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True Valor
A five-year-old prince was sent away from his own kingdom and did not return for twelve years. When he finally did, he drove out an entire invading dynasty, and history still cannot fully agree on whether he was one king or the memory of several folded into one legend.
A five-year-old prince was sent away, came back twelve years later, drove out an empire, and founded a calendar. Almost every part of that is unverifiable, and the calendar is still on the wall.
Vikramaditya, in the fullest telling, was the son of King Gandharvasena of Ujjain.
He was sent from court at the age of five to live as an ascetic. And kept away for twelve years.
When he came back to be crowned, the ceremony was interrupted. A brahmin scholar objected that a birthright was not a qualification.
He insisted the prince be examined, and trained in the actual craft of governing, before he was allowed to sit on the throne. Only after that instruction was he made king.
The threat he inherited was foreign. The Sakas were Scythians, pushed south out of the Central Asian steppe by pressure from the Yuezhi.
They had been moving into the north-west of the subcontinent for a century. And they had set up satrapies across what is now Sindh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.