The Princes of Starryholt

Etho, Prince of Edrea and Duke of Ebonfang, is set to marry the prince of Ostal, Bdubs. They don't know each other yet, but they will. And in between political ploys, a curse and the attempt to liberate the lands of Bdubs' ancestors, they fall in love.
Today, only legends and fairytales of them are left. But once upon a time, they were real people, and their love prevailed all hardships.
This is a 80k royal ethubs au that has its origins in Last Life and the snow fort.

Read it here


Everything below the following picture, of course, contains spoilers for The Princes of Starryholt

The beginnings

The first time I mentioned, or even considered, writing Starryholt was on November 16, 2021, the day of the Last Life Finale. Quote:
"Last Life medieval fantasy au ; Maybe as a combination with third life, where crastle prince bdubs and high knight etho (depending on where you put his alliances in 3rd life, I'd go with the mountain people/ren and martyn) become the Kings of the snow kingdom. The marry bc of politics to unite the crastle and mountain people/renchanting folks to take the North and bdubs and etho are isntalled as the lords/Kings of the North"

The Prologue and the first few sentences of the first chapter were decided upon on November 17. The original draft went "Before Etho became a legend, he was just some dude". I held onto that first sentence through like four different drafts before I settled on the final intro.

If you are interest in reading the very first draft of the prologue and the very first chapter, you can find that here!
What followed was almost an entire year of worldbuilding, of starting with a few chapters, then scrapping them again. Cleo was going to have a bigger role, there was going to be more court intrigue, the parents were going to play a bigger role. Etho and Bdubs were going to ahve met as children, when Etho was still suffering from an active Curse, which was the reason why Edrea and Ostal had their falling out in the first place - because Etho almost infected Bdubs on accident.
After the year, I sat down for NaNoWriMo 2022 to write out the first full draft, which totalled at 53k words by November 30th.
THEN followed a good four months where I edited the shit out of Starryholt and the 83k resulting words is now what you can read on Ao3.

Things that changed

Originally, it was more of a colonizing story - it was supposed to be Etho and Bdubs being sent to The North(TM), where "rebels" (the native folks, in this case the Southlanders surrounding Grian) that Etho and Bdubs were supposed to go to war with.
I'm sure you'll figure out why I didn't want to go through with that story, and instead went a different path, where Etho was supposed to almost gets assassinated, because he really only was married off to Bdubs to get him out of the way, which did not work as intended. I hadn't yet decided if this assassination attempt would be done by Edrea or by Ostal. Of course, he would survive it, but it would either force him and Bdubs to flee, or move against their home countries. In the end, though, I settled on the oppressed Starryholt as Bdubs' ancestors' home.

For the first draft, I had planned on including more magic. I described it at first as a medieval fantasy AU, and planned on having at least magic (Scar's main motivation, for example, was to steal some rare magic tomes from the Starryholt court), I was going to add the watchers as a cult, or a strange guild like the faceless assassins from GoT. Even a more supernatural way of explaining The Curse. Something with a similar feeling to Werewolves, maybe, but in the end, I trashed almost all magic in favour of flower language.

The Stories that never were

Moss, as you might have guessed due to Bdubs' entire theme for a while, has become Starryholt, and the species names remained as chapter titles.

Trees was going to be the treebark companion story, where I planned on writing about the doomed story of Crown Prince Ren and his (forbidden) beloved squire Martyn, including the whole stabbing and betrayal thing that happens in the latter chapters of Starryholt. In contrast to Starryholt, it was not going to have a happy ending. BUT Ren and Etho were supposed to be way closer than they ended up as, with Ren trying to be the best wingman to Etho there is, even while completely failing to notice that Etho and Bdubs are already romantically involved and not just politically married to each other. Completely with a "I'm going to tell him" - "Don't you dare" exchange between Bdubs and Etho. It was going to mostly expand on the only briefly touched upon kingdom of Edrea, which we only really see at the very beginning and the very end of Starryholt, and that we, really, know barely anything about, just because so much of Etho's memory of the place is just drenched in trauma.

Flowers was going to be the story of Starryholt told through the perspective of Grian. This was based mostly on the fact that I enjoy making Grian an actually really dangerous man behind a gremlin mask, and partly because he was going to be the cause for any Ethubs relationship drama that could possibly happen. He was supposed to be somewhat involved with Mumbo, and later getting also involved with Scar in their attempt to overthrow the Ostali government, and he was supposed to try and split Ethubs apart at every opportunity. In the beginning, he was already part of the court of Starryholt, and only later decided to identify as a problem, after Bdubs and Etho came there.