That went well, Alvin thought.
In fact, as he moved down through the corridors, he realised it had gone extremely well. He felt fortunate that he had found someone who seemed as compassionate as her, and without the rough around the edges that so many other Zantzar soldiers seemed to bring. It also did not at all hurt that with her slim figure and bob length hair, that she was also pleasant to look at as well.
Alvin shook his head. He could not picture himself entering into a courtship with an elf, nor did he think could she. The Elven Conclave had never quite put the right foot forward as it came into the modern world; executions had become rife for anyone who’d dared go against the direction it took as it reestablished itself on the Mylean stage.
Of course, he knew little about Cressia’s own life or beliefs, but with the choices being that she was fanatical or deathly afraid she’d be the subject of a court martial when she returned, Alvin decided it would not be a good idea to press a ring into her hands anytime soon.
Even so, when Weria told him of the elven lovers he’d taken in the past, of both genders, he at least now understood the appeal. From fencing instructors to guardsmen to common tavern wenches, their beauty was overwhelming.
At times he felt as though the elves were illustrations who’d simply gained life after they fell out of print from real life books. It did not help their case when Alvin often found them huddling in Zantzar libraries, retelling old stories when they weren’t working menial odd jobs for scraps.
He was walking himself in the direction of the Royal Library, which was apart of his latest plan to understand all this spirit business. Weria, his long suffering marshal was also there, and who’d drifted into reverie after tiring himself out from doing some soul searching.
Weria had more important things to do as member of the Army Council, but once Alvin heard that he’d been a librarian before military service he was suddenly not going to let that go amiss. Alvin had tasked him to find any leads, and soon enough most of his free time had been spent in the royal library trying to track down elusive creatures who moved between their world and the next.
Alvin was going to have some fun with the sleeping Marshal. This was not a habit becoming of a Prince - Oh, well, maybe it was during some of the darkest days of Zantzar history, but Alvin decided he would put aside his conscience this late evening.
He came around to the desk and squatted himself in position, toying at the tail ends of the Marshal's buttoned trousers like a hungry lady of the night who needed all the gold coin she could get to feed her several whining children.
This caused a few grumblings to be omitted, and soon both of his hands strayed dangerously close to the Prince's chest, the Marshal reaching for Alvin like this curvaceous wife he often laid with.
"Wakey, Wakey." Alvin whispered.
Weria's grim eyes lit up, and then he leapt high in the air out of his seat, all the wat to the other side of the room. He nearly crashed into several bookcases in the process, almost turning the Royal Library into battleground, a skill which Weria was steeped in.
There were all sorts of cursing and ranting until Weria's anger was sated and then he was content to go and swoon in the covers with his actual curvaceous wife. Or perhaps it was his curvaceous husband who dressed up as his wife?
Alvin was fortunate that, as he peered down at the research gathered, that Weria had done most of the hard dirty digging already.
He soon found himself being enveloped in a whole new world of notes, scrapbooks and shelved PhD programs as he began reading through everything that revolved around the spirit world.
Weria had started his search where any Zantzar native would begin: the great big book of Zantzar Fables.
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By the decree of One Eyed Vitali, the mean spirited king with a passion for the arts, every family within the kingdom had a received a copy of what was more popularly known as the “Big Red Book.”
A collection of tall tales and contemporary accounts of the more outlandish creatures believed to inhabit Zantzar, it was passed from one generation to another, and was in fact for many Zantzar children both both their first and last experiences when it came to reading.
Even Alvin had a copy of it hiding somewhere in his royal prince, and despite it being a bit world weary, it was still readable even after 150 years old.
Vitali had the foresight to add an appendix before any chose to dig deep into it’s nearly 500 page length. Orcs, ogres and trolls were all grouped together in the same chapter, reflecting some early beliefs Zantzar humans had before Trolls began to differentiate themselves from their supposedly large cousins, whom they were not related to at all.
Alvin flipped to the pages on spirits, of which there was only a few scant illustrations and paragraphs on the subject. He had once struggled to read them as a child, which he could not make any rational sense of. Tales of Orcs gobbling up unsuspecting children had always been a breeze, even if they were a more prescient threat, but something about spirits as a whole always seemed to unnerve him when the handmaidens read to him at night.
Among the largest of the illustrations, Alvin noticed how oddly drawn the Spirits were. They were outside a churchyard, and visibly distraught, over what seemed to be their anger with the Dominion Sect’s practice of drinking them during services.
But Alvin noticed how they were drawn as large spirals instead of anything resembling a pale human dressed in a white sheet. The spiral was familiar, but he couldn’t place where it had come from, or why it unnerved him so much. Any answer to that question would be ideal, just as long as it didn’t reveal that spirits frightened him to his bones.
Even back when he was a child, when Aeryn tried dabbling in the confines of black magic he found himself rushing out of their twin bedroom, and away to the warm embrace of King Theodore.
He did not want Aeryn to see him afraid and trembling, nor even would he with his mother, the Queen. They upheld such dark forms of masculinity for him that even Theodore tried to break the mould with his son, but Alvin began to lean into a more aloof manliness as the years went on, unable to keep up with the constant dents in his sensitive soul.
The mask he’d crafted had only begun to break apart when the other Zantzars fell from the throne. Queen Meredith died after a sudden and rapid illness, Theodore was soon left bedridden with a broken heart, and Aeryn had been snatched up by forest spirits and not been seen since.
It had only taken the near destruction of the Zantzar lineage for him to escape the confines of that dark, brooding masculinity he’d been forced into. Without it, he was now freed from becoming one of those angry phantoms who lingered in the past that he was reading about.
He wondered if Cressia and the other female elves had such traditional expectations of their men. They absolved themselves from the rest of the world for 60 years, breaking apart as they tried to rebuild themselves after the great Elvish Civil War, and then reemerged 20 years ago, with a new banner and a new spin on Mylean world history. Between that and trade rights being drafted up, Alvin could not recall reading about what the new Elven Man was supposed to be.
He had come across some elven men when King Theodore still accepted refugees, before it had all gotten a little bit too much for Zantzar to handle. They were older and the wives who came with them were considerably younger, but beneath the soft features he felt steel hearted men still expected to ensure their family’s safety as they fled.
He could not imagine to lead someone in a journey that would be fraught with such difficulty and terror; Even ruling Zantzar would be a considerably easier task.
Elven Conclave. Spiral. THAT’S IT. THE SPIRITS ARE LIKE THE GREAT SPIRAL!
“Spirals and Spirits,” He wrote down with a darkened pencil, “How do they relate?”
Cressia had come to him with a spiral brooch, but he was still not sure why the illustrator used spirals to illustrate the spirits.
Was it just an artistic choice? Alvin doubted that, considering Spirals were an elven creation. Even 150 years ago it would not be keeping for the time, when spirits were already being drawn as humans dressed in white sheets. (An education in the history of Art is always a blessing.)
“So why use Spirals?” He thought deeply, letting the pen tap into the heart of the pages.
It wondered if there was some Academic out there that could lead him to spirits? He left the table, and began to skim through the field of collected knowledge that Zantzar had shined a light on for the rest of the world.
It seemed there was one kooky PhD student out there who had taken the notion that Spirals and Spirits were entwined, and not just that, but elves were once spirits too. It sounded utterly bonkers, but perhaps there was a grain of truth to it that it had never been unearthed by the rest of the world.
He would tell Cressia all about it in the morning, and hope that this discovery might keep her distracted from bringing on overtly long sprinting sets.