The Roar of Andora: Book One

Chapter Seventeen: The Winter of Discontent

Eden was nothing more than a memory. A silly boyhood crush that Aaron had on the girl who was to be his brother's wife. Looking back, Aaron concluded his infatuation with the Pyrésees princess was just envy. Many nights after seeing her last, Aaron dreamed of Eden. Imagined that he were the one betrothed to her, and although he had never set his eyes on Torino, Aaron pretended in his dreams that he were the one who would be sent to the Great City to study under the Council and the Knights of Sevren. Aaron abstained from fantasizing about his romance with Eden in any sexual context, for he had admired her far too greatly, and was still under the impressionistic adolescent belief that desiring sex with someone he loved was immoral. Whenever Aaron relied on the mental picture of some idyllic future to carry him through whatever woes of the day, he would return to the scene in his head where he would arrive in Torino after many long years of not having seen her (somehow Sidon was just gone from the world) and Eden would be enamoured by the man he had become. In the dream, enemies would attack them on the streets of Torino, and Aaron would withdraw his sword and fend them off. Saving her life. Realizing what a hero Aaron was, Eden would fall madly in love with him. If he couldn't be king of Andora, together, he and Eden would rule over the seaside kingdom that the boy had dreamed of returning to ever since his visit for the princess's coming-of-age ceremony.

But Aaron was no longer fourteen years old. By the time his sixteenth birthday rolled around he had long abandoned his unrequited crush on Eden and forfeited the desire to someday sit on the throne.

Throughout the years, Aaron slowly concluded that an opportunity to rise out of his rank was never going to happen. He was not to study and train abroad in Torino nor become Eden's husband. One day, after having realized that he was officially Eden's brother in-law, he lost all of his feelings for her.

Settling for his installed birth-rank, Aaron became aggressively committed to the art of war. He hadn't sat down at a piano or picked up the lyre in years. Determined to being the captain of the Andoran military, for that was the most highly respected rank a son of royal blood could receive, he relentlessly trained with the other warrior's sons. Breaking his body down to exhaustion. Eating twice as much as he could, his body needed to be combat-ready.

Jorge, the Evershield boys' childhood swordsmaster, was discharged from the service of the Evershields as the boys became men and Jorge withdrew from ever again training young men in the art of war, and vowed to only instruct students in meditative healing. Much to Jorge's misfortune, the Evershield boys out of spite for their former instructor began calling him 'Jorge the Crazy,' and that nickname quickly caught on around Andora. Wanting to ensconce his place amidst his cousins and peers, Aaron began using the nickname too.

Throughout the winter of his eighteenth year, Aaron roused early every morning to practice his swordsmanship and participated in the affairs of the Andoran court; sanctioned solely under the precedent that his father had instructed George to set before he departed.

The winter was brutal to the land and the frost permeated deeper than usual. The days would sporadically warm up, and then the next morning turn bitterly cold. Farmers struggled to keep their crops alive and accused the Winds of playing cruel games. Some were so distraught by their failed crops that they turned to blaming the unfavourable weather patterns on the absence of Adonis II. Saying that since Andora went without a king the elements were punishing the people.

Coincidentally, the existential theories that the farmers created and spread around the Vale of Catholina worked in Aaron's uncle's favour. And so by using these rumours, Jarod Evershield seized as much authority as he could over the council. Jarod proposed the immediate construction of weapon facilities that were to experiment with a new device to be used in war—explosives, as the inventors called them. No other province in the Continent of Andora had the new explosives to their avail. The alchemic formula was purchased from traders in the far, far east and, at this point, had yet to see a single detonation anywhere in the Continent.