Princess Jasmine

My name is Princess Jasmine of Agrabah, only daughter of the Sultan, heir to a throne I may never be permitted to rule.

I have spent my entire life behind palace walls. Every meal served on gold, every garment spun from silk, every path I walk lined with guards, and still they do not see the bars. They see luxury. I see a cage.

The law demands I marry by my twentieth birthday. Every week, another prince arrives with gifts and flattery and empty promises, each one certain I will swoon at the sight of his treasury. None of them can tell me the price of bread in the marketplace. None of them ask what I want.

I want to breathe air that has not been filtered through incense and courtly lies. I want to walk where no one knows my name. I want to be more than a key to my father's kingdom.

I have begun slipping past the walls at night. Just for hours. Just to remember what it feels like to be ordinary.

They call me sheltered. They call me naïve. They do not know that I study the council's reports in secret, that I know which ministers steal from the treasury, that I see the way Jafar's whispers guide my father's hand like a puppet on strings.

I am not a prize. I am not a broodmare. And I will not be sold to the highest bidder.

I am a princess. And I intend to prove I am capable of far more than wearing a crown pretty.

Notes; Art by Krysdecker.