You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for March 4, 2009.

On most days, Shams does not notice it: the duties of a Crown Prince coupled together with being the Favorite Child and Only Son keep him pretty much fully occupied, aware of little else beyond what is Proper and What Must Be Done. In these moments, Taj is his shadow – the presence at his shoulder, the autonomous blade, the dark wolf walking at his heels. Overall, someone who makes it only too easy to be ignored, someone who has schooled himself in the art of only appearing when he is needed.

It is always and ever a painful study for Shams, then, when he is caught between one duty and the next and finds himself with nothing else to do beyond look up and into Taj's eyes. To stare pure, raw devotion right in the face; to see the weight of love and honor and duty bear down on shoulders as thin as his own. He holds the thread of Taj's life between his two fingers: through a debt of blood, he now commands someone who has forced his way in, declared himself loyal beyond all conventional ideas of loyalty, someone who has decided to exists for the sole purpose of hanging on his every word. He has come to see that for Shams, there is no kingdom, no master: only his Prince, for whom he is willing to die several hundred deaths for.

On demon days and on the rare occasion that it hits him while he sits beneath the pomegranate trees with a sleeping Taj's head pillowed on his lip, Shams wonders if it would be easier, somehow, on the both of them, if he were to take the knife sheathed at Taj's back and slit his retainer's throat himself. "Easy", however, is not for princes. "Easy" is not the word best associated with love.

So he decides, as he always does, to carry the weight of one more life – one somehow infinitely more precious and fragile than all the others – for as long as he has to.