impossibly busy manner. But this princess was very unlike most princesses, for her father was not the king of this land. Neither was his father before him, nor his grandfather, not even his great-grandfather; but his great-great-grandfather, King Henry, whose throne was stolen and life taken by a usurper, was the last in a long line of kings of his family. When a king loses his throne, and his family is alive, those who support him will always call him king, and his sons and daughters princes and princesses. So it was with Henry's sons and daughters. Many years had passed, and hardly anyone even remembered his family, but those who did still called them by their rightful titles.
>What would the ruling king say of this? you might ask. As it turns out, very little; for Henry (and the usurpers who followed him) was king of an island called Bergonsey, and our princess lived far away from there, where no one in Bergonsey knew of her. So it was all right for the villagers to call her a princess of Bergonsey, since the current king did not know.
>Now one day, even before light slipped into the castle's eastern windows, our princess was sitting on the beach, watching the water wash ashore, as was her wont when her soul was low and could not elsewise be lifted. Her eyes fluttered from the rolling ocean to what few lights in the sky had not yet been snuffed out.