My Darkening Ember

Chapter Twenty - Five

The gate was wide with both sides encased in gold, slithering into a dome, meeting at the top. It formed two hands, palm to palm, stretching their fingers towards heaven. It was the cup of hands, as I had read it at home. It would signal a blessing to the gods, but reading between the lines the hands looked more like they were bound, reaching out for help.

I knew if I asked Xander he would just concur, telling me that the capital bound people's freedom, and the hands signalled that or some other grim conspiracy. I had no doubt he was right, seeing how we had to live back home all the while these people could afford to bejewel their gate.

The rest of the city was nothing I could have imagined.

The streets were jam-packed full of merchants, trading, and yelling on every corner. Every five minutes there would be a guard posted, holding silver spears, wearing matching helmets with protruding white feathers. Their armour was just the same, with a swan emblem on their chest.

It was the national symbol, another wide conspiracy about the ugly truth of a swan's rise to beauty. A fitting symbol for this place.

Although the city was beautiful I couldn't help but think of home. The uneven pavements and sandy streets. The shared bathhouse, and the old rusty well behind the abandoned church, where faith was losing its grip on people every day. This city seemed so foreign.

The people wore clothes with the brightest colours I had ever seen on fabric. Blue, red, orange, and even pure white. Gowns, tunics, and suits were all so polished, carefully crafted, and jewelled in rubies or other valuable stones that seemed so common here.

They all walked on foot, on pavements that looked like they had been melted together in gold, travelling in and out of stores fit for every purpose. Buying shoes, polishing shoes and buying clothes with separate stores for men and women. A bakery was on every corner, and in the windows was fresh produce just sitting there waiting for someone to buy. It was that easy. There were stores for any purpose a human could need.

Building blocks stretched tall enough to block the sun, but still cowered beneath what was the tallest of them all. The palace, its highest tower could be seen in the back of the city. It was where the king once lived, but now it housed the court of nobles, composed of six men and a woman, all tasked with the responsibility of ruling the six territories.

The desert, where my home stood. The tundra, where the wildflower only bloomed in the summer. The glacier mountains, with dangerous predators. The farmland that housed the capital. And beyond that, lay the wetlands, and finally the woodlands. No one lived in the last two territories. It was uninhabitable, although under strict rule from the council as they also used them for their natural resources.

There was a seventh, a territory erased from the books. Stories told of a sand-covered desert where no life could emerge. Where the first man walked but didn't settle. It was nothing, so the stories said.

And at the top of it all, was one man. But the books never told much about him either, so my father had told me all he knew.

His name was Aleron Rasmund, a power-hungry general in consideration for the throne. It had been nineteen years since the king died and no decision had been made about who was next in line.

My father had said it was because the council liked the power. That they were afraid of Aleron, of what he would do with the crown. No one would give up their grasp on the throne, as if they all owned a tiny piece of it.

Aleron had been the youngest commanding general beside the king. In the years before the tragic death, the general had absorbed his duties, running the country how he saw fit.