Dragonworld: The Drive For Power

Part 14: The Outland Kingdoms

Needle in a haystack

Footsteps could be heard pounding against the hard surface of the central road. A lone figure was walking quickly in the direction of the court. Normally, a man of his status would not be seen at this late hour unescorted. However, these were not ordinary circumstances.

Taufus Lanse was the assistant of the chief diviner and record keeper of the kingdom. Above all, he was a mage.

Long ago according to tradition, magic was all present throughout the world. At the time when gods lived among men, certain people could wield its powers.

After the demons invaded, and the gods moved away into their celestial realm, magic slowly trickled out of the world. Only small amounts of it are left. Mages are one of the few who can still employ it.

Taufus was hurrying up to give news to the king of a discovery he had made while rummaging through old records. King Plamus IV., the ruler of the western port city of Akelon, had tasked him with one very important mission. 

"Use your magic, if you have to," he recalled the king as saying. 

Finally, he was able to deliver.

Akelon was one of the city-states on the western side of the continent. It was located at the edge of the Green Sea, and served as an important hub for goods coming from both the interior, but also from across the seas.

The ancestor of Plamus IV., a certain man named Bloodbeard the Rough, had been a pirate. He preyed on the merchant ships of the Green Sea, and grew enormously rich doing it. With his ill-gotten wealth, he was able to assemble a large flotilla of ships and conquer the city of Akelon.

After the conquest, he installed himself on the throne as the first ruler of the Bloodbeard dynasty. In order to have insurance in case things didn't work out for him in the city-state, he had hidden away a large portion of his gold on some remote island.

No one knew where it was. Apparently, he had left clues to its location in his former home, an old pirate fort, but the location of that had also been forgotten through the ages. Plamus had tasked Taufus with trying to find where it was.

Taufus might finally have succeeded. Among the old records, hidden away in an ancient library, he found the diary of one of the captains of Bloodbeard's pirate flotilla. While Bloodbeard himself was illiterate, that was not always the case among his commanders.

"You can find gold in the most unexpected of places," one of his old teachers used to say. Who knew this could also apply to a few sheets of rotting paper written by a crook. 

"A royal dynasty stemming from a pirate," murmured the mage, a grin on his face. 

As he approached the king's palace, the mage made sure to appear presentable. After days spent wading through the decrepit library, he had developed severe black shadows under his eyes, and his clothes certainly looked like clothes that hadn't been cleaned in weeks.

Recognizing the assistant of the chief diviner and record keeper of the kingdom, the guards at the front gate let Taufus through. However, now he had to deal with the king's chief slipper keeper. That one was always a tough cookie.

Coming down in his nightgown, the chief slipper keeper did not look happy.

"What is the matter with you? Can't you see people are sleeping? What are you doing here at this ungodly hour?" Screaming at the top of his lungs was a specialty of the man whose role was to give the king his footwear in the morning.

Apart from that function, the chief slipper keeper also played a variety of other roles. He was the king's chief advisor, his chief assistant, kept his agenda, and also tasted and poured his wine during meals.