Someone Else's Kingdom, BOOK II - Scene III

"The Maiden Lands can't have killed him," exclaimed Maleeva, "It's impossible."

"He was killed in the Maiden Lands," replied King Mizmeam, matter-of-factly. The dim lighting of the room, and the absence of any other person, giving the conversation an almost conspiratorial tone.

"They weren't in the Maiden Lands," insisted Maleeva, with equal knowing. "There is no Ouroborus. No one travels beneath the desert and comes out on the other side of the world. It's just a myth - a clever ruse. The desert is just desert; endless desert, nothing more."

"But I've seen it," replied the king, with a continued equanimity. "You forget that I too made the exact same journey that Aralak made. It's knowledge for kings and the heirs of kings. I understand it's hard for you to take. I too wouldn't believe it - had I not seen it with my own eyes - but it's the reality of the world. You too should make the journey one day ..perhaps with Seaspell, when it's safe to do so. You need to experience it for yourself to truly know it. But for now you have to believe what I'm telling you."

Maleeva stepped with menace around the room, as King Mizmeam sat weightily in his chair, exhausted by the recent events. His tired lounging a poor substitute for sleep. Maleeva, cat-like, remained alert, but the darkness of night allowed doubts to enter her mind that the daylight would normally forbid from entering. She stood firm in her worldview, but there was a nagging quiver of doubt in her heart.

"I don't know what you've seen, but it's not what you think you've seen," she forged on, "I have known it, straight from the King of Tunid's mouth - just as every Head Treasurer has had such knowledge - that it's a ruse. A ruse to keep lesser kings in line. They mock you that you fall for it."

"Perhaps it's you they mock," came back the quick reply from Mizmeam, unfazed by any suggestion that he was in error. "I travelled west beneath the desert, through tunnels of solid stone, as hard and as real as the ground beneath these floors. I ascended steps into blinding daylight, and tasted the air on my lips. I saw endless fields, vivid green with nature. Poppies - poppies that are found nowhere else in this world but the Maiden Lands - scattering their pale blood red. Some in the very field where I stood - that I could and did touch with my very hands. Then beyond all that, in the distance, the sea. I stood in the east and looked out across the sea to the west."

Another slight shudder inwardly passed over Maleeva. The possibility that it was her that had been so deceived disconcerting her ever more so, but still, she couldn't accept it. She stared intently at the moonlight that shone through the window and reflected off the solid oak table that stood firm and anchor-like in the middle of the room. It's umber brown looking like two shades of black in the miserly dark.

"Perhaps you were taken round in a circle beneath the desert?" she proffered, searching hard for an explanation, "..Then ushered out into a fashioned garden, giving the illusion of the east."

"It was no garden," laughed Mizmeam, "It was an entire country. The whole kingdom stretched out in true realness before me."

The laughter irked Maleeva more. Disturbed, but unable to push on further, she moved things back to the more pressing issue at hand.

"Still, why would the Maiden Lands kill Prince Aralak? It makes no sense."

King Mizmeam looked regal, almost god-like - his heavy frame adding gravity to his words as he responded from the large sagging chair.

"It makes perfect sense, as an act of war - the world is changing. The Tunidan Kingdom is weak, it's desperate. Surely you see this. We now have black powder, they do not. These are desperate times, and don't think for a moment that the Maiden Lands are just a passive realm - an innocent pawn on the outer rim, hoping to stay on the sidelines. Do you think Queen Aglaia doesn't know these truths that I too know? Could the King of Tunid keep these truths to dole out like absolutions without her help? Guarding the gateway between east and west in her very kingdom. They can't hold down the Western Isles without our force - they know this. They grow weaker as we grow strong. Now they have robbed me of my only heir, at the very moment I threatened their eclipse. And now, as they have always ruled through secrets and intrigue, so too they seek to preserve their power through these means. The King of Tunid blindfolds men with these confusions. It's better for him that his enemies flail in darkness. It's the one way a power so small can hold dominance over a force much greater. But now it's time these veils were lifted, and a simpler world order be imposed."

At this point the door of the room swung open. The glowing light momentarily stunning the already-dazed Maleeva as it swept into the room. The torch-bearing messenger spoke with a suppressed animation, "We have news from the Eastern Kingdom, my liege.."