The Last Prince of Java

 

Chapter 1: Blood and Prophecy

In the shadow-draped palaces of old Java, where the air hung thick as funeral shrouds and whispers carried the weight of ancient curses, there lived a boy who would become a king—and die forgotten in a place so far from home that even the monsoon winds couldn’t find him.

His name was Raden Mas Garendi, and if you’d seen him in those last golden days before everything went to hell, you might have thought he looked like any other young prince. But you’d have been wrong, dead wrong, because this kid carried something in his eyes that made grown men look away and mothers pull their children a little closer. It wasn’t cruelty—no sir, not that. It was knowing. The kind of terrible knowing that comes to those who are marked by history’s bloody finger.

You see, Garendi was born into a world where royal blood was both blessing and curse, where every sunrise might bring a dagger in the dark or poison in the wine. His grandfather, Amangkurat III, sat on the throne of Mataram like a spider in its web, and everyone—everyone—knew that in palaces like these, family trees had a way of being pruned with swords.

The old primbon—that’s the Javanese almanac, for those of you who don’t know from ancient prophecies and blood-soaked predictions—had whispered that Prince Tepasana would father five children. Five souls, each destined to dance their part in the great cosmic joke that was Javanese royalty. There was Raden Wiratmaja, the eldest, who carried himself like he already had the weight of a crown on his shoulders. Then came the daughters, married off to princes and lords like pawns in a chess game played by kings and devils.

But it was the youngest—our boy Garendi—who made the old fortune-tellers shake their heads and mutter prayers under their breath. Because sometimes, just sometimes, the youngest son is the one who changes everything. And change, as any fool knows, usually comes swimming in blood.

Chapter 2: The Crescent Moon and Other Omens

They said he was beautiful, this last prince of a dying line. Beautiful in that dangerous way that makes empires fall and good men forget their prayers. The court chroniclers—those nervous little scribes who wrote history while trying not to become part of it—described his noble bearing, his kindness, the way his grandfather looked at him like he was seeing a ghost from better times.

“His youthful charm was likened to a crescent moon seducing the night,” they wrote, and if that doesn’t give you the shivers, then you don’t know much about omens. Because crescent moons in stories like this? They’re never just about beauty. They’re about things that wax and wane, about cycles that end in darkness, about seduction that leads to damnation.

The boy had intelligence, sure enough, and a heart big enough to hold all the sorrows that were coming his way. People looked into his eyes and felt something stir in their chests—hope, maybe, or recognition of something they’d lost long ago. He had that gift, that terrible gift of making people believe that tomorrow might be different from yesterday.

But in the Mataram court, hope was just another word for target practice.

Chapter 3: The Fall of the House of Tepasana

Before Garendi could celebrate his twentieth birthday—hell, before he could even figure out what kind of man he wanted to become—the palace intrigue came calling like a bill collector from hell. They whispered that his father, Prince Tepasana, was plotting against Pakubuwana I. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter a damn. In royal courts, accusations have a way of becoming facts faster than you can say “off with his head.”

The palace guard came at night, because that’s when they always come. That’s when the real monsters do their work, under cover of darkness while decent people sleep and dream of better days. Prince Tepasana never saw the sunrise again, and suddenly young Garendi found himself running for his life through forests that seemed to whisper his name.

His uncle Wiramenggala grabbed him by the scruff and hauled him north, across Mount Kemukus toward the remote lands of Grobogan. They traveled like ghosts, these royal refugees, following paths known only to smugglers and madmen. The mountain seemed to watch them as they climbed, and more than once Garendi felt eyes on his back—not human eyes, but something older, something that remembered when kings were just men with sharp sticks and bigger dreams.

In Grobogan, they found salvation in the most unlikely place: the house of Tan He Tik, a Chinese merchant whose family had learned long ago that survival meant choosing your friends carefully and your enemies even more carefully. When He Tik looked at this broken prince with his haunted eyes and royal bearing, he saw something that made him nod slowly and open his doors.

“I will protect this boy,” he said, and perhaps he sensed even then that he was signing his own death warrant. Because protection, in times like these, is just another word for rebellion.

Chapter 4: The Golden King

April 6th, 1742. Remember that date, friends, because it was the day the world shifted on its axis and everything that came after bore the mark of that terrible spring morning.

In Pati, under skies the color of old blood, a coalition of desperate men did something that would have been called impossible just months before. They took a boy—barely sixteen, maybe eighteen years old—and placed a crown on his head. Not just any crown, mind you, but the crown of Mataram itself. They proclaimed him Sunan Amangkurat V, and the title they gave him was longer than most men’s obituaries: Kanjeng Susuhunan Prabu Amangkurat Senapati ing Ngalaga Abdurrahman Sayyidin Panatagama Ingkang Jumeneng Kaping V.

But the people, the common folk who would die for this golden boy they barely knew, they had a simpler name for him. They called him Sunan Kuning—the Golden King. The name came from trying to pronounce “Cun Ling,” the Chinese title meaning “highest noble,” but it became something else entirely in their mouths. Something that spoke of sunrise and harvest, of better days and ancient promises.

On July 1st, 1742, in a ceremony that mixed Javanese mysticism with Chinese ritual, the boy became a king. If you’d been there—if you’d seen the way the incense smoke curled around his young face, the way the old priests looked at him like they were seeing a miracle or a catastrophe—you might have understood that this wasn’t just a coronation. This was the moment when fate decided to roll the dice one more time.

Chapter 5: The Massacre That Changed Everything

Meanwhile, in far-off Batavia, the Dutch were teaching the Chinese community what European civilization really meant. They called it the Geger Pecinan—the Chinese Massacre—and it was the kind of horror that stains the earth so deep that the grass won’t grow right for generations.

Picture this: Chinese laborers, men who’d come seeking nothing more than honest work and a chance to feed their families, suddenly finding themselves trapped in a city that had decided they were vermin to be exterminated. The VOC troops came like a plague of locusts, burning houses along Kali Besar while the cannons sang their death songs against the gates of Chinatown.

In two weeks—two goddamn weeks—they killed over 10,000 people. Fathers, mothers, children, grandparents. Bodies floating down Kali Angke like a parade of the damned, the water turning red as communion wine. Those who survived fled wherever they could, many of them making their way to the young Golden King who’d promised protection to anyone brave enough to fight back.

And here’s where our story gets really interesting, because sometimes the most unlikely alliances are forged in the hottest fires.

Chapter 6: The Alliance of the Desperate

Pakubuwana II, the official king of Mataram, watched the massacre in Batavia and saw an opportunity. At first, he opposed the Dutch, opening his arms to the Chinese refugees and the young pretender who’d gathered them around his banner. But kings, you see, are like weather vanes—they turn whichever way the wind blows strongest.

Sunan Kuning, meanwhile, was building something unprecedented: an army of the dispossessed. Javanese farmers who’d watched their rice paddies burn, Chinese merchants who’d lost everything but their lives, young men who’d seen enough death to understand that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

Together, they attacked Kartasura and Semarang, turning what had started as a local uprising into something that made the Dutch wake up screaming. According to the historian Ricklefs—and that man knew his numbers—about 3,500 Chinese and 20,000 Javanese besieged Semarang fortress while the VOC could barely scrape together 3,400 soldiers.

For a moment, just a moment, it looked like David might actually kill Goliath.

Chapter 7: The Betrayal

But this is a Stephen King story, friends, which means that hope is just the setup for something much darker.

Fear is a powerful thing, and when Pakubuwana II felt his throne wobbling under his ass, fear made him do what fear always makes weak men do: he sold his soul to the highest bidder. The Dutch offered him guarantees, protection, continued rule in exchange for turning his guns on his own people.

One night, when Sunan Kuning’s forces were on the verge of taking Kartasura Fortress, when victory was so close they could taste it like wine on their tongues, Pakubuwana II showed up with Dutch artillery and blew that dream to bloody pieces.

The betrayal cut deeper than any sword. This wasn’t just political maneuvering—this was a father figure turning against his own children, a king choosing foreign gold over the blood of his people. When Sunan Kuning heard what had happened, witnesses said his face went pale as moonlight, and something died behind his eyes.

From that moment on, he wasn’t just fighting for independence. He was fighting for revenge.

Chapter 8: The Last Stand

They called him the most feared anti-Dutch force in Central Java, this golden boy who’d become a man in the space of a single breath. Together with Tan He Tik and their combined forces, they raided VOC ports and fortresses like pirates from hell, their cannons singing death songs that made Dutch commanders wet their beds at night.

For fourteen months, Sunan Kuning ruled from the shadows, a ghost king with real power, a legend that grew with every Dutch defeat. Mothers sang lullabies about him to their children, and old men gathered in coffee houses to swap stories about the Golden King who’d come to save them all.

But legends, as any fool knows, have a way of ending badly.

Chapter 9: Exile and the Long Darkness

The Dutch brought reinforcements from Batavia—professional killers who knew their business and did it well. The Javanese-Chinese alliance, for all their courage, couldn’t stand against trained soldiers with modern weapons and unlimited supplies.

When Kartasura fell for the final time, they took Sunan Kuning alive. Maybe they wanted to make an example of him, or maybe they just couldn’t bring themselves to kill a boy who’d shown them what real courage looked like. They shipped him off to Ceylon—Sri Lanka—and locked him away to die slowly, forgotten by everyone except the dreams of old women and the songs of children who’d never learned to fear authority.

September 1743. That’s when the Golden King’s story officially ended, though nobody bothered to record exactly when or how he died. The Dutch weren’t interested in martyrs, and the official Mataram court had already moved on to more convenient truths.

Epilogue: Ghosts and Red Lanterns

Here’s the thing about legends, though—they don’t stay buried.

Today, in Semarang, there’s a grave marked with his name. Chinese lanterns flicker there at night, casting shadows that seem to move with purposes of their own. Incense burns in small clay holders, and sometimes—just sometimes—people swear they see a young man in royal robes standing among the memorial stones, looking out toward Java with eyes that remember everything.

But here’s the kicker, the final twist that would make even this old horror writer shake his head: the Indonesian government, in its infinite wisdom, turned the area around Sunan Kuning’s memorial into an official red-light district. They called it “Resosialisasi Argorejo,” but everybody knows it by its real name.

So the Golden King, the boy who died fighting for his people’s freedom, now watches over prostitutes and johns, pimps and broken dreams. His memorial sits in the middle of government-sanctioned sin, red lanterns casting their bloody light over transactions that would have made the old kings weep.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s the most Stephen King ending of all. Because sometimes the real horror isn’t in the monsters that come howling out of the dark. Sometimes it’s in the casual way that good people let beautiful things get buried under layers of bureaucracy and compromise and the grinding machinery of modern life.

The Golden King is still there, friends. Still waiting. Still remembering what it felt like to believe that tomorrow could be different from today.

And on quiet nights, when the wind comes down from Mount Kemukus and the incense smoke carries whispers of old prayers, some people swear they can hear him singing—not a death song, but something else entirely.

Something that sounds almost like hope.