NaNoWriMo
So I started out a little late, but I'll make up for it. This is completely unedited, I'm not even sure the characters' names stay the same throughout. I like her name, but I'm still working on the bad guy's. I'd ask for suggestions, but names are really something I have to come up with on my own or they don't work in my head.
There was a draft in the cave that made the lone candle flicker, and Callyn used its steady pulse to keep a kind of time-she didn’t know if there were forty or seventy or more candle flickers to the minute, but it kept her from losing track of the relative amount of time passing, which, after staring at nothing but the cold stone walls for several days (or weeks, or months), she knew would keep her from going entirely insane.
The invasion had been quick. The planet’s defenses, seldom used as they were, had no chance to even properly finish their startup sequence before they were taken out by the strange intergalactic warships. Callyn hadn’t even realized that such ships were still manufactured anywhere, much less in their closest neighboring system. Their sister planet.
His planet. Ametras.
She still was unsure of the exact details of the invasion. The castle had been taken so quickly that she did not know what remained of the city. She had seen her father killed, and her eldest brother as well, but she only knew of the deaths of the others when he came to announce them to her, cold triumph in his voice. From her count, she was the only one left. She had little hope for her own life to be spared. In her darker moments, she thought she had little desire for continue, but then the candle would flicker, and her anger would spark, and she would remember the betrayal. She didn’t think she would ever be able to exact vengeance on the criminal mind responsible…but she wished for it with all her heart.
She was in the process of counting candle flickers (two thousand ninety-five, two thousand ninety-six) when he opened the great stone door and stood before her, long black cloak sweeping behind him like a proper villain of stories. The draft from the door swept the room and the candle went out.
She stood. “Lord Aledredon,” she said, studying him. His demeanor was the same, as always. Cold blue eyes stared through her over a graying beard. His cloak covered a dark grey robe of the fashion of a close advisor to the king, the well-pressed fabric a sharp contrast to the rags she wore. She knew that they had once been a shining blue dress of rare Corrield silk, but none of that could be seen in the grayish rags they had become since the occupation. They could have at least provided me with something to wear, she thought, there was no need to humiliate me like this.
His voice overrode her thoughts. “Princess Callyn. I regret to inform you that your cousin Raina has been executed. A loss for the both of us, I assure you.”
She started to reply to that, her voice rising, but again, he overrode her. “She has, however, left something behind, and I rather thought that you would be the best one to…bestow…this on.” A hand signal to a crony behind him brought the man scuttling forth. Callyn’s eyes widened as she saw the bundle in his arms.
“You didn’t…you didn’t kill…” She reached out anxiously to the henchman, who seemed more than happy to deposit the package in her arms. The bright green eyes of the infant stared wonderingly at her from its wrappings.
Aledredon’s voice seemed to drop ten degrees. “You honestly believe me capable of killing babies for no reason? That I am that type of monster? Lady Callyn, you had severely misread my character.”
Callyn’s anger returned. “You’ve killed all my family, my sisters, my brothers, and now you have killed my cousin, for doing nothing! How could I expect you to discriminate?”
Aledredon made a small sound in the back of his throat. “It was necessary. It still may be necessary. Which, I suddenly recall, is why I came here in the first place.”
“Oh? Not just to announce Raina’s murder?”
“No,” he replied, not rising to the bait, “I also must ask you what I asked her, before she died.”
Callyn froze. She had expected her own death, but not soon. Being faced with a thing is very different from having it always in the back of your mind. “So ask,” she challenged.
“Will you rule this world for me?”
To Callyn, the question came from nowhere, although the tone in which he asked it suggested that he had asked many times before and expected to receive the same answer yet again. She wondered why he bothered asking. Her family had ruled the planet successfully for many years, he could hardly expect that they would submit to becoming puppets, icons without any true decision-making capabilities. “Is that supposed to be funny? Why not just ask me to marry you, or to go cut off my hands, or something else equally ridiculous?”
“Hah. I might have asked you, if I thought that would make it any more possible. No, Princess, I ask because I wish to make this seem as nonviolent of a takeover is possible. For I have taken your country,” he assured her, “but I would like for the people to calm themselves. A member of the royal family endorsing my presence would do much to help with that.”
Callyn shook her head, unwanted tears forming in her eyes. “What did you want from us?”
Aledredon paused, seemingly taken aback. “My own planet needs supplies. We need your industry and your strength. Our resources, you see, are dying.” He frowned, looking at a space beyond her, likely beyond anything in the small stone room. “My world is dying. The planet is cooling, much quicker than our mathematicians predicted when we were sent there from Gaea. It did not last us the thirty thousand years they promised, but only two. But with Madera,” his eyes flashed some emotion she could not read and returned to her face, “with your world, we could continue. You have a hot planet, cooling slowly. You have coal, and uranium and even iron still. We have none.”
Her pity for him was stopped by realization. “So you will simply plunder our world, and leave my people without resources, so your own can survive?”
“No, no!” His gaze returned to the faraway vision. “We need to work together. It is true that this way, your planet may have its own resources used up before it would with only one population, but your planet was a million-year planet, and even if it survives only half as long, five hundred thousand years is more than enough time to develop new technology. But you have to understand, my planet was dying. My people were starving, and then…we have such a long winter there. Fifty years long. I couldn’t let it come without help.”
“Why not send to Gaea a request for a transfer for your people? They promised, when they sent us out, that they would help if ever there were problems.”
His voice was bitter. “You think I didn’t? When was the last time you had any communication with Gaea? Have you asked them for anything? Have you spoken to them?”
Callyn thought back. She had not been in charge of communications for her house, but calling Gaea was important. It was done very rarely, both because of the time and energy it took. Small interstellar ships were one thing, but Gaea belonged to another galaxy. She had known the name, once. It had appeared in her textbooks, and, if not for their neighboring worlds who also knew the story of their colonization, she wondered if it would have faded into myth. But Gaea was real, and could be communicated with. They just hadn’t…needed to. “It was…I think two or three hundred years ago. I don’t remember exactly.”
“They don’t respond,” he replied softly, “I don’t know if their world is gone, or if they simply haven’t the time or whim to care about us.”
“They have to care about us,” Callyn protested, “our ancestors were their kings and queens and emperors. Their royalty, their pride.”
This time, the depth of his bitterness surprised her. “They do shelter you children in your schooling, don’t they? I wonder if they tell you when you’re older and ready to keep the family secret. Or perhaps your parents didn’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” she demanded, “What aren’t you telling me?”
“We weren’t their royalty. We were their exiles. Their criminals. We were given a choice, to colonize offworld or to die.”
“Criminals?” she repeated weakly.
“Not their worst, certainly not. But Gaea was having problems of her own, of overcrowding. Of course, the first idea was to simply execute all the criminals, and they did at first. After they had…disposed…of many people that way, they realized that it would not work for everyone, that some did not deserve to lose their life over a petty crime. So they sent us offworld instead.”
“So your actions are governed by your family background?”
His lip twisted. “Had your father not resisted…”
“Of course he resisted!” Callyn looked down at the baby, last of her family after her. Should I name him after Father? Should I even bother giving him a name? “You never even tried to ask us for help. You just took over.” She paced over to the other side of the room, as far away as she could get, staring at the wall. “Had you come in and asked for an alliance, it would have been granted. I might have even married you, to preserve the peace. But you never asked. Why?”
“You think I crave power?” She couldn’t see him move, but she felt him turn away. “Is that what you believe this war is about? I want to control you? No,” he said, and she heard weariness in his voice, “this is what my people wanted. They wanted this betrayal. Actually, they demanded it. And I am not so strong a man that I will trade my life for that of my brother. They would have seen me deposed if I had not led this attack. They were desperate, and they wanted revenge. Do you believe it? They wanted revenge against a country that had never done them wrong. They believed, in their peasant fashion, that Gaea was sending you supplies and wealth and leaving us in the dust, and I could do nothing to dissuade them. Nothing,” he repeated, “or believe me, I would have.”
“So it is because you are a coward that your forces are here,” she concluded angrily. “You could not tell them that my father was blameless; instead, you killed him and called it justice.”
“I called it nothing,” he snapped. “And it is not because I am a coward that they are here-it is because I am a coward that I am leading them. I thought-just thought-and I was wrong-“ his voice was breaking, and she did not understand it. Does he expect me to believe that he’s sorry? “-but I thought that perhaps that it because it was me, your family would listen. That there would be no death.”
“You were wrong,” she said, and her words seemed to echo in the little room.
“I know,” he replied, his cold composure regained, “and now it seems that since you refuse to aid me, I must kill you as well. You are my brother’s daughter, but that cannot spare your life. I will give you until tomorrow to think about it.” He turned to leave, and paused at the door. “You should find a name for the child. When you are killed, it will be him that assumes the throne, and I will be his regent.”
“So you didn’t even spare him because he was an infant,” Callyn said coldly, “but because he was of use.”
“Would you rather the blood of all your people be spilt by the cruelty of mine?” He left, his final words almost cut off by the shutting of the door.
“I don’t know,” she whispered to the silent, and now candleless, darkness.
She spent most of the night finding a name for the newborn prince. Names of her family came and went, and she resolved to find something that would fit this poor child, destined to be a puppet ruler with no family to guide him, only the bitter, evil puppetmaster.
As she sat and thought, a story came to her, an old one from Gaea. Well-known throughout her small planet, it told of a young prince whose kingdom was taken by a dragon.
The prince ran from the burning castle, the cries of his sisters following him. He could do nothing for them. He had not the power to keep the dragonfire at bay, and he knew that if the dragon’s rider was pleased with the kingdom, its people would not become dragon food. So he left rather than to die uselessly. He knew of one things that could turn back dragonfire, and he knew he would find it.
He tried the witch’s house first, but the wizened old woman had no help to offer him. She claimed that only the fairies knew of the weapon that could kill a dragon, and she was too old to show him how to find their land.
He went to the sorcerer next, the young one with the mechanical animals. The sorcerer laughed and told the prince that fairies weren’t real, but that he had a mechanical elephant that would be more than a match for the dragon. The prince shook his head and told the sorcerer that this dragon could melt the insides of the mechanical elephant with little problem.
When at last the prince had visited the wizard, the dwarf and the river serpent (and all of these were grand adventures that will have to be told at a later time), he fell to the ground in despair, wailing that nothing would save his kingdom. Five long years had he searched for the answer, and still nothing could be found to defeat a dragon. To make things worse, he had heard tales from his land, of horror and pain and death under the dragon rider’s rule.
It was then that the fairy queen appeared. Her glowing smile and bright laugh brought the prince out of his grief-driven stupor. He demanded to know why she appeared now, if she had always known where he was.
Again she laughed, and she gently told him that she could only find those who truly needed her aid. Yes, she told him, she could help him defeat the dragon, but why should she when he could do so on his own? Humans were silly things, she said, they never realized their full potential. Simply take your sword, she told him, and pierce the dragon’s heart.
Emboldened by the queen’s words, the prince returned to his kingdom. His people hardly recognized the strong, golden warrior who strode up to the castle. He took his ordinary sword (at least, until then they had all thought it ordinary), and thrust it through the heart of the dragon. As the beast died, its rider also cried out in agony and fell to the ground.
The people ran to the castle and lifted the prince onto their shoulders and set him on his rightful throne. The prince was wed to the most beautiful princess from a nearby land, and their kingdom was their two lands combined, and their world prospered under their reign.
Late one night, many years later, when the prince’s hair was grey and his eyes could only see light and dark, the fairy queen came to him again, and he could see her as clearly as he did as a young man. He asked her why no one before her had told him the truth, why everyone had kept that from him. Throughout his life, he had carried that grudge against those he had sought out for help.
With that lovely laugh, the fairy queen gently explained to him that it was not until he had lost himself completely to despair that the ability to slay a dragon had surfaced in him. Had he not been faced with the greatest grief, he could not have done the greatest good.
The story resonated in Callyn’s mind, and she nodded to herself. I must name him something that will give people hope. Looking down at the child, with his green eyes so much like hers, she named him Jillan, after the prince in the story. “Little Jillan, I call you and I name you.” She whispered, knowing her voice would be picked up on a monitor somewhere and likely transmitted to Aledredon. Well, let it. “I tell you now that you are a prince, and you are no one’s prince but your own, and someday, I promise, you will slay the dragon for your people.”
Later, she mulled over Aledredon’s words. Pitiful as his planet’s predicament was, she could not forgive him this transgression. On Madera, the royalty was everything to the people, the people would abide by their decisions. They would never have rebelled and threatened to kill her father if he did not lead an attack. She knew that people could behave differently if under pressure, and she supposed that a land without resources would be pressure enough…but she could not forgive him. He had been an uncle, almost, a member of the family. One of those distant uncles that was rarely seen, as travel between planets was rarely done, but they had shared meals with him. She had seen his grand metal castle in his capital city, and stayed in a room with a balcony in which it seemed you could see the lights of his whole world. It was very different on Ametras from Madera-they were more industrialized, there was more metal and less clear crystal. She had always felt a little claustrophobic when she visited, as Madera City had many buildings with walls transparent to the outside, and the cold silver walls seemed to shut her inside and away from the natural light. She still enjoyed the foreign feeling when she visited, but this crystal city was her true home. And now, these stone walls inside the deepest dungeon, the darkest part of her bright castle, would be her last home. Tomorrow, they would come for her, and she would die. And little Jillan would live. That much Aledredon had promised. Puppet or not, Jillan would live.
Surely, she realized, as her thoughts led her on, someone would explain the plight of her family. An old servant or friend, or anyone. And then, she continued, Jillan would rise up against his oppressor, and take back his rightful place.
Despite her attempts to convince herself of this, she wondered if Jillan would come to love Alendredon. After all, he would likely be kind to the boy, and he would probably raise him as his own, if only to ensure that such an uprising would never actually happen. Stories or no stories, nothing would cause a boy to kill his father.
The thought of Jillan calling Alendredon his father made Callyn almost cry. So many years, rule passed down from father to daughter to son, and now it was wiped out so quickly, with seven interstellar warships and one insane overlord. Or one overlord with an insane population. Callyn doubted his story, but she didn’t find that there was much of a difference in whether or not it was true. He had taken over the planet, and that was it. Spurred by his own cruelty or by others’, he had led. She certainly didn’t believe that he had ever thought it would make it better for him to lead. Aledredon was many things, among them apparently evil, but he was not stupid.
Comfort and sleep were both denied her, so she spent the remainder of the night with her thoughts, her mind twisting and turning and causing her to feel ill on more than one occasion. Beside her, the newly-named prince slept soundly, unaware.
Comments, of course, are appreciated, although I won't blame you if you can't read through all of that.
There was a draft in the cave that made the lone candle flicker, and Callyn used its steady pulse to keep a kind of time-she didn’t know if there were forty or seventy or more candle flickers to the minute, but it kept her from losing track of the relative amount of time passing, which, after staring at nothing but the cold stone walls for several days (or weeks, or months), she knew would keep her from going entirely insane.
The invasion had been quick. The planet’s defenses, seldom used as they were, had no chance to even properly finish their startup sequence before they were taken out by the strange intergalactic warships. Callyn hadn’t even realized that such ships were still manufactured anywhere, much less in their closest neighboring system. Their sister planet.
His planet. Ametras.
She still was unsure of the exact details of the invasion. The castle had been taken so quickly that she did not know what remained of the city. She had seen her father killed, and her eldest brother as well, but she only knew of the deaths of the others when he came to announce them to her, cold triumph in his voice. From her count, she was the only one left. She had little hope for her own life to be spared. In her darker moments, she thought she had little desire for continue, but then the candle would flicker, and her anger would spark, and she would remember the betrayal. She didn’t think she would ever be able to exact vengeance on the criminal mind responsible…but she wished for it with all her heart.
She was in the process of counting candle flickers (two thousand ninety-five, two thousand ninety-six) when he opened the great stone door and stood before her, long black cloak sweeping behind him like a proper villain of stories. The draft from the door swept the room and the candle went out.
She stood. “Lord Aledredon,” she said, studying him. His demeanor was the same, as always. Cold blue eyes stared through her over a graying beard. His cloak covered a dark grey robe of the fashion of a close advisor to the king, the well-pressed fabric a sharp contrast to the rags she wore. She knew that they had once been a shining blue dress of rare Corrield silk, but none of that could be seen in the grayish rags they had become since the occupation. They could have at least provided me with something to wear, she thought, there was no need to humiliate me like this.
His voice overrode her thoughts. “Princess Callyn. I regret to inform you that your cousin Raina has been executed. A loss for the both of us, I assure you.”
She started to reply to that, her voice rising, but again, he overrode her. “She has, however, left something behind, and I rather thought that you would be the best one to…bestow…this on.” A hand signal to a crony behind him brought the man scuttling forth. Callyn’s eyes widened as she saw the bundle in his arms.
“You didn’t…you didn’t kill…” She reached out anxiously to the henchman, who seemed more than happy to deposit the package in her arms. The bright green eyes of the infant stared wonderingly at her from its wrappings.
Aledredon’s voice seemed to drop ten degrees. “You honestly believe me capable of killing babies for no reason? That I am that type of monster? Lady Callyn, you had severely misread my character.”
Callyn’s anger returned. “You’ve killed all my family, my sisters, my brothers, and now you have killed my cousin, for doing nothing! How could I expect you to discriminate?”
Aledredon made a small sound in the back of his throat. “It was necessary. It still may be necessary. Which, I suddenly recall, is why I came here in the first place.”
“Oh? Not just to announce Raina’s murder?”
“No,” he replied, not rising to the bait, “I also must ask you what I asked her, before she died.”
Callyn froze. She had expected her own death, but not soon. Being faced with a thing is very different from having it always in the back of your mind. “So ask,” she challenged.
“Will you rule this world for me?”
To Callyn, the question came from nowhere, although the tone in which he asked it suggested that he had asked many times before and expected to receive the same answer yet again. She wondered why he bothered asking. Her family had ruled the planet successfully for many years, he could hardly expect that they would submit to becoming puppets, icons without any true decision-making capabilities. “Is that supposed to be funny? Why not just ask me to marry you, or to go cut off my hands, or something else equally ridiculous?”
“Hah. I might have asked you, if I thought that would make it any more possible. No, Princess, I ask because I wish to make this seem as nonviolent of a takeover is possible. For I have taken your country,” he assured her, “but I would like for the people to calm themselves. A member of the royal family endorsing my presence would do much to help with that.”
Callyn shook her head, unwanted tears forming in her eyes. “What did you want from us?”
Aledredon paused, seemingly taken aback. “My own planet needs supplies. We need your industry and your strength. Our resources, you see, are dying.” He frowned, looking at a space beyond her, likely beyond anything in the small stone room. “My world is dying. The planet is cooling, much quicker than our mathematicians predicted when we were sent there from Gaea. It did not last us the thirty thousand years they promised, but only two. But with Madera,” his eyes flashed some emotion she could not read and returned to her face, “with your world, we could continue. You have a hot planet, cooling slowly. You have coal, and uranium and even iron still. We have none.”
Her pity for him was stopped by realization. “So you will simply plunder our world, and leave my people without resources, so your own can survive?”
“No, no!” His gaze returned to the faraway vision. “We need to work together. It is true that this way, your planet may have its own resources used up before it would with only one population, but your planet was a million-year planet, and even if it survives only half as long, five hundred thousand years is more than enough time to develop new technology. But you have to understand, my planet was dying. My people were starving, and then…we have such a long winter there. Fifty years long. I couldn’t let it come without help.”
“Why not send to Gaea a request for a transfer for your people? They promised, when they sent us out, that they would help if ever there were problems.”
His voice was bitter. “You think I didn’t? When was the last time you had any communication with Gaea? Have you asked them for anything? Have you spoken to them?”
Callyn thought back. She had not been in charge of communications for her house, but calling Gaea was important. It was done very rarely, both because of the time and energy it took. Small interstellar ships were one thing, but Gaea belonged to another galaxy. She had known the name, once. It had appeared in her textbooks, and, if not for their neighboring worlds who also knew the story of their colonization, she wondered if it would have faded into myth. But Gaea was real, and could be communicated with. They just hadn’t…needed to. “It was…I think two or three hundred years ago. I don’t remember exactly.”
“They don’t respond,” he replied softly, “I don’t know if their world is gone, or if they simply haven’t the time or whim to care about us.”
“They have to care about us,” Callyn protested, “our ancestors were their kings and queens and emperors. Their royalty, their pride.”
This time, the depth of his bitterness surprised her. “They do shelter you children in your schooling, don’t they? I wonder if they tell you when you’re older and ready to keep the family secret. Or perhaps your parents didn’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” she demanded, “What aren’t you telling me?”
“We weren’t their royalty. We were their exiles. Their criminals. We were given a choice, to colonize offworld or to die.”
“Criminals?” she repeated weakly.
“Not their worst, certainly not. But Gaea was having problems of her own, of overcrowding. Of course, the first idea was to simply execute all the criminals, and they did at first. After they had…disposed…of many people that way, they realized that it would not work for everyone, that some did not deserve to lose their life over a petty crime. So they sent us offworld instead.”
“So your actions are governed by your family background?”
His lip twisted. “Had your father not resisted…”
“Of course he resisted!” Callyn looked down at the baby, last of her family after her. Should I name him after Father? Should I even bother giving him a name? “You never even tried to ask us for help. You just took over.” She paced over to the other side of the room, as far away as she could get, staring at the wall. “Had you come in and asked for an alliance, it would have been granted. I might have even married you, to preserve the peace. But you never asked. Why?”
“You think I crave power?” She couldn’t see him move, but she felt him turn away. “Is that what you believe this war is about? I want to control you? No,” he said, and she heard weariness in his voice, “this is what my people wanted. They wanted this betrayal. Actually, they demanded it. And I am not so strong a man that I will trade my life for that of my brother. They would have seen me deposed if I had not led this attack. They were desperate, and they wanted revenge. Do you believe it? They wanted revenge against a country that had never done them wrong. They believed, in their peasant fashion, that Gaea was sending you supplies and wealth and leaving us in the dust, and I could do nothing to dissuade them. Nothing,” he repeated, “or believe me, I would have.”
“So it is because you are a coward that your forces are here,” she concluded angrily. “You could not tell them that my father was blameless; instead, you killed him and called it justice.”
“I called it nothing,” he snapped. “And it is not because I am a coward that they are here-it is because I am a coward that I am leading them. I thought-just thought-and I was wrong-“ his voice was breaking, and she did not understand it. Does he expect me to believe that he’s sorry? “-but I thought that perhaps that it because it was me, your family would listen. That there would be no death.”
“You were wrong,” she said, and her words seemed to echo in the little room.
“I know,” he replied, his cold composure regained, “and now it seems that since you refuse to aid me, I must kill you as well. You are my brother’s daughter, but that cannot spare your life. I will give you until tomorrow to think about it.” He turned to leave, and paused at the door. “You should find a name for the child. When you are killed, it will be him that assumes the throne, and I will be his regent.”
“So you didn’t even spare him because he was an infant,” Callyn said coldly, “but because he was of use.”
“Would you rather the blood of all your people be spilt by the cruelty of mine?” He left, his final words almost cut off by the shutting of the door.
“I don’t know,” she whispered to the silent, and now candleless, darkness.
She spent most of the night finding a name for the newborn prince. Names of her family came and went, and she resolved to find something that would fit this poor child, destined to be a puppet ruler with no family to guide him, only the bitter, evil puppetmaster.
As she sat and thought, a story came to her, an old one from Gaea. Well-known throughout her small planet, it told of a young prince whose kingdom was taken by a dragon.
The prince ran from the burning castle, the cries of his sisters following him. He could do nothing for them. He had not the power to keep the dragonfire at bay, and he knew that if the dragon’s rider was pleased with the kingdom, its people would not become dragon food. So he left rather than to die uselessly. He knew of one things that could turn back dragonfire, and he knew he would find it.
He tried the witch’s house first, but the wizened old woman had no help to offer him. She claimed that only the fairies knew of the weapon that could kill a dragon, and she was too old to show him how to find their land.
He went to the sorcerer next, the young one with the mechanical animals. The sorcerer laughed and told the prince that fairies weren’t real, but that he had a mechanical elephant that would be more than a match for the dragon. The prince shook his head and told the sorcerer that this dragon could melt the insides of the mechanical elephant with little problem.
When at last the prince had visited the wizard, the dwarf and the river serpent (and all of these were grand adventures that will have to be told at a later time), he fell to the ground in despair, wailing that nothing would save his kingdom. Five long years had he searched for the answer, and still nothing could be found to defeat a dragon. To make things worse, he had heard tales from his land, of horror and pain and death under the dragon rider’s rule.
It was then that the fairy queen appeared. Her glowing smile and bright laugh brought the prince out of his grief-driven stupor. He demanded to know why she appeared now, if she had always known where he was.
Again she laughed, and she gently told him that she could only find those who truly needed her aid. Yes, she told him, she could help him defeat the dragon, but why should she when he could do so on his own? Humans were silly things, she said, they never realized their full potential. Simply take your sword, she told him, and pierce the dragon’s heart.
Emboldened by the queen’s words, the prince returned to his kingdom. His people hardly recognized the strong, golden warrior who strode up to the castle. He took his ordinary sword (at least, until then they had all thought it ordinary), and thrust it through the heart of the dragon. As the beast died, its rider also cried out in agony and fell to the ground.
The people ran to the castle and lifted the prince onto their shoulders and set him on his rightful throne. The prince was wed to the most beautiful princess from a nearby land, and their kingdom was their two lands combined, and their world prospered under their reign.
Late one night, many years later, when the prince’s hair was grey and his eyes could only see light and dark, the fairy queen came to him again, and he could see her as clearly as he did as a young man. He asked her why no one before her had told him the truth, why everyone had kept that from him. Throughout his life, he had carried that grudge against those he had sought out for help.
With that lovely laugh, the fairy queen gently explained to him that it was not until he had lost himself completely to despair that the ability to slay a dragon had surfaced in him. Had he not been faced with the greatest grief, he could not have done the greatest good.
The story resonated in Callyn’s mind, and she nodded to herself. I must name him something that will give people hope. Looking down at the child, with his green eyes so much like hers, she named him Jillan, after the prince in the story. “Little Jillan, I call you and I name you.” She whispered, knowing her voice would be picked up on a monitor somewhere and likely transmitted to Aledredon. Well, let it. “I tell you now that you are a prince, and you are no one’s prince but your own, and someday, I promise, you will slay the dragon for your people.”
Later, she mulled over Aledredon’s words. Pitiful as his planet’s predicament was, she could not forgive him this transgression. On Madera, the royalty was everything to the people, the people would abide by their decisions. They would never have rebelled and threatened to kill her father if he did not lead an attack. She knew that people could behave differently if under pressure, and she supposed that a land without resources would be pressure enough…but she could not forgive him. He had been an uncle, almost, a member of the family. One of those distant uncles that was rarely seen, as travel between planets was rarely done, but they had shared meals with him. She had seen his grand metal castle in his capital city, and stayed in a room with a balcony in which it seemed you could see the lights of his whole world. It was very different on Ametras from Madera-they were more industrialized, there was more metal and less clear crystal. She had always felt a little claustrophobic when she visited, as Madera City had many buildings with walls transparent to the outside, and the cold silver walls seemed to shut her inside and away from the natural light. She still enjoyed the foreign feeling when she visited, but this crystal city was her true home. And now, these stone walls inside the deepest dungeon, the darkest part of her bright castle, would be her last home. Tomorrow, they would come for her, and she would die. And little Jillan would live. That much Aledredon had promised. Puppet or not, Jillan would live.
Surely, she realized, as her thoughts led her on, someone would explain the plight of her family. An old servant or friend, or anyone. And then, she continued, Jillan would rise up against his oppressor, and take back his rightful place.
Despite her attempts to convince herself of this, she wondered if Jillan would come to love Alendredon. After all, he would likely be kind to the boy, and he would probably raise him as his own, if only to ensure that such an uprising would never actually happen. Stories or no stories, nothing would cause a boy to kill his father.
The thought of Jillan calling Alendredon his father made Callyn almost cry. So many years, rule passed down from father to daughter to son, and now it was wiped out so quickly, with seven interstellar warships and one insane overlord. Or one overlord with an insane population. Callyn doubted his story, but she didn’t find that there was much of a difference in whether or not it was true. He had taken over the planet, and that was it. Spurred by his own cruelty or by others’, he had led. She certainly didn’t believe that he had ever thought it would make it better for him to lead. Aledredon was many things, among them apparently evil, but he was not stupid.
Comfort and sleep were both denied her, so she spent the remainder of the night with her thoughts, her mind twisting and turning and causing her to feel ill on more than one occasion. Beside her, the newly-named prince slept soundly, unaware.
Comments, of course, are appreciated, although I won't blame you if you can't read through all of that.