The first ten minutes went by in a flash, but Iris couldn’t spare a thought to the new day breaking outside. She felt no wind break against the folds of her armour as her beast glided mere inches above a sea of gilded sand, listening to it scratch and gnaw at her feet’s armour as she entered a sweeping turn.

  No sooner would the sand settle, than a rush of sudden magic sweep over it, planting the fast-growing seeds of great, maple vines that wilted as quickly and beautifully as they sprouted. A kilometre each side of the small, purple speck they rode, it left a fleeting mark on the ever-evolving landscape visible from space.

  “Nothing?” Iris asked.

  “Nothing. Keep going.”

  Another border, shimmering an iridescent blue lay ahead, obscuring the next landscape. But caution took time, and their time was measured in hours.

  Her beast opened its maw, drawing on Iris’s armour like a scavenger on marrow. Purple pooled in its maw, building upon itself and kindling a dancing flame. With the careful movements of her fingers, she kneaded it like dough, spreading the fire into a barrier moments before they crossed onto the other side.

  Trees. Or that was what the blur of brown and blotches of green looked like to her. Her barrier was eating a path through it, but sustainable as it was, a search asked for sight lines. She straightened her back, and hear mount responded in kind. They rose, breaking the canopy like one would the waves.

  A forest, trees smaller and greener than the ones in the Queen’s garden. They stretched for miles and seemed as endless as the sand dunes before had, even though at their speed, the world seemed to spin around them like a compass losing its bearing.

  “I’m seeing something approaching your left flank under the canopy. Big but looks environmental. Don’t get caught up in it.”

  Iris chanced a look left, at first seeing nothing but uninterrupted green.

  No. It was small for now, but there was a disturbance. Trees by the dozen, yielding like simple blades of grass at the behest of something. Something that closed the distance in mere seconds.

  Whatever it was, defined only by its imprint on its surroundings, passed below them like the wind. Branches snapped, and leaves plummeted into the under croft, where light took the opportunity to invade.

  “What was that?”

  “Spirit,” Evalyn said. “Big.”

  “Take it further to your right,” their Deity’s Eye advised, and Iris leaned into the turn accordingly.

  They were covering their ground, Spirit or sand or tree be damned. Iris could only hope the other teams were doing the same.

  Thirteen minutes. Time was eroding fast.

  Things progressed with time. Naturally. The young would profess that things got better; technology, medicine, societal structure and culture, while the old insisted on the latter; degradation, failure. Both outlooks, true and false in their own right, were to some beings the unfortunate result of mortality—lives so short they would only see the rises and falls in what truly was an oscillating wave called change. Independent of every metric, everything both tangible and intangible, but also time, and place.

  Al’s journey further into the mountainous region of Geverde, past the great waters of Aerilia, felt like an exploration of that oscillating wave back through time, to a place so untouched, so pristine, that the greater trends beyond individual oscillations revealed themselves.

  The trees gossiped here. Silent giants they might’ve seemed at first, their transport’s wheels crushing great handfuls of bark like gravel, but so loud they were that Al could eavesdrop on them. Anxious whispers danced about their leaves, hopping from one branch to another like hysteria in a crowd. Something greater than Al’s feeble body was already afoot; a sign of things to come, they hoped.

  Their transport and escorts’ sputtering engines most definitely brought disrespect to such a venerable land, where even a dainty brook had watched at least a thousand years-worth of oscillations come and go.

  But they had no choice.

  It was an emergency, but the beings he was to meet might not think it such. Those who remembered a time before nations, when her majesty was but an upstart, might again see their current predicament as another course of change. But it was their job as a crowned prince to convince them.

  Nobody said being king was easy.

  What might’ve been a leisurely drive without the burden on their shoulders ended rather abruptly, as the cars in his convoy fanned themselves out along the edge of a generous glade. Still thoroughly under the canopy’s shade, spots of sunlight danced across their vehicles, pouring through the canopy’s break, and showering the grass in its centre with ample sunlight.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Picturesque, and the type of place ancient Spirits held in highest regard. Part of Al wished it was for mythical reasons, the kind that sparked legend, but when unhampered by the need for food, safety and connection, Spirits simply liked the beauty of untouched nature as anybody else would.

  The members of Al’s delegation exited first: record-keepers, mainly. The crown had been an institution greater than the Queen herself. With her children gone with her, there were few who could carry on their duty, and fewer who remembered the history such ancient Spirits would recall as though it were yesterday. Security they had left behind at the forest’s entrance.

  “Your Majesty,” Al’s driver said from the front seat—an individual clad in black, as non-descript as they would hope a member of the Special Operations to be.

  “Crack a window for me,” they said, and the driver obliged.

  Al fluttered their wings in a confidence ritual they never knew they had, and fluttered out of the window, venturing further into the clearing than anybody else until their claws landed on pillowy soil and his azure feathers shimmered in the sunlight.

  Around them was a forest holding its breath, waiting for them to speak first. There were things there, hiding in plain sight, nestled between branches, in the shadow of tree trunks or simply erasing themselves from his senses.

  How many made themselves known, if any, would be his first test.

  “To those who heeded my plea and honoured this land, this humble servant and the people who call it home, I extend my most sincere and desperate gratitude.”

  Their opening statement echoed through the shadow of sound, as loud as silence could be. The trees reacted first, their gossip reaching a fever pitch before once again settling, as though waiting for the next line.

  Nothing stirred otherwise. Not yet, at least.

  “I come in the wake of my mother’s death, who once stood here and asked such a congregation for the power to do something unprecedented. With her lineage severed, that power has been lost with her, and dark times befall her legacy and what she left behind.”

  The first signs of life made themselves known, but Al sensed such movement came not of intrigue or sympathy, but purely from the shock of the news itself. Some Spirits so insular in their way of life they were yet to realise.

  “I speak for the people that built a home under the shade of her great antlers, whose lives are now threatened by interlopers moulding our own to their will.”

  “It. Was. Her. Time.”

  Al could not tell which had spoken, only its vague direction, where the branches stretched and sagged around a hulking, invisible mass. Its speech was primitive, as though a toddler’s mind inhabited it, yet it boomed with the might of a war horn.

  “Kingdoms. Fall.”

  The silence that followed spoke for itself. Whether out of fear or agreement, the caucus aligned itself behind the booming voice.

  “Kingdoms fall when it is their time, but kingdoms fight back when threatened.”

  “Once. Is. Enough.”

  Pride. The folly of his kind only grew stronger the greater the power became, the more ancient the mind that wielded it.

  “Your people had a hand in this. You are but their servant.”

  “Then why does the country mourn?” Al argued with the second voice. “What justification do the devastating actions of a handful have?”

  “Wait…and…see…” said another voice.

  Thousands of years was still not sufficient justification. The younger Spirits, powerful as they were, held little sway over those who had watched mountains disappear. Like an ant begging for favours it didn’t deserve, Al wouldn’t get anywhere by pleading.

  Things progressed with time. The short-lived of the world would watch great change through their meagre lifetime and profess that reality itself had flipped asunder. But those who saw decades in the blink of an eye, an individual ebb and flow was no more or less consequential than the softest of vibrations.

  But even vibrations in number grew loud over time.

  “Her Majesty, the bearer of your powers, was most likely killed by human machinations.”

  A different stir this time; the moments preceding outrage, but for a moment in time, Al was spared of it, and so they seized their opportunity and continued.

  “We now know that artificial technology, unable to counter magic’s might directly, has sought to deprive its source. We know through sheer numbers alone, many a powerful Spirit has been brought to heel. Geverde is capable of such feats, yet still holds reverence for those who watch over our land. Our foe replaces that respect with hatred and wields power ten times greater.”

  Divided, they’d be overrun. The erasure of the Kingdom was not only the end of one era, but the start of another that would see many around Al fall victim to the torture of machinery, designed to tear their souls from their lifeless bodies and place them on an assembly line. It was an impossible ask to convey that to beings who’d known no adversity since their’s mother’s reign had begun.

  Nobody said his job as king would be easy.

  “You will once more be hunted, not by arrows and catapults, but by your brethren’s magic turned against you. Contraptions that hold the skies hostage will reduce this forest into mulch and ash overnight, and could do so until not a single flicker of life remained within these borders.”

  Al may have interpreted their own words through the lens of human speech, but where words could lie, Spirits could not. That preserved sanctity, and if Al’s fell short, those around them could at least feel their sincerity. Their desperation.

  “Do not be mistaken that we are the only party benefiting from our arrangement,” they said, planting a metaphorical foot in the dirt. “All land has been claimed, locked away between borders and agreements—without a sympathetic nation, we are all but resources up for the taking.”

  The trees seemed to gasp in unison; even the grass under Al’s talons stirred. Yet no intelligible voices were part of the quiet chorus. Not yet.

  Al waited, sheer nerves taking over like parasites, feeding thoughts of failure into the far crevices of their mind. Because there was no contingency plan—any deviation, and they might just wander right into their enemy’s hands, their cards still almost a complete mystery.

  “Full. Moon,” the hollow voice said, taking the space of every other Spirit at the gathering. “I grant you till then.”

  Full moon, barely a week.

  A hard bargain, in fact not a bargain at all. More leverage, more charisma, more...something. Something they lacked that their mother once hadn’t. Something she could’ve done that they would never replicate, and Geverde would only suffer for it.

  “Understood,” Al said, bowing their head to those who would barely raise a finger.