The Duke was not the first student I ever tutored in my academic career, but I can say without the slightest doubt that he was the most brilliant. Anyone would have had said the same. His insights would have both shamed and delighted the professors at the university if he had ever met them, and often during my tutoring I lamented that the Duke would never have such an opportunity.

I'll admit that my ego was a bit bruised by the tremendous speed with which he was able to absorb my carefully prepared lessons, concepts that had at first baffled me when I learned them so many years ago. Not only did he fully understand them when he was first introduced to them, but he also had the talent to instantly apply them, to modify them, to question them, and finally accept or reject them based upon his brutally logical conclusions, conclusions that I would never have thought of.

Before starting my second day, the Chancellor prepared for me an outline of what I was to teach him. It was very short, and consisted only of the most basic of social manners. I immediately discarded this notion. If I was to be his tutor, then I was to also be his source of knowledge. My duty as an educated man exceeded that of a common teacher of etiquette.

I was allowed merely an hour every morning to tutor him. Each time I would begin with the most elementary concepts and attempted to proceed to those more difficult, but by the time I had moved on the Duke already deduced them through pure inspiration and extrapolation. It was as though the facts followed logically from the initial insight, and the logic led further into realms beyond even my education.

Having made the decision to exceed my orders, I ended up teaching him the basics of higher mathematics. When we had finished, he had already moved onto forms unknown to me. After I had moved onto economics, he had also ready come up with formulas describing the behavior of entire imaginary countries, and how they would interact. At the time I remarked that it was he who was infinitely more suited to the role of managing the treasury, not I, nor the Chancellor.

True to my word I would leave him books from taken from both my estate library and the long-neglected palace library. When I would return the next day, he had already finished the book, memorized its contents, and had attempted to rewrite passages upon the walls of his room in his own invented language.

"Why do you do that?"

"The language of Oriana is too slow, too unrefined, too crude. I can't fully appreciate it."

His memory was phenomenal. True to duty, I prepared him as much as possible for the upcoming wedding. I showed him a list of the various nobles that would be in attendance, and he would recite the names, titles, and recent history of each one. From me he learned how to shake hands, overcoming his trepidation for physical contact in the process.

One day the conversation turned to theology and also cosmology. He asked me to explain after he read of an academic's reference to the classical deities in a relatively modern treatise, so I did. My inquiry about his feeding apparently got carried on, and his rations were delivered at their proper time. As I explained, he tore apart a loaf of bread, his thin fingered hands picking at the soft crumbs from the inside of the crust, as if he were doing a gross dissection of some new creature.

While he ate, I told him the old story of the Creator, and the Creator's war with the Three Who Were, and how the Creator fixed the world in the aftermath, changing it into the state that it is today: a mercurial, everlasting pool of creation and destruction. I told him how it was believed by some theologians that it was through the Creator's benevolence that new lands are created to add to the diversity and bounty of our world. That the Kingdom lay at the center of this great mechanism as a sign of His favoritism of us.

When I had finished, the Duke began with only a simple question, a comment really.

"Are there people today who truly believe that?" he asked.

"Most do," I smiled. "You have a questioning mind. That's good. Very good. Now do you have any other questions about today's material?"

"Who are the Three That Were?" he asked, direct as always.

"I'm not certain," I replied. "Once when I was told the story by my parents around the fire, I often asked myself the same question. I don't think that we are supposed to know. They were simply details in the Creator's story - side characters, inconsequential except in how they might have interacted with the Creator."

"Villains?" the Duke asked.

"You could call them that," "Yes, 'villain' is an apt title. They could be thought of as representations to that primal state of darkness and chaos that existed before the Creator's presence brought light. Come to think of it, I don't believe that you'll meet a single person in all of Oriana who could tell you anything about them. Even their names have been forgotten."

"Hm," the Duke said. "Then in that case, they were much like me."

I had no answer for that last comment he made.

I apologize to you, my employer, for this interruption in the interview. I warrant that you yourself caught the reference to the trio of deities referred to by Grumper as the Three Who Were.

It was only when the interview was concluded that I was able to compile my own findings on the subject. For this information, please consult the first appendix labeled "Notes Concerning the Dead Religions of Oriana" for a full disclosure.

I shall now return to the interview with your blessing.

"Can you tell me anything about the library?" the interviewer asked. "I should like to visit one day."

"Magnificent that library was, not even the great storehouses of knowledge of the university that I attended could equal it. It was an immense chamber that formed the heart of the oldest section of the palace. Within its disorganized shelves lay tomes and scrolls dating back to before the official history began in Year One.

"All gone now, of course. Again, like the trophy room, the library did not escape the Princess's renovation. If you should ever come face to face with the Princess, you would instantly see a stubbornness about her. I think that the trait runs in the royal family, courses through their veins that they think is so pure. Once the Princess has made her mind, there is absolutely nothing that can dissuade her from that course of action. She's also a fast judge of appearances. Displease her on the first meeting, and she will never want anything to do with you for as long as you live. She was the same way with that fine library, and other fixtures of the palace.

"She would go into a room, and instantly assess what was to be done with it. In the library's case, its entire contents were removed, its weighty tomes were re-located, sold off or burned when a place could not be found for them. Those books that the Princess deemed to be of some value she had moved to her apartments in the upper levels. Others - histories mainly- she had destroyed. Her reasons varied, as though she couldn't quite convey her distaste. Sometimes she claimed that the kingdom needed a new beginning, and the complete erasure of our records would give us that. 'We will not carry the burden of the past, Grumper. Not anymore. In the name of pleasantness, we will take steps forward. Out of the shadows of the past and into the light.' Another time she said, 'I am right in doing this. One can't find the answer to life in any book. Light, love, courage – those are the ways to wisdom. Not books.'

"When she was finished moving every book, scroll, painting, and dusty tome, - when she had finished stripping the walls of the centuries old wooden shelves - there was just dusty shelves that she wanted to fill with a new crystal and metal ornament collection. She didn't even have that many in the collection - only a few. 'I'm still young. I will collect more. It's good to make space,.' she said.

"I believe that she did it for an entirely different reason. I have a theory, and it is this. It is so simple, and it is also maddening in its simplicity. I educated the Duke with books from that library. The Duke rebelled and became the kingdom's most notorious figure. I believe that it is because of this that she had the library destroyed. In her mind, if there was no more library, there would be no more Dukes to threaten the kingdom in the future.

"It was stupidity, ignorance...nay, it was true insanity.

"But those qualities are all I've come to expect from the royal line of Oriana."