"In the end, my sister had to help me behead the mice," Prince Nathaniel said and sighed, remembering Aurelia's frantic screams. "They had drunk the blood of their fellow kind, and they just… kept on screaming, trying to squeeze through the bars to get to me. If not for my sister, I might not even be here."
Aurelia wasn't scared of the bloody mice, but she was terrified that her brother could have been bitten or hurt. Since their mother had passed away, Aurelia had grown increasingly overprotective of him, especially after they realized that his magical abilities had not grown stronger with time.
Back then, he had foolishly put the mice in his bedroom, with a net to cover the top of their enclosure. He had assumed that the experiment had failed when no mice showed signs of anything out of the ordinary.
Nathaniel even harbored the thought that he might keep the barn mice as pets. They were cute.