Buried In Thorns

HER5

The rattling of the wagon wheels made the ride nearly miserable, the rough wooden benches and the wooden beam covered in thick leather behind me arching overhead.

I endured this for three days all to enter the Zelig Kingdom, the hardest of all places to enter, for whatever reason. If people made it past the dense forest with misty passageways and confusing pathways, the first inspection port would surly make one reconsider where they had ended up.

With Madame Lota and Sir Lumin in charge of making brisk work of handling all paperwork and identification, we were the fastest to enter. But once inside, I couldn't help but get the odd feeling that I had just left behind safety. It was the way people looked here, or rather it was the appearance of the people themselves. It was nothing too suspicious, bustling people heading to their destinations, children playing around, no one seemed starved nor overly exhausted, but there was something almost off in the streets. It was on a momentary rest period while we had lunch, pulled over, and away from Main Street. I sat with Andrea as she chatted along with some of the others, looking around in awe at the lavish and elegant buildings around here. Which was odd, for a town so far from the capital, where these not supposed to be the lesser version of it?

I too began to look around, and in doing so came to stare at a pair of young brown eyes looking back at me. A child no older than seven was strolling along with his mother. It was mostly instinctive and somewhat ruse, I softened my face and smiled. He stared for a moment longer than normal as they strolled, eyes dropping lower as if looking me over, stared some more, and then mirrored my actions.

But his smile dropped faster than it had taken to even reach his face, eyes unusually expressionless for a young child, looking behind me, I saw him make faces at whoever he had been staring at. His mother, eye forward, did not even glance down to place her hand on his shoulder. At once, he too looked forward and on they went. It puzzled me, but I shrugged it off. Children were hard to read, harder to control, and unreasonable when it came to finding a reason behind their actions. Later that afternoon, I had been placed near the back, a freeing view of the scenery as the cold day went on.

The Kingdom of Zelig was the largest on the west side of the map, the territory stretching out father than the rich and lustrous kingdom of Mozier, not as large, but definitely nothing to brush off. Mozier was a nation of hot weather, sand-filled afternoons and beautiful music, jewels of all shapes and sizes, riches beyond one's imagination covered homes and the people. For a moment, I was swept away with recollections of the seafoam green morning skies while the world below swirled in caramels, browns and hypnotic laughter, golden dresses, and books laid out beside pillows. Those days it was much easier to play around for me. I had yet to know what I knew now of the price of the freedom I carried. I bit my tongue, focusing back on the moment at hand.

Zelig, for all its richness of the land, was priming with wildlife both around and within the nation. As extravagant as the buildings were, if one had enough knowledge on what other places looked like, would be able to tell that there was something almost wild and nearly haunted to the looks of this place, even if they were elegant when the little sun that came hit them. It was as if the very buildings themselves were taller than they seemed, their shadows crawling up the walls, windows looking like watchful eyes. Not much was known about here. Businesses that made trade within the ports said it was a place filled with restrained sharks. The women were known to be as powerful, if not more so than the men themselves. The thickest fabrics and furs were exported from here, along with exotic flowers and, most importantly, the strongest military power. These were all the common things known about Zelig, which made it all the more suspicious.

For a kingdom so large and brimming with military power, they were oddly nonexistent when it came to rumors. Nothing ill, nothing grand, there was little to ever be heard when it came to the ongoings of a place filled with such overflowing potential. Fewer people knew the names of royalty, less knew who was in power currently. The only time I could recall ever hearing a whisper of a rumor was perhaps from a tale my mother had told me of hand, something about a shut-in king or such. Even so, I couldn't help the sensation that there was something more to it. I mean, undoubtedly there probably was, no grand nation built themselves up holding hands, there was probably more skeleton beneath this uneven ground than most cared to dig for, but the sense that I had just walked into a spider web would not leave me. Not one to ignore my instincts, I decided then and there that my stay would be shorter than all of the previous, despite the benefits of being shielded as a maid by an entire kingdom, I needed no warning sign to know danger lurked here.