Tales of Cubonia

The Golden Hourglass 11 - The Fireworker

Alastair Meyer was an engineer.

To clarify, he is no longer, hence the was.

As a young man, Alastair was one of the most talented engineers in all of Cubonia. His bridges were unrivaled. His airships were the fastest. And when he did design a building, it was only for the highest lords and ladies in the land. From the moment he joined the Guild of Engineers, he climbed the ranks so quickly that many believed he was some sort of dark sorcerer who was using his Dark Magics to aid his work which was, of course, forbidden and meant expulsion from the Guild and disgrace. No one could ever prove such a thing mostly because Alastair had no magical ability whatsoever. It took only three short years for him to be named Guildmaster, a title that took other Guild members nearly fifty years to attain.

The success went to Alastair's head, however, as success can have an annoying habit of doing. He began to dream bigger and reach further. While his designs were borderline insane, they always seemed to work out in the end, and gain Alastair that much more renown. It wasn't until he was commissioned by the Great Earl of Paragotia to build a floating castle that things went wrong.

You see, the Great Earl – a burly man with delusion of grandeur and an almost debilitating lisp – believed that his title set him above the common man. He was mere moments away from believing that he was, in fact, a god amongst men. As such, he believed his place was in the sky so that all his subjects may look upon him and his lot with marvel and awe. Not only did he want the castle to be exquisite, but he wanted the grounds of the Royal Palace to be large enough and high enough in the air for anyone within a hundred furlongs to be able to view the castle and know that a living god was among them, albeit way up in the air.

Alastair designed a castle of such magnificence that the Great Earl could hardly believe it was possible. The building of the Royal Palace of Paragotia took nearly thirty years. Each brick had to be cleverly mixed with an appropriate ratio of airpine needles to ensure that it would be light enough to stay in the air, but not so light that it would float away forever. It was the most daunting task any Builder had ever taken on, and many men lost their lives in the project, particularly near the end when the castle had reach a buoyancy high enough to make construction only possible when done at great heights and usually suspended over nothing but the welcoming sky beneath.

The Royal Palace of Paragotia was only in the air for eight days before it fell. No one had ever used airpine as such an integral component of construction before, so no one could know that the buoyancy that airpine needles bestowed would only last a limited amount of time. The Great Earl was holding an opulent feast in honor of his new residence when the castle plummeted from the sky like...well, like a castle that had been raised a thousand feet in the air and then dropped.

Many lost their lives, including the Great Earl. Those who survived only did so because they were wretched enough to use others to cushion their fall. The whole incident was, naturally, blamed on Alastair and not on the Great Earl's delusional idea that prompted Alastair to build the castle in the first place. Alastair was ousted from the Guild of Engineers rather unceremoniously for the fiasco, his wife took his two sons and moved in with her sister in Rodain, and he discovered a drink that was simply referred to as The Pink Faery. Alastair spent twenty years of his life lost in a bottle of Pink Faery and living on the streets, begging for money to buy more Pink Faery. Needless to say, it was rather unpleasant.

One evening when he had gone far past three sheets to the wind, Alastair stumbled upon a store of fireworks that were being produced for the annual Midsummer Festival. The Pink Faery encouraged Alastair to make a fireworks show of his own, and using the hallucinations that The Pink Faery granted, he created a show so spectacular that there are some that still think about it when they see fireworks.

Queen Annelise, only a few years into her queendom and with her first child on the way, visited Alastair in the dungeon where he was being kept and offered him the job of Lead Fireworker at Castle Andora. Wishing to get out of his jail cell, Alastair accepted on the condition he be readily supplied with The Pink Faery as it was his greatest aid in the newfound talent of firework. Reluctantly, Queen Annelise accepted, and Alastair took up a permanent, booze soaked residence at Castle Andora.

He had gone from the failure that killed the Great Earl to a renowned Fireworker In a few short years. His love for The Pink Faery was his true master though, and he was often found asleep in the streets or running naked around the castle grounds which the royal family would continually make excuses for. His exploits were quickly becoming as prominent as his Firework. Queen Annelise approached him one evening as he lie in a particularly smelly stall in the stables, and informed him that her daughter's sixteenth name day would soon be approaching, and that it would be best if Alastair make the Midsummer Festival fireworks display his best work ever, and then quietly retire from his position shortly afterwards. Alastair accepted only because it would give him more time to chase The Pink Faery.

And so it was, on Princess Alexandra's sixteenth name day Alastair Meyer found himself in a small antechamber of Castle Andora surrounded by nearly five hundred different types of fireworks, waiting for his cue to begin his final performance, his swan song. The Pink Faery, however, felt that things were taking a bit too long and the show should start straight away instead of giving the queen a chance to make her traditional speech.

The first firework was sent into the sky not long after a gryffon and its rider had launched themselves into the sky from a small inn just a stone's throw away from the castle