by Ryan McCall
Sunlight streamed down through several windows, specially designed to capture the light and create a tropical atmosphere for the flora inside to flourish. There was a small line of grass after the steps and then flowers. They filled the entire center of the building. They were brightly colored, coming from the tropical regions of the world and a variety of floral smells filled the air.
The collection on its own would have been impressive alone, but there was more. The flowers were arranged by color and formed the shape of the eastern regions of the continent of Maceon, including Alkos, Estara, Enz and Huffolk and Silund. A large pool of water and a waterfall represented the ocean.
“Lawrence, this is incredible,” said Clara, in awe of the impressive display of flowers. Now that they were alone, Clara dropped the use of his title as he had requested her to do so.
“I thought you’d like it,” he said. “My father had it commissioned, a work of art to celebrate the formation of Naikos province. You’re the first person to have set foot in here outside of my family and the caretakers.”
“It’s beautiful. What about Estara? I can’t see it from here.”
“This way,” he said and grabbed her hand . He led her down the grass path along the side of the map garden, passing the waterfall and reaching the top end. Estara was represented by red and green Zefey lilies with a single white lotus indicating each of the major cities.
Lawrence plucked one of the red lilies and presented it to Clara. “This is only a flower, but take it as a promise from me. I will do everything I can to see you restored to your rightful place on your throne.”
Clara gratefully accepted it and he felt her shiver as his hand brushed hers slightly. Lawrence wanted to see her get her nation back, but his ability to aid her was hindered by several factors. He couldn’t declare war on Estara in an effort to restore her to the throne. That would risk antagonizing both the Kordate Union and Silund. Together the two nations could do significant damage to Alkos, particularly in the level of trade they controlled. The Alkos government had supported royalist rebels in Estara for many years but their success had been dwindling with President Praellis ‘clean-out’ actions.
“I was thinking of having a public ceremony, open this place up, in celebration,” he said.
“Celebration of what?” asked Clara. He smiled, he was finally about to admit his true feelings to her. “I was thinking that the people of Alkos would want to celebrate if they knew their emperor had finally found a woman he wanted at his side.”
He placed his hands on her arms and looked into her deep blue eyes. He could spend forever losing himself in those eyes.
“Lawrence, I…,” she was unable to find the words.
“You feel as I do, don’t you?” he asked. “I have tried to fight against it, but I cannot help myself. You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met Clara and I want you as my empress.” He leaned forward and kissed her, something he had wanted to do for so long. She was hesitant at first but was swept into it and responded to his passion. It only lasted moments. She stopped and pulled away, her face flushed slightly.
“Lawrence you know how difficult this would be,” she said.
He had been prepared for her reluctance. “Why is it difficult? We both feel the same for each other. We are both of royal blood.” It was only natural that they should marry.
“Yes we are.” She sighed. “But we are also both heads of state. How on Somal can two heads of state marry? We have a duty first and foremost to our nations. You to Alkos and I to Estara. People on both sides would accuse us of selling out our nations; or trying to create an even bigger empire. The Creator only knows how other nations would respond. Any children we had would inherit two kingdoms. Numerous wars have been fought over dynastic struggles like that.”
Lawrence didn’t accept that though. “Marriages and wars of this nature are how Alkos was built. We weren’t always the largest empire you know,” he countered.
“If my family was still alive and I was not a queen-in-exile, then perhaps it would be possible. But I must do what is best for Estara. What little support I have in my homeland would quickly dry up. Praellis would seize the opportunity to paint me as nothing more than an Alkon puppet, answering to its emperor.”
Lawrence moved his hand to stroke her perfect cheek and said, “We could…find ways to work around it all.” But his voice was not as certain as it was moments ago.
“You know in that I am right,” she said. She hugged him and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘I truly wish the situation were different, but we are tied to our individual fates and they do not intertwine. I have never met a better man than you and I don’t think I ever will again. I’m sorry.”
She pulled away and looked him in the eyes again, she was crying. She wiped the tears away and dropped his hands. She exited, leaving him alone in the private garden.
***
Clara returned to the patient Ursa. “Are you alright, Your Highness?” asked Ursa. The general had noticed she was upset.
Clara replied, “I’ll be fine Ursa. I want to return to my apartment and rest, it’s been a long day.” Ursa nodded and they walked through the palace.
After several minutes, Ursa decided to take a guess as to the reason behind her queen’s demeanor. “You Highness, may I be frank?” she asked.
“Go ahead, Ursa” replied Clara. She could guess at what her general was going to say. She had already made plain her feelings when she noticed Clara and Lawrence’s budding romance.
“Would I be correct in assuming that the emperor has made his intentions toward you known and asked for something formal?”
“Yes, he did. But before you repeat the lecture you gave me last week. I can already tell you I turned him down, for all of the same reasons you made clear to me,” replied Clara.
Ursa nodded. The general would be glad that she had listened to her head instead of her heart. “I see. I realize it is difficult now, but you are doing the right thing, Your Highness. Your duty lies with Estara, you are the last hope for all of us,” said Ursa. She was referring to all of the Estaran refugees in Alkos that had pledged full support to the queen.
“That doesn’t make it easier,” said Clara.
“Being queen isn’t about what’s easy, it’s about what’s right. The republicans have torn our nation and culture to pieces. You are the last chance we have to get back from the brink. Before we lose what was Estara forever.”
Clara looked at Ursa. “It’s been fourteen long years. I wonder if we did return would we even recognize our home. The republicans have made so many radical changes. I fear that trying to undo them could cause as much damage as the war.”
”Fear not, Your Highness, we shall reclaim Estara and you will sit in Haltoria. In fact, I am due to meet with the Alkos minister of security of tomorrow. He’s one of our strongest supporters in the Alkon government.”
“Then I hope he has something significant to tell you,” replied Clara. All the support from Alkos ministers had done little to get them home so far. “The more time we spend in exile, the further our homeland slips away from us, until it is nothing but a chapter in the history books.”
Chapter 22
“On page eighty six of your text book, you will see the full display of Stirling’s Theory of Biological Diversion for the higher kingdoms of animals,” said Professor Ling Xerin. “As you can see, they are grouped into three categories, gigantic, dragensis and carvolgis.”
Reese tried to concentrate on the class as best he could. He should have known going drinking after the medal ceremony was a bad idea, but he had gone along anyway. Cassandra was still upset and he wanted to support her. She had taken the drinking to heart and had more than both Reese and Michael combined, in an effort to drown her sorrows.
After embarrassing moments of her drunkenly trying to hit on several cute girls, Reese had decided to cut her off and dropped her in her apartment to sleep it off. He wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t made it to the
class this morning. He took swig of water from his drink bottle to slake his dry throat while the professor continued her explanation of kingdom classifications.
“Carvolg Bax, more commonly referred to as Lannoch’s Rat. Named for its discoverer, George Lannoch. This is an artist’s impression of what it looked like.” Xerin clicked the projector. The picture that appeared looked something like a rodent standing on its hind legs, although its front legs were clearly arms that ended in hands.
“Not much to look at, similar in shape and form to a common rat. But all of you sitting in this room are descended from this creature. As well as every other human, skylord, elf, goblinoid, agorid and kitsune in the entire world.”
Someone put their hand up with a question.
“Yes?” asked Xerin.
“According to Stirling, convergent diversion is the reason why species with similar features, say drakons and humans, emerged from separate different lines of diversion. But why is it that the dragensis line only produced one biped while the Carvolg Bax line produced numerous ones?” asked the student.
Reese was curious about it as well, but he was not in the mood to ask questions today. He was glad someone else had asked for him.
Xerin smiled and said, “Even Stirling, the father of modern zoology was stumped by that. It was one of the few pieces of evidence that ran contrary to his theory. It was not until recently that newer work with residual energy dating has allowed us to explain this contradiction.
As you are all aware, residual energy dating is a technique for measuring the amount of natural magical energy in archeological and paleontological samples. This energy depletes over time in the geological strata and measuring it, gives us good estimates as to the age of fossils.
However, what it does not take into account is when raw energy varies by region. Carvolg Bax lived on of the supercontinent of Biveria which contained a higher concentration of raw magic than anywhere else. This led to greater mutations and thus its common line of descent rapidly diversified, with the different descending species occupying different environmental niches.
With Dragensis, dragons had already evolved sentience in the Age of Dragons and while they were successful for millions of years, the competition between them became too great and the larger dragons died off, much as the colossi before them. The southern super-continent of Paxara was nowhere as resource rich as Biveria. The dragons that were smaller were better able to survive, as they required fewer resources. This is what pushed the biological diversion of dragons into the smaller bipedal shape of drakons.”
Professor Xerin continued for a long time, talking further about the next line of bipeds, the precursors to each of the major races. She reached Numax Terrax the common ancestor to humans, skylords and elves, when the bell rang.
Xerin said, “That is all the time we have. We will finish this off at the beginning of next class.” Then she suddenly remembered something else as the students stood up. “Oh, before you all go, I have an announcement. At the end of next week, a foreign delegation from Galria will be visiting Alkos City, including our university. As such, there will be a presence of watch officers and Imperial Guards on campus over the next two weeks to ensure everything is secure. Please do not interfere with their security procedures. They may also carry out random inspections of students and staff. Please comply with their requests. Students that are directly involved in departments that the delegation will visit will have further instructions from their supervisors.”
As Reese made his way out, Xerin called him over, “May I speak to you a moment Mr. Galius?”
He nodded and walked over to the front of the room, “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“You were not as active today, as you normally are. Would it have anything to do with Ms. Breac’s absence?” asked Xerin.
Reese nodded. “Yes. We had a celebration last night after the ceremony and Cassandra enjoyed herself too much.” That was an understatement, but he didn’t want Cassandra to get into more trouble.
“I understand the honor that you received,” said the professor. “But you should be careful not to let it go your heads. And I do hope Ms. Breac does not miss any more classes or her academic marks will start to suffer. I would hate to see such an intelligent student fail.”
Reese nodded again. “Don’t worry, I’ll let her know.”
“I am not heartless, I want see all of my students apply themselves to fullest of their potential. I would suggest that she talk to one of the university’s counselors if she has been affected this much.”
Cassandra finally showed up while Reese was having lunch at the cafeteria. He stopped in the middle of his meal. “You finally decided to emerge into the daylight? How are you feeling?”
She scowled and said, “How do you think? I’m hung-over.” Then the smell of Reese’s food hit her. “Mmm, that smells good.” She looked over to the food area and groaned at seeing the length of the queue. “Could I have some?” she asked, her bad mood having vanished.
Reese was in a generous mood and said, “Go ahead.” He pushed the plate across the table. She sat down and devoured the food as if she were in a race. Reese passed along Professor Xerin’s advice to her.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I just…wanted to forget for at least one night. It won’t happen again,” she replied.
“Better not,” said Reese. “If you start dropping your grades, you’ll be hounding me to tutor you until they improve.”
Cassandra smiled at his joke, then asked, “Where’s Michael? Aren’t you two normally joined at the hip during lunch hours?”
“Ha-ha,” he said sarcastically. “He has a chemistry project. Something about synthesizing an acid. It’s a time sensitive reaction, so he has to keep working through lunch,” replied Reese.
He brought up the other piece of news she had missed. “Something else you missed today. The Galrian foreign minister and his delegation are going to be visiting the university,” he said.
“So what?” she said, not appearing to have much interest in his news. “Foreign dignitaries like to make a big impression but I can’t imagine he cares one bit about the University of Alkos. You know what the Galrians are like, they think they’re way is best and anyone else doing it differently is an enemy.”
Reese couldn’t argue with that, the conservative Galrian mindset was infamous.
“Does this mean we have to put up with a whole lot of security procedures and guards?” asked Cassandra.
Reese nodded and she made her face that showed her annoyance. “It could be interesting. How often do foreign ministers come here, especially from Galria? Maybe they’ve finally decided to play nice,” said Reese.
Cassandra chuckled. “Now your countryside roots are showing. One little foreign delegation and you’re swooning. You’re right though, if they’re sending their foreign minister, it could be the Galrians are finally going to stop waving their cocks and start dealing with us like neighbors.”
Reese had always believed the Galrian sabre rattling was more for show. “I never thought they were ever serious. What could they ever hope to gain by going to war with us? I can’t see how anyone could want to put their nation through that.” Reese could barely remember his the war in his homeland, but he had dreams and flashbacks that terrified him.
“You’d make a terrible politician,” said Cassandra. “There can be valid reasons to go to war.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“To defend yourself, to defend a nation that is being bullied by a smaller nation, to fight for what is right,” she said. She spoke with conviction.
“And you’d make a perfect politician. It all sounds good, the only problem is that everyone has a different interpretation of defense and what qualifies as right or wrong.”
“True,” admitted Cassandra. “Did you figure out who broke into your room?” she asked, changing the subject.
Reese shook his head. He hadn’t told his friends the full story, leaving out the p
art about being ambushed on the train. Mastermage Abeliah had helped him though.
There were too many candidates in the records of Warded Spirals to figure out who it could have been. She had given him an artifact which protected his room from magical penetration, so it wasn’t going to happen again. He had informed university security about the break-in and left them to deal with it.
“Security passed it on to the watch, but it’s doubtful they’ll catch whoever it was. It was only a couple of books anyway,” he said.
“Odd for a thief to take books instead of money.”
“I imagine they mistook them for valuable antiques. They are old looking, but I doubt they’d be worth much. They weren’t written by a famous historian or philosopher,” he replied. He carefully left out mentioning his father’s diary.
Cassandra nodded. “Well, since we still have time left before classes, why don’t you catch me up on everything I missed in Professor Xerin’s class this morning?”
“You’re certain?” asked Reese. “I mean with everything you’re going through, you want to jump back into it now?”
“Yes I am. It helps to keep my mind focused on studies and not…other things. But I promise I’ll go and talk to one of the counselors, when I’m all caught up.”
“Good,” he said, satisfied that she was starting to heal. “Then you better grab your text book and turn to page eighty six, Stirling’s theory of biological diversion.”
Cassandra grabbed at her bag, then set it back down in realization.
“Let me guess,” said Reese. “You don’t have it with you?”
She nodded.
“I’m done here anyway” he said. “Why don’t you go get it, then meet me at the biology section of the library on the fourth floor.”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ll see you there in about twenty minutes.” She picked up her bag and walked towards her apartment.
Reese cleared the table and turned his thoughts to the visit of the Galrian delegation. He was interested in seeing it. Cassandra was right, he was a country boy, never having visited anywhere outside of Alkos City and his hometown. Michael would be interested too. The real problem would be getting a good view.
