The King of Candyland Wants a Wife

Chapter One

The King of Candyland Wants a Wife

Once upon a time, there was a great King who was wise and just and kind. He lived in a far off realm and ruled a land full of beauty and wonder – and candy. This King, named Richard, was the King of Candyland. From his Peppermint Palace in the Jellybean City, the King governed the four territories that made up Candyland: Cookie Kingdom, Lollipop Land, Truffle County and the Gingerbread Province.

 Each territory was far different from each other, such as the Lollipop Land, which was a forest of giant, tree-like lollipops that had the power to move about on their great white trunks and speak to each other in a sweet, indecipherable language. The Lollipops were kindred spirits, always willing to help people, even if they could not communicate with them. They would form paths for lost travellers, parting themselves like the Red Sea before Moses and offering safe passage, while rustling their brightly coloured, perfectly circular leaves.  Lollipop Land was also home to the Soda Sea, an ocean that instead of being made of salt water, housed bright pink sugary liquid that washed up on beaches of sherbet. If a fisherman were to take to the waves of the Soda Sea, in his nets he could expect to catch brightly coloured gummy fish and long strings of sour-seaweed, a delicacy in Jellybean City.

 But this was in contrast to the barren Truffle County, a wasteland of rough, chocolate plains. Winds howled across the surface of the flatlands that were only interspersed by enormous rocks of sharp toffee jutting from the ground and high into the sky. A wide river of thick milk flowed sluggishly through the County, cutting it jaggedly in half. The only way to cross the Milky River was over a delicate wafer-bridge. One had to be extremely careful crossing the bridge, lest they not make it to the sanctuary of the Marzipan Tower on the other side. The Tower was a lone pillar of habitation in the stark Truffle wastelands. It offered refuge to the travellers that dared brave the harshness of the County. The Tower was inhabited by small truffle people, by which the territory got its name. The Truffle People were quite literally walking chocolate truffles, about the same size as a cat, with little black arms and legs and beady black eyes. They did not speak and seemed grumpy all the time, but efficiently tended to the explorers of the County none-the-less.

The Cookie Kingdom and Gingerbread Province were both similar, but were inhabited by very different creatures. The natives of the Cookie Kingdom were large walking cookies, all in a variety of flavours, but God help you if you try to eat one! The Cookies were extremely snobbish and rude. They believed they were better than everyone else in their Snickerdoodle Citadel and the whole of Cookie Kingdom. The Cookies were always trying to usurp the King, but thankfully to no avail, as the King was clever and knew that if the Cookies were to rule, Candyland would no longer be a peaceful place. The Cookies were ruled by the Cookie Overlord, preferring independence from the Kings leadership because they believed that, as a human, the King was not fit to govern the Candy People. The Cookie Overlord was a brutal dictator and showed obvious favouritism to the Cookie People of his land and severely mistreating the unfortunate humans who resided there. Outside the Citadel, the Cookie Kingdom was a place of rolling marshmallow hills covered in pale green floss-grass and the occasional Lollipop Tree and dotted about were villages in which some of the less snobbish Cookies lived, along with humans who had managed to escape the Cookie Overlord and his prison of Snickerdoodle Citadel.

Not all Cookies were bad though, as was demonstrated by the Gingerbread Lords and Ladies of the Gingerbread Province. The Gingerbreads were civilised people, always composed and very polite. They were distant cousins of the Cookies, but shared none of their hatred of humans; in fact, the Gingerbread Baroness was close friends with the King of Candyland and had been for many years. The Gingerbread Province was a very majestic place, filled with beautiful sprawling castles and mansions nestled into tall mountains formed completely of Peanut Brittle with tops dusted with sugary snow, dubbed the Peanut Peaks. Among the summits of the mountains, high waterfalls of sparkling golden maple syrup fell and splashed into glittering pools metres below. Near the middle of the Province, all the syrupy springs joined together and formed a vast lake. Small gold waves gently lapped at the chocolate pebbles of the shores. The Gingerbread People dressed in thick coats and dresses woven from the floss-grasses that dusted the base of the Peaks to ward off the frosty temperatures.