The meeting room was grand and illustrious. The architects had outdone themselves adding decoration to its very structure. Images had been etched into the walls and carved carefully into the room's supports and then beautifully painted to create a vibrant, visual space. Artistically shaped wooden chandeliers floated in place shining with magically created light. Each enchanted and each filled with spell thread by the servants before people had started arriving.

Usol entered the room and sat at the table in its centre. Compared to the decoration of the room the table and the chairs around it were plain and unremarkable. Usol wasn't the only one here. The Prince's steward Devin Gore, a pedant of a man with thinning hair white and utter devotion to doing things the proper way, had already taken a seat. Next to him sat the loyal Captain Holt, pointedly refusing to acknowledge Devin's existence. The captain was a career military man. He was a tall broad-shouldered man in armour and from the marks on his face, it was clear he'd seen combat more than once. Devin and Holt didn't particularly get along and had very different views on the best ways of doing things and often didn't hesitate to try and impose those views on each other. Devin was supposed to manage the servants and the fiances and Holt was supposed to manage the guards and security.

Devin frequently insulted Holt calling him a brash thoughtless brute and in typical Devin fashion, he did this by writing notes in fantastically neat and precise handwriting and sending them to everyone involved. Their squabbles could get vicious at points but Devin considered taking things too far 'indecent' and had lines he'd never even contemplate crossing. Similarly, Holt saw himself as a man of honour and would never resort to anything underhanded or violent. This all resulted in their feud having a set of unspoken rules they both adhered to.

The three of them weren't alone. In each corner of the room stood a palace guard clad in iron with their staff or wand at the ready. Vigilant against intrusion or attack. Against the back wall there stood a line of well-dressed servants with short to moderate length lines. One would naturally think they were there to attend the people coming to this meeting but in reality, this briefing was as much for them as it was for the people taking their seats at the table. They served as agents and spies. They'd mingle with the servants of anyone the prince would visit and learn all manner things. They were eyes and ears that could slip away unnoticed when the Prince couldn't. Sometimes they could even act as knives in the dark that pruned away problems before they could blossom. They were dedicated, well trained and surprisingly dangerous. No one coming to this meeting thought them simple servants. But they would act the role so thoroughly and professionally that it was easy to forget that for them it was just a mask and beneath that mask they were killers.

Lord Keel was next to enter. He was an older man, his skin had been toughened by spending so much time exposed to the sun and the wind. He had been a wyvern rider before the Jeklein treachery had wiped out Narell's wyverns. Wyverns lived for fifty years and to be able to ride one you'd need to care for and train it since it hatched. It would take ten years before it could carry a person while flying. They were not just tools of war they were hand raised lifelong companions to their riders. The Jeklein had murdered Lord Keel's trusted friend and they had taken the sky from him. Even now several years later he wore simple, yet tough clothes unbefitting a lord with a wyvern rider's scarf and goggles hanging around his neck. His gaze burned with an intensity that made him difficult to look in the eye. Lord Keel had not forgiven the Jeklein and Usol doubted that he ever could.

Lady Felmir shuffled in after him. The Narellian court had many stunningly beautiful ladies but Lady Felmir wasn't one of them. She was rather plain in comparison, even in the gorgeous dress she wore. Shoulder length brown hair, unremarkable features. Yet she had captured the Prince's eye when the many far more attractive ladies of the court were rebuffed. This was something that had made her many enemies among her peers. Perhaps this was why she seemed as timid as she did. Regardless of how timid she seemed Usol couldn't think of her as such. He knew better. She was cunning and ruthless and had quickly built a business empire in Narell from the finances of what many had considered a ruined noble house. Few now spoke ill of the power and influence her house now wielded. That was why she had drawn the Prince's attention. Lady Felmir got results. Usol had seen her negotiate, had seen all that timidness vanish as she extracted the very best terms from people who thought they could intimidate her.

Last but certainly not least the Prince entered the room. He was an impressive individual no matter how you viewed him. Soft handsome features, neat, blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Dressed in the finest of fabrics, with a cloak descending from his shoulders. He was exactly what the words handsome prince summoned to mind, except for his arms. They were strange assemblies of wood and iron that made strange whirring and clicking noises when they moved. They were painted in black and trimmed with gold with the Prince's heraldry inlaid into the back of each hand again in gold. They were a striking vision.

Everyone knew the story; on the night of broken trust when Jeklein assassins had come for him and his father he had lost both his arms saving his father's life. Healing could only do so much. The arms would need to be regenerated in one go for it work and no one had that much power, no left at any rate. His father had offered generous rewards to anyone who could restore his son's arms. A parade of quacks and fools had lined up only to fail to deliver what they promised. All except for one.

Dequillis was a mystery. She showed up wrapped in dirty rags, asked for materials and a workshop. The desperate king promised them to her but warned of punishment should she waste the materials and fail as all others had before her. She disappeared into the provided workshop taking all her meals there. Until two months later she emerged with the enchanted arms that the Prince now wore.

The arms mystified every enchanter, focus smith and craftsman who examined them. The channel layout made no sense. The channels themselves passed through moveable joints and most impossibly of all through the iron components. Even children knew spell thread couldn't penetrate iron. Channels in Iron were impossible. Yet in defiance of all logic here it was.

But that wasn't were the confusion had ended. The arms were magically efficient beyond all reason, the same power used to light a candle could keep the arms moving for several hours. The Prince was powerful, the speed he reformed his spell thread utterly dwarfed how much these devices consumed. So he had kept connected spell thread in the channels permanently. People could feel when spell thread connected to them was moved. The arms it seemed used this fact to provide sensory feedback to the user. Even more bizarre the Prince's spell thread in the arms had begun to solidify according to readers who witnessed it. It was becoming like his internal weave. If you saw a person's internal weave as their soul like many did this had startling implications.

Dequillis left almost as soon the arms were delivered. Saying she left might be simplifying things a bit, it would be more accurate to say she vanished. She vanished from the palace, with three heavy strongboxes of coins, without a single palace guard or servant noticing. This is what had made Dequillis such an excellent source of story and rumour. Was she a wandering grandmaster enchanter hiding from any repeat of the night of the broken trust by staying on the move and dressed in rags? Or was she the Obsidian witch quietly helping repair the broken son of the man who had tried to stand with her against the Jeklein in the Western Kingdom's darkest hour? Was she an illusion projected by a gold-hungry dragon expanding its horde, not through pillaging and violence but skilful craftsmanship and forgotten secrets? Was she stolen away by dangerous elements that saw how useful she could be and sought to force her to make them powerful weapons? The rumours and stories were endless and imaginative.

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Those stories affected the population, they added meaning to the devices the Prince now wore. The Prince's arms became symbols, symbols of regrowth and repair, of the damaged becoming strong and of Narellian resilience.

Everyone sitting at the table stood and bowed to him as he entered. He gestured for them to sit. All his mannerisms were precise, every movement he made was a deliberate choice. Usol knew the Prince had three versions of himself. One was the smiling Prince who greeted the public, a diplomat and a social butterfly representing himself well in any noble gathering. Another was the cold and precise version that had entered the room, this was the one that bore the weight of responsibility of his position, the one that could not afford a mistake. The last version was Usol's friend, he laughed and told dirty jokes, he was blunt and direct and made bad decisions freely. They had gotten into so much trouble when they were younger. But ever since the Prince had lost his arms Usol had seen less and less of that version of him.

"The Kingdom of Raliec has chosen to hold a festival to celebrate the fall of the Jeklein empress. They have invited me and my father to attend. My father cannot, his duties hold him here. But I have announced I intend to go. I ask that you accompany me as my entourage. Captain Holt, we will be in a foreign land so I will be trusting you and select a few of your best men to protect us during this visit,"

"Understood, your highness,"

"Officially we will be there as a sign of Narell's companionship with Raliec and show our support for their recovery. But the way I view things Narell comes first and as the prince I have a duty to it. Narell is by far the most prosperous of the western kingdoms currently. Despite the blows we've taken we are doing well economically. However, our military is crippled, it will take several decades to rebuild it and to breed and train new wyverns. We have no significant military force. If Raliec collapses the same way Vouran has we will have no way to stop that violence spreading across the border into our prosperous lands. Raliec is an important trading partner. So for the sake of Narell, Raliec must be made stable. This means for once our unofficial and official purposes are essentially the same,"

The Prince looked around the room, with his arms behind his back.

"We are currently limited by our lack of intel in Raliec. Devin, Usol I ask you to fix that. We need to know about the claimants. How close are they to civil war? What are their positions, strengths, vulnerabilities and who are their allies and supporters? What kind of man is the regent and what is his intentions? We will need to know everything we can if we are to pull our neighbour back from the brink. It will be a challenging task but I'm sure you'll find great relief by asking my servants for refreshments should the task ever tire you out. Lord Keel, Lady Felmir I would be honoured if you were to accompany me to the many balls we are sure to be invited to. I will be hounded where ever I go by people seeking Narell's backing for their bid for the throne. My movements will be watched closely. Everyone I speak to will be scrutinized. I will need your help to talk to people and learn what you can from these events. That and to keep me sane during them. If we can pick the right claimant and place them on the throne Raliec may stabilise. Picking the wrong one, or possibly any of them might cause it to spiral into a civil war we will most likely get dragged into. We need information before we can act,"

This was pretty much what Usol expected. He was good at divination magic, so his role here would be clear. But without enough information to work with, divination magic was a waste of time. Divination didn't show you the future or the truth. It showed concepts and how much people thought about those concepts. What those concepts were was difficult to figure out. They weren't exactly labelled. They were strange abstract things, misshapen and ever-changing. They defied description to those who did not practice divination magic themselves. It took deduction and a whole lot of guesswork to figure out even a handful. But by tracking down the concept of someone's identity and finding out what concepts they linked to could tell you a lot about a person. Divination did not provide answers handed out by generous gods, they were answers wrestled out from mankind's collective unconscious. It was terrible for finding the truth of the world but it excelled at telling you what everyone really thought about a person. It was a useful tool on a political battlefield.

"Now a secondary objective aside from this will be to locate Dequillis and the Obsidian Witch. Locating the Obsidian Witch could well bring stability to Raliec but people have been searching for her for a few years now so I doubt we'll find any leads that they missed. Dequillis, on the other hand, is someone we're more likely to find and is someone we cannot allow to be recruited by anyone else. Efforts at locating her in Narell have failed but we haven't been able to search in Raliec. Since her other options are Carlilis, a place where they'll have agents monitoring everyone who enters and leaves, Vouran, the Jeklein Empire or the broken north. I am fairly confident she is somewhere in Raliec and that she is using a different name. I will be leaving in three days and it will be a two-week journey. I would appreciate it if you helped me with this. I may well be sticking my head into a hornet's nest and your presence would make this much easier. If you have any questions or objections I'd like to hear them,"

Lord Keel was the first to respond. His raspy voice was a souvenir from decades of trying to yell over howling winds. "Your highness, you already know we are going with you. I have sworn oaths to your family and to Narell itself. You know I will fulfil those oaths. But I do have a question or two. How do we know Dequillis will be using a fake name?"

It was Usol who answered. He'd spent so much time failing to magically divine answers about Dequillis and he only came away with more questions but this was one of the few pieces of information he had gained from his efforts "Because Dequillis isn't her original name. I've tried to find out what her original name was or anything we didn't already know but all I can tell you is that she can change how she views her own identity and name like most people change hats. I can't find the name she changed to or the name she changed from. It was a clean break each time, she didn't once think of any former name and she had divested herself of the Dequillis identity before constructing a new one. Even after a year, I haven't a single thing she thought about while she was Dequillis I can use. So I can't find her other identities. Frankly, that is some terrifying mental discipline. Perhaps even more disturbingly it appears she didn't even think about anyone she interacted with except the Prince and the King. This may indicate she does not see people as...people. This is all the more reason to find her. It looks like she is highly intelligent, likely understands divination enough to take deliberate measures to counter it and may think nothing of killing any in her path,"

"I think that adds credence to the rumour about her and the Obsidian Witch being the same person if you think about it," quietly remarked Lady Felmir "It would take someone with that kind of mind to do what the Witch was able to do,"

"If that's the case is it truly a good idea to find this person?" inquired Devin.

The Prince leaned forward and placed his hands on the table. The movements were so natural you could be forgiven for thinking they were his real hands.

"I do not know," he admitted, his voice cold "But find her we will. Because we must. Because she doesn't stop existing just because we don't know where she is. She doesn't stop being dangerous because she is out of sight. And more than that we need her. We will find the Obsidian Witch for Raliec and Dequillis for Narell. If Raliec falls to chaos all the western kingdoms will follow. They need someone to rally behind and the Witch is perfect. She represents their old strength taken to the extreme and victory against their enemy. As for Dequillis and Narell-"

He took a rock from his pocket and with one mechanical hand crushed it into dust.

"-for us she represents a path back to being a military power,"