In the kingdom of Mirabel, love was, in fact, a performance art. A bit like ballet, or mime but even more gut-heavingly laced with cloying sentimentality and, unhappily, just as revolting.

Every proposal was a spectacle: fireworks over crystal lakes, skywriters etching vows into the clouds, orchestras playing on floating platforms. So when Prince Calen decided to propose to Lara, the inventor’s daughter, he knew he had to do the impossible and create a proposal that outshone every other in a land addicted to grandeur. The idiot.

He started with the moon.

For three years, he commissioned astronomers, magicians, and engineers to build a fleet of silver airships. Each was equipped with mirrors so vast and bright they could catch moonlight and bend it. On the night of the proposal, as Lara stood on her balcony overlooking the capital, the fleet rose silently into the sky. The mirrors turned, and the moon’s light gathered into a single radiant beam that spelled her name: LARA, across the heavens.

She laughed, thinking it was a trick. “He’s trying too hard again,” she muttered, smiling.

Then the streets below came alive. Thousands of dancers, villagers, nobles, even guards, moved as one, forming swirling patterns of various loving icons - hearts, fluffy bunnies, bells and horse-shoe shaped trinkets, apparently visible from space according to the local news. The choreography rippled like a living mosaic: her favourite inventions, the gear-shaped that was supposed to work like a compass but was more like a wind-up mouse, the constellations she had charted in an exercise book. Every image formed and vanished with perfect timing, each one accompanied by the rhythmic beating of drums that echoed her heartbeat.

Lara leaned over the balcony rail, spellbound.

Then came the sky’s turn.

The airships opened the show, releasing swarms of glowing paper lanterns. Each carried a word, written by someone Calen had asked to describe what love meant. The lanterns rose, filling the night with drifting poetry, thousands of tiny lights floating upward until they clustered into the shape of a ring around the moon.

The city erupted in cheers. The lanterns began to spin, and a single beam of light shot down, landing in the courtyard below her window. Calen stood in its centre, wearing a suit woven from what was supposed to look like starlight, but was, in truth, a bit more like an advert for Christmas tree lights.

He raised his hand, and the entire city fell silent. The light around him dimmed. The airships paused mid-drone. The dancers froze.

“Lara,” he said, voice steady but soft, carrying through the still air, “you once told me that love isn’t about being the brightest light in the sky, it’s about being the one that never goes out. So tonight, I promise to be that light. Even if the moon forgets to rise, even if the stars go dark.”

He snapped his fingers, and the city’s lights extinguished, every lantern, every torch, every candle. For one heartbeat, all of Mirabel vanished into darkness.

Then a single light flared: a small, glowing ring in his hand.

It wasn’t made of gold or gemstone, but of pure, gentle gloworm’s rear-ends formed into a magnificent ring of light, the same glow she’d once used to power her first invention, the mechanical glower (it didn’t catch on).

Lara gasped. She leapt from the balcony, landing on a billowing net of starlight that carried her gently down to him.

“Yes,” she said, before he could even ask.

And for once in Mirabel’s history, the kingdom didn’t cheer. They just watched, breathless, as the two lights, his and hers, merged into one.