The Kingdom of Should
Hungarian-Style therapeutic folktale exploring identity, duty, authenticity, and the quiet cost of living according to “should” rather than one’s own inner truth.
Once upon a time, in a well-kept kingdom nestled between rolling hills and thick, whispering forests, there lived a prince. He was the firstborn son of a noble family, and from the moment of his birth, everyone knew who he would become. He would lead, protect, honour the traditions of his people, and carry forth the legacy that had been carved into stone by those who came before him.
The prince did everything right. He married a kind woman from a respected family. He built a grand house filled with laughter and the cries of many children. He worked hard and made his parents proud. His name was known throughout the land — not just as a man, but as a symbol of continuity, of reliability, of strength.
But what no one knew — not his father, his mother, his brothers, his wife, or his children — was that the prince was a prisoner in his own fortress. The walls were high and gilded, the gates well-guarded, not by soldiers, but by dragons. Invisible ones. Fierce ones, born from duty, fear, guilt, shame, and legacy. He didn’t even know they were there at first.
Not all the dragons were his.
Some were ancient creatures of the Kingdom of Should — sentinels of tradition and law. They did not guard his heart, but the rules of the realm. They had names like Protocol, Policy, and Report. They didn’t just breathe fire — they filed it, archived it, and delivered it with stamped authority.
He hadn’t noticed either kind at first. That’s the trouble with dragons — you often don’t see them until they block your path.
One day, while the dragons were sleeping, the prince quietly snuck out of the fortress. Not to escape — it is hard to escape from a prison no one believes is a prison — but just to taste the air outside. He saddled his horse and rode deep into the messy forest. The kind of forest that no one cleaned or named. The kind that grew in wild directions and hummed with stories.
There, in a clearing filled with fern and birdsong, he met a girl. She was not a princess. She laughed too loudly and cried too easily. Her hands were stained with earth, and her eyes held something the prince had never seen before — something that frightened and stirred him.
“Why do you stare at me like that?” she asked.
The prince blinked. “I… saw my own face in your eyes,” he whispered.
“Then maybe you have not been looking in the right mirrors,” the girl said with a soft, crooked smile.
And when she spoke, he heard his true voice for the first time. Not the careful words he’d been taught to say, but the raw, unguarded hum of his soul.
He stayed a while, longer than he meant to. They didn’t talk much after that. They didn’t need to.
The prince went home. He tried to forget.
But what the prince didn’t yet know was that suppression has a shelf life.
At first, he returned to the fortress and tried to carry on. The dragons stirred again and resumed their watch. The fortress gates closed behind him. The voices of the forest — hers, and his own — faded into the background.
And yet… not entirely.
The girl’s eyes kept appearing in his dreams. Her voice rang in moments of silence. And the mirror — the one that showed his true face — refused to leave him. Suppression is useful, but not eternal. It can bury a truth for a season, but not forever.
Eventually, something inside him began to ache. Not loudly. Just steadily. As if a part of him had begun to rot under the weight of a neat life.
One evening, he whispered to himself, “Why does everything feel hollow, even when it is full?”
No one answered. Except his own long-stretched silence.
He tried to get stronger first. “One day,” he told himself. “When I’m ready, I’ll go back. When I am strong enough to face the dragons.”
But the dragons had grown fatter in his silence. When he tried to pass them, they growled and snapped.
And it wasn’t just the ones he’d raised inside.
The Kingdom’s dragons were still awake — sharp-eyed and coiled at the edge of the forest.
He had once bent the rules and paid dearly for it. Now, to even go near the path again would be to risk another fire. Not of the heart — but of institutional wrath.
And so he looked away again.
But longing is a quiet fire. And grief is a stubborn teacher.
Years passed. The people kept celebrating him. His family stayed proud. His children thrived. But deep down, the void remained. The weight of the split life became harder to carry.
Finally, the prince decided to confront the dragons. One by one.
He didn’t slay them. He listened to them.
“You are weak,” said one.
“I am tired,” said the prince, “but I’m still here.”
“You’ll lose everything,” said another.
“I already lost myself,” he replied.
He wept in front of them. He spoke the truths they were guarding — shame, guilt, fear, love. One dragon softened and let him pass. Another turned into smoke. Another simply stepped aside when he finally stopped running.
And then — at last — the fortress gates opened, not with a roar, but with a breath.
The prince rode back to the messy forest. To where he last saw his real face and heard his real voice.
He searched for three days and three nights, until he found the girl again.
She was not as she had been. Her hair had silver strands now. She still laughed loudly and cried shamelessly — but there was something deeper in her eyes.
Around her danced small children — her own — pulling at her skirt. And nearby, a man — her husband — was chopping wood for the fire.
The prince said nothing at first. He only looked into her eyes, and saw once more the truth.
“I hoped you would come,” she said softly, brushing a child’s hair from their face. “But I also knew you might not.”
“I didn’t come to take anything,” the prince said. “I just needed to know it was real.”
“It was,” she replied. “It is.”
He bowed his head.
And that was enough. He didn’t need to possess anything. He only needed to know it had been real.
He rode home again, back to his fortress. But this time, he did not work on strengthening the walls of his inherited fortress.
Instead, he built a garden around it. A vast, wild, beautiful garden.
With roses. And olive trees. And a quiet path that led to a small clearing, where the wind sounded like a woman’s laughter.
It was the first thing he had ever built for himself — not as someone’s son, someone’s husband, or someone’s brother or father. But as himself.
And his heart, for the first time in his life, felt lighter than a feather.
Aliz Ovlachi - Clinical Psychologist & Author 