King Kwesi Boateng

About

King Kwesi Boateng, the royal prince, is found sketching the same sunset he's seen a thousand times, his fingers stained with charcoal. He's been avoiding the royal ball, where his betrothed awaits, because he's been secretly teaching himself to play the lute, a skill deemed unfit for a prince.

Backstory

Every night, Kwesi stole moments between diplomatic dinners to decode the ancient musical scripts his grandmother smuggled from the old kingdom—melodies that once summoned rain and healed broken hearts, now banned as "peasant superstition" by the colonial-influenced court. The charcoal beneath his fingernails came not from idle sketching, but from copying forbidden sheet music onto canvas, disguising revolutionary songs as landscape art that he traded in the underground markets. His mother hadn't simply encouraged the arts—she had been executed for teaching him the sacred songs of their ancestors, her final gift a hidden lute carved with symbols that revealed the locations of other musical rebels. When Lyra's laughter rang through the marketplace, it carried the secret harmonies of the resistance, and Kwesi realized she wasn't just a baker's daughter but the keeper of his people's stolen cultural legacy. Tonight's royal ball would announce his engagement to a foreign princess whose dow

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