Her father spoke with gentleness, which Vera knew meant everything was about to change.
Valor Vanilla
A story about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Book Two · after Chivalry & Chocolate
The spare
princess
Princess Vera of the Noble House of Amaranthine spent twenty‑five years being someone else convincingly — a nineteen‑pound wig of ceremony, a rehearsed smile, an understudy performance worthy of the realm’s finest theatre.
Then the king woke. The costume came off. And freedom arrived with nothing official to be.
“Of course, Your… Fatherness.” The word landed with all the sleek elegance of a boot in custard.
— Chapter One
The Prophecy of Tending · read aloud on the road
Four fires wait in the fading lands
Where the unfading name has been forgot
Come, keeper of the hollow crest
Bring only what the proud have not
Shell that remembers gathered heat
Grain that rises after stone
Crystal sweetened dark and deep
Meadow gold by patience grown
An ingredient list with the proportions left out. Four kingdoms of dragons, each holding one thing a runaway princess would need — and none of them knowing it.
Stanza IILedgenroostegg
Shell that remembers
gathered heat
A kingdom of copper‑scaled Ledgenest Dragons whose purple nestfire warms without ever consuming — the world’s most patient ovens, brooding on nests the way other dragons brood on gold. Eggs here are kept warm by gathering close, by wanting to.
Sit still. Be still. The tender waits
For hands that hold and not the throne…
What breaks will bind what falls apart;
Don’t flinch. The crack is not the blade.
hold anywhere — keep it warm
Stanza IIIOvengrain Flatsflour
Grain that rises
after stone
The great mill has ground to a halt, and the cleverest dragons in the valley cannot fix it — because the simplest stone knows what they don’t: that play outlasts the cleverest guise.
Sift what remains through open hands.
Too much will make the whole thing break.
Fold gently what the field has grown;
Be light, or you will never bake.
move — the field answers
Stanza IVThe Amber Reachessugar
Crystal sweetened
dark and deep
Masked dragons in crystal galleries, where a stray sunbeam counts as vandalism and every surface performs. But the amber mirror shows what the masks are for — that gilded hunger is yours to forgive.
Measure twice — abundance ruins.
What dazzles is not always pure.
The grain that gleams must meet its match,
And what is rich must learn to endure.
your light bends in the lattice
Stanza VThe Velvet Downsbutter
Meadow gold
by patience grown
Dragons who sleep on their hoard like any dragon should — except the hoard is a patch of warm sun. Nobody hurries. Nobody seizes. The churning does not end with cream, and what yields is stronger than what fights.
Soft patience pressed and pressed again —
What yields is stronger than what fights.
Meet the grain before the fire;
Together, face the heat. It rights.
stir it — slowly
A fifth ingredient sleeps plain beneath the tongue
A small bright thing the grand forgot
The Dragon Witch to Azumel tends the doubt
And brews the strangered thing its own
press and hold — don’t flinch
The fifth ingredient
was never in a kingdom.
Egg, flour, sugar, butter — and the one everyone overlooks. The dismissed, essential, binding agent. The spare. Vanilla.
the Dragon Witch was Vera all along
What binds the broken to the whole
Was sleeping underneath the stone
One drop of what was always there
Will make the strangered thing your own
Not a riddle solved. A meal earned.
Valor & Vanilla
a cozy gaslamp fantasy, a dragon’s grief,
and seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary
every verse is from the book