As the years rolled by, the young Prince took it upon himself to create his perfect kingdom.  He would dismiss a soldier with even the slightest hunch and draw out his sword if he even spotted a sentry rubbing his eye.  He frowned at the happy river songs of his kingdom and the playful laziness that comes at the end of a hard day's work.  A perfect kingdom could only come by constantly labouring towards perfection.  And wasn't that what being human was all about?

Time whirled by and the Prince's kingdom grew quieter but his fault-finding did not decrease.  And one morning, many years later, as the Prince grumbled about in his chamber, a movement at the door made him look up.  Looking golden in the sunlight stood a little child wearing a flower-splashed tunic that looked strange to the Prince for he had seen no garb like it in his kingdom.  Beneath her folded hands, she clutched a faded yellow book.

 Shocked at this intrusion, the Prince rushed at her to throw her out.

"You couldn't touch me even if you wanted to.  I don't belong to your world," said the girl calmly.  "You are a miserable prince who lives here, inside this book, but you aren't fit to be a Prince either here or anywhere else."
"GIRL!  I will have you ROT in my dungeons and THROWN before my soldiers to be stoned!"

The child looked at him sadly with her deep wise eyes.  "What people do you talk of O Prince?  How many years has it been since you stepped out to look into your kingdom?  Here, come with me..."

There was something so pure and brave in this little child that for the first time in his life the Prince followed another's words unquestioningly.  She led him into the ramparts and the Prince stepped back horrified.  His pride, his kingdom, was just a barren country devoid of life.  She took him through the silent corridors of his castle, from one empty chamber to another.
"Where is everyone?" he asked.

"Gone."

"Where?"

"A place where being happy is not considered an imperfection, where people can make mistakes knowing that that is the only way they can reach for the stars."

"And my parents?"

"Why...Prince...they've long died."

The Prince slumped onto the stone castle floor.  "Why is everything so cold…"

"That's because of your heart," said the girl matter-of-factly.  She turned the pages of her book filled with his pictures.

"You are not a bad or evil man, O Prince; you have merely forgotten what it means to live.  See, what it says here: '…the Prince had forgotten what it was to love and laugh for he had lost himself in righting the follies that come from being human.  In his quest for perfection, he mocked the innocent excitement of children at the sight of a rainbow, mocked his mother's joy at a bird on her window-sill, mocked his brothers at the jokes they shared. 

That day in the Silence of the castle and in the greater Silence of his life, the Prince warmed his heart with tears of regret.  "What have I done?  I tried to create the perfect kingdom, and instead I succeeded in creating only perfect loneliness for myself."

"You know Prince," said the girl calmly, "You are lucky you exist only in this book and are not from my world where people hardly get a second chance to live their lives they wished they had lived or ought to have lived.  But  you can retrace the story of your life. '’

She turned to where the pages were inkless and white.  "All you have to do is rewrite the first half of this book backwards, word for word.  Where you have hurt people and done wrong, put in kind actions and kind words.  Only remember that all throughout every sentence has to read backwards."

The girl left and the Prince quickly sat down with his quill, inkpot and the book.  Very carefully he started to fill up the pages with sentences that read from right to left.  But when he had to rewrite his stone-hearted actions with kind words it took him days together for he knew none and had no one to ask and he had to search through the book to look for them.  But the Prince didn't falter.  With every page he rewrote, the land coloured itself with grains and streams.  He heard faint happy voices returning through time.  Within a few months he saw glimpses of his brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, the Old King and Queen within the castle walls.

It took him a year to rewrite the story of his life.  But when he did, the castle filled with fresh new joy and laughter.  And when one night the Old King and Queen kissed him good-night, they swore they had never seen a braver or more loving man in all this world.