The Chloenicles #1 [COMPLETE]

CHAPTER 17: The Devine Right of Queens

When I came back to the secret room, the crowd around Paul Herford had scattered. It took me a few seconds, before I spotted him at the table that Miranda, Lars and I had been sitting at before I had left to make the call.
I went over there to find Lars and Paul Herford sit next to each other in icy silence.
They were both reading the menu.
Lars must know it by heart by now.
I sat down on my old chair, put my phone on the table and stared at Paul Herford.
Now that I was not threatened with being kicked out anymore, I could think about what I thought Vitali the bouncer dude had told me: that Paul Herford was Queen Eliza's actual brother.

I could not be sure, but if this was true that would mean that he was a prince, right?
I don't know why this was so important to me to have this confirmed, royal people were just people, too.

But how often did you get to meet a prince?
I was thinking about a good way to ask him about what I had learned, but for some reason I could not find the right words or where to even begin.
So I just continued to stare at him.
He blushed and I could tell that I made him uncomfortable and that he tried to ignore me, but I could not help it.
After a little while longer he could not take it anymore.
„Yes, Chloe, you want to say something?", he said with a forced smile and looked up.
„You're a prince?"

Wow.
Way to have no filter, Chloe!
All this thinking about how to bring the subject up for nothing.
He sighed. „I knew you found out about my sister. People always become weird when they find out about her."
„So it's true then?"
„Yes and no. I am not a prince. I am the Queen's brother."

I frowned. „But I thought the correct title for the brother of a Queen would be ‚prince'...?"
„Maybe that is true for other monarchies but not for ours."
What did he mean by that?
I thought Miranda was the one responsible for the vague answers.
Lars noticed the confusion on my face.

„In human monarchies, the crown usually has some sort of legitimacy.

In early history, their rule was made legitimate by God. People were told, that the monarch was the only one able to get the job done because God had called on them. And that God would be the only one able to judge them, if they ever ruled unjustly.
Long story short: This gave the royals some sort of super human vibe that nobody dared to question. And this unworldly power that came with that could not be learned, you had to be born with it. Meaning, only somebody related to them could become the next King or Queen.

In other, very cynical words: they came up with a neat way to tell people that they couldn't do anything about the people in power or their successors.

Nowadays, the political role royals take on is mostly established in countries' constitutions. We don't have our own law, we don't even have geographical borders, which means that our Queen is neither legitimized by a higher, unworldly power, her ancestry or some form of law. All of this makes our monarchy so fragile and that's why—"
„And that's why I refuse to call myself a prince", Paul Herford interrupted Lars' explanation, „because in order to be one I needed to be born to some sort of royal person or there had to be a law that made my sister royal or some form of God had to tell me or my sister that we should just go for it."
I nodded slowly.
I was not sure if I a hundred percent understood what they had been saying but I saw where they were coming from.

There was one thing though, that really confused me.
„Then how come Eliza has the right to call herself Queen?", I asked.
„Good question! The short answer is that she started to call herself that and people caught on to it.", Lars said.
I thought about this for a second. „Eh, I think I need the longer answer please?"
He grinned. „Sure! Let's start in the eighteenth century."
He paused. „You still want to hear it?"
I nodded.
I could not see why not.
„Okay. So shortly before Eliza became Queen we started to become an actual community. Before that we kept to ourselves, to our families and clans, because we knew that we were different from the average human. It was during this time that we became aware of other clans like us around the world. We started to feel like we were more than just outsiders, more than just abominations of nature. We started to feel like we had a right to live a good life out of the shadows. It became clear pretty quickly that we needed somebody to represent our collective interests to make sure that we could achieve that goal. The idea was to show a united front. Power in numbers."
He sighed.
„But sadly the complete opposite happened. People had different ideas of what our goals actually were and how they should be represented. Not only did those different opinions rip our community apart. Our families, our clans, which had structured our way of live until that point in time, split into different factions, too. With the old power structure gone and no new power structure in place, chaos erupted. And there were so many men who thought they would be the solution. Each of them gathered followers and started to advocate for themselves to become our ruler, our king. And the different contenders for the throne started to kill each other and their followers. Those times were brutal. Everyone was suffering, regardless wether they were actively involved in the political power conflicts or just trying to live their lives. And that was when Eliza started to go to people and introduce herself as the new Queen. So—"
„Wait, wait, wait back up a second!", I interrupted him, „She just went to random people and told them: Hi, I am Eliza, your new Queen?"
Lars nodded.
I shook my head in disbelief. „What on earth possessed her to do that?"
I could understand why she wanted to do something about the situation of her people, but doing that by straight up lying seemed.... in a lack of another word... pretty ballsy to me.
„I... I don't actually know why she did this", Lars said while stroking his beard, then he asked: „Paul do you know?"
Paul Herford thought about this for a while. „If I'm being brutally honest, and you haven't heard this from me, I think she started this as a joke. She saw that all the people who suffered by the hand of those who were supposedly there to make everything better and thought to herself: Hey, I can do better than that! She has always been and independent thinker... I think she just did this to see what would happen. The worst thing that could have happened would have been people laughing at a girl. She was, still is actually, a very outspoken woman, so sadly, people not taking her seriously is something she was used to. She had nothing to loose. But the more people she spoke to, the more she actually started to believe that she would be a good Queen. And the people thought so, too. So a couple of years after that, when it became clear that she had the support of the people and most of the other contestants were either dead, had lost their supporters to her or agreed to marry her, she crowned herself Queen and with that, the great wars of our kind ended."
I was very confused. „She just crowned herself?"