Chapter 7

(Eris)

I didn't know what I'd expected although this was certainly not it. Fantasia seemed awe-struck and disgusted at our punitive conditions however I simply understood that my father had a plan, no matter the conditions we were given.

I went to the balcony, opened it, and looked outside just in time to see a small huddle of 'gleaners' going out into the wastes to scrape what fungus and plant life would grow on the glaciers and frosted sheets of ice nearby, and also to hunt whatever animal life was out there. This was a precautionary measure implemented by their queen since they had farms within the walls of the crater that, to my knowledge, were quite bountiful and pretty much ran themselves.

“Core below, what is this place about?!” Fantasia sputtered out angrily as she looked around the room frantically, hoping beyond hope that it was better than what she was seeing.

Mother didn't say anything and seemed to be entirely focused on the baby. This room was truly miserable, it was too small to even have separate rooms of its own and was more of a communal living space for the five of us. I shook my head as I walked out, quickly telling mother that I was going to see what father and the queen were doing.

When I felt I was out of sight, I removed some of the layers my father had put on me. I couldn't feel the cold or heat from either the layers or the outside and so I didn't care much for them. When I stepped out of the hotel, I'd expected it to be as slow and sleepy as when we'd come. I was soon proven wrong as a large crowd of people stood huddled around the door, all eyes on me. I hesitated a bit before asking what the matter was, scanning the crowd for my father, or any other politically significant figure to get out of this mess.

Though it was common for a small crowd of thirty to forty people to follow my father around the city, it was very rare for any more than five or six to be around my sister, mother or myself.

In front of me stood a crowd of at least sixty pairs of bright and dull blue eyes, pale skin and frosted white hair. A man of about my mother's age stepped forward and cleared his throat, speaking a heavily accented dialect of Imaginarian,

“Madame, we have come to ask you to speak to us of the state of the world.” He spoke in an especially thick, shaky accent that was slow and slightly hard to understand but I heard it and understood what they wanted.

I deliberated with myself for a second, what’s particularly new about the world that I can tell them? Nothing of importance came to my mind especially seeing as how this was my family’s first destination on our expansive and exhaustive journey throughout the Continent.

“Who among you speaks the common dialect?” I asked loudly across the crowd “If any among you speak it, please come forth!” Twelve people each raised their hands and came before me. “Whatever I speak, please translate it to your fellows so that they might understand.” It was common for there to be separate dialects across the many cities of my father’s rule. Some of them were so varied from the original tongue that they were practically separate languages.

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The amount of attention that was focused on me was daunting to say the least and I didn't know what I could tell them that was new and interesting. I pondered for a bit as I began to speak again, interrupting the awkward silence of dragging minutes and seconds, “I need to reach my father and speak with him promptly. Let us walk through the city to the palace.”

After letting the translators finish, many of the crowd nodded and made a way for me to walk through. As I walked past them, I could hear them shuffling behind me. I turned to see them following me. Is this what it feels like to be queen? I asked myself quietly as I walked the frozen roads carefully.

A woman ran up to me with her child in her hands, asked me something in quick, thickly accented Imaginarian before thrusting her baby forward into my hands with a small bow. I took it so as not to drop it while a translator told me to kiss it and give it my blessing. I shrugged internally as I gently gave the baby a kiss on the forehead and prayed a quiet blessing aloud over it before giving it back to its mother who bowed and thanked me loudly. Seeing this, other mothers came up to me with their children ranging between twelve and newly born, asking the same thing of me.

After several minutes of blessing the children and kissing more people than I had ever in my life, we walked on toward the castle, picking up more people and assimilating them into the crowd as we went, eventually numbering in the nineties to possibly hundreds.

As we passed a more densely populated area, something caught my eye. A frail old man stood coughing on his front porch before falling down in front of me. The crowd moved around him and gently lifted him up before bringing him to me.

The people were finally quiet and those carrying him were sombre as he lay in their arms, his wings creaked and groaned as he attempted to stretch them, his orb flickered as barely a ball of frozen white light the size of a rose petal, scales fell from his dragon-like wings as he murmured out something.

One of the translators turned to me, eyes like tombstones, “Good queen, this man wishes to speak with you. We fear he is not long for this world.”

I came closer to him and his cold, sightless eyes seemed to readjust as he looked at me. He was blind and more pale than his kindred citizens but he seemed to look right at me. He coughed away from me, blue blood staining his palm.

I reached over to his hands and held them as the crowd gently put him into my arms. I held him close to my chest and something seemed to spark in his eyes as he felt my warmth, as if my very presence was keeping him alive.

“Are you the fonterling princess?” He asked in his solemn dialect.

I answered yes and he seemed to gasp and his eyes opened as he looked to the sky. He reached his frail arms up and he whispered something quietly that I couldn’t piece together and that my translators were at a loss to explain.

His family told me that he had always wanted to meet the future empress of his land. I held his hand tightly as the crowd bowed and closed their eyes, lifting up a silent prayer as he spoke to me in his fading tongue until he fell silent. I embraced him, even if I couldn't understand what he was saying, I could still tell by his tone of voice that it was deeply personal and important for me to hear. I felt him heave and gasp before he exhaled one last time speaking the words, “I am at peace now, my peqtissin…”

I lay him down and closed his blind eyes as some people rose and carried him away to be buried in the Frozen Wastes. The word he had spoken was peqtissin, a heavily accented form of the word for 'queen'. I unconsciously wiped the tears I didn't know I had been crying from my face as the remaining people sat around me in rings for a moment of silence that even the children seemed to understand.