Prince Ignas' gaunt face and dark eyes scanned the room for someone who may be sympathetic to his cause, his patience was visibly wearing thin but everyone present could tell he was trying hard to remain diplomatic. At times his frail wrists would hold his head as he hid his face behind long, greasy looking black hair. His condition betrayed his actual age of thirty-something. Everyone present knew he was ill with some ailment but the real cause so far had been kept private.
By now he had been sat for hours listening to the various speakers arranged in Brittlerock Palace. These conferences held between Ignas' Crowhaven county council and his brother's in Brittlerock were intended to strengthen the condition of both counties, but the councils in both were fickle and corrupt and were slowly eroding the integrity of the authorities to a worrying degree. The palace conference room was a long, well-lit hall with stained glass windows that went the full length of one side. In the centre of the room was a beautiful ornate table about which sat nine councillors from both councils. The room's floor was flagstone and the walls were of white plaster, decorated with paintings of various past regional figures and events.
Ignas had been fairly quiet until now but finally snapped. "I don't really give a damn what laws Anvil is pushing through, I don't want the people of Brittlerock and Crowhaven suffering the same draconian measures. Arctur and that fool Tamh are going to drag us all into a civil war at this rate. The people cannot stomach further tax increases, people will starve!"
The delegation shifted uncomfortably in their seats as Prince Ignas went into another one of his rants but Etira, the Prince's Magister finally got a word in edge-ways and interjected. "My lord, we all appreciate your concerns for the citizens but please, it's been twenty years since the fall of the Empire, we simply don't have the funds to..." Ignas raises a hand and cuts her off mid sentence "..to fund your lavish lifestyle, Etira?"
"No, M'lord!" she said, looking visibly flustered.
Xander, a short stocky man that worked as Ignas' martial advisor finally piped up to re-state the same case he had made earlier and repeated several times. "As I've already said my lord, we are all worried about our security. We're getting indications that both Anvil and Kvatch are in the process of reorganising their military which could be used for border expansions. If we don't increase our taxes now and increase our military budget then our citizens will end up as their subjects and taxed the same anyway."
Ignas held his head again and rubbed his tired eyes with the palm of his hands. "So if I don't increase the taxes, our people will be dragged into a war and forced to defend their homes with nothing more than shovels and hoes. If I do increase the tax rates, the poorest folk will struggle to feed themselves and end up no better than slaves anyway. What sort of decision is this?" Ignas' summary was accurate and rounded up a pointless three hour conversation.
One of Brittlerock's advisors, a younger man by the name of Claudian suddenly stands up excitedly, like he's been itching to make this suggestion for weeks. "M'lord, perhaps if we pressed our claim on Sutch and expanded our borders to the River Brena, that would give us the required resources we need to protect the southern border with Anvil."
Ignas suddenly looked up at the man with daggers in his eyes, "Sit down Claudian, you fool. I may question Count Andorak's rulership but I hardly think I'll start a war just so you can finally gird your loin." He had been promoted to Brittlerock's martial advisor merely because his father had served the same title. He was reputedly a good fighter but it was a well known fact that he was absolutely hopeless with the fairer sex, and Ignas' jibe was meant to ridicule that fact.
"Let's just get this vote over and done with, I grow tired of this bickering. I assume you will all support the tax increase and I can't exactly stop both councils from doing so, so sobeit. Do what you like. I'm retiring to my bedchamber for the afternoon, I'll see you all for dinner later on."
With that, Ignas slinked off upstairs to his bedroom, shut the heavy wooden door behind him pressed his head against it, cursing the people he had come to be surrounded by, tears welling up in his eyes. The bedroom chamber was a comfortably sized room, a small dormer opened out to the garden below but the room was dominated by an enormous four-poster bed adorned with emerald green velvet curtains. Ignas had just sat down on a chair when there was a quiet tap on the door. Ignas growled in frustration.
"It's only me, Ignas" came a quiet voice from outside the room."
"Oh, Jera my darling! Come in, come in!" replied Ignas, his mood instantly shifted.
Jera was a young girl from the local chapel. An apprentice in healing who generally got stuck doing the routine work whilst her tutors did virtually nothing. She had beautiful green eyes, light brown hair that reached the bottom of her back and possessed a petite but pert frame that were usually hid under the healer's robe. The most anyone usually noticed of her was her angelic voice and good nature.
"Just here to dress your wounds M'lord" she said joyfully.
"No time for a chat today?" asked Ignas with a wink.
"I've always got time for you, you seem like the only one that actually wants to talk to me" she said laughing.
"You're the only one I want to talk to" he joked, "everyone else in this wretched palace is an idiot."
Ignas got undressed and laid face-down on the bed revealing a back that was covered multiple sores of various sizes and degrees of severity. These visits were a daily occurrence for him, ointment and medicines were applied on a daily basis to try and stem the spread of whatever disease he had, but it was proving highly resistant to treatment and no one could understand what it is was. At first the local healers presumed it was just a bad case of the Pox but after two years nobody was any closer to remedying it and it was slowly getting worse.
Just one month prior, two Dark-Elf healers from Maar Gan were contracted to see if it was Blight, a disease that in the past had sometimes appeared when the Red Mountain had been active but even they were unable to work out what was causing the affliction. So far, Ignas was just pleased that the disease hadn't spread to his face or hands and had been able to keep it all a secret.
The pair carried on chatting as Jera gently applied ointment.
"Darling, tell me. Why am I cursed?"
"How do you know it's not just rotten luck?" asked Jera playfully.
"Same difference! No I'm serious! I'm born as heir to the throne of Anvil shortly before the Empire collapses and Anvil becomes a independent Kingdom. My brother ends up a lunatic and to top it all off, I lose my claim to the throne simply because the Elder Council are a bunch of homophobic old men." He got visibly more angry and frustrated as his rant went on.
"Well, since you put it that way." she said, humouring him.
"To top it off, I bet half the Elder Council are pederests anyway, bloody hypocrites!"
"You can't say that!" Jera said in faux outrage.
"Ok, fine! You're right, I take that back. Half the Elder Council aren't pederests!" he joked.
They both laughed for a bit and remained silent for a while, simply enjoying each others company. Jera was used to his rants by now and over the past year or so the two had become close friends as he regularly made biweekly trips between Crowhaven and Brittlerock as he juggled to run two counties on his own since his brother's decent into madness.
Truthfully, Jera's meetings with Ignas were the only times she felt she could truly be herself. She never chose to become a healer, it was decided for her as one of the Empire's orphan training schemes before the Reman dynasty collapsed. She'd been enrolled from the age of eight years old with the temples of the Eight Divines and had been sent from Bravil to Crowhaven on a long-term work placement. Despite now being a proficient healer, what she really wanted from life was the one thing she had never – a family. It was something a life in service to the Gods threatened, not outright perhaps as Priests and Priestesses were allowed to marry, but it certainly hindered advances from any suitors.
Ignas finally broke the silence, his tone more serious. "How you holding up anyway, Antois still giving you a hard time?"
"Not as bad as before, but I'm dealing with it, in my own way." She replied.
"You need a boyfriend" said Ignas in a joke-but-not-a-joke manner.
"Not sure Antois would very much like that. Can't do anything just yet, next year though, who knows!?"
Legally speaking, she was right. Without any parents, a child's welfare until the age of sixteen becomes sole responsibility of the sponsor, in this case Father Antois. Father Antois had a particularly nasty temperament not really befitting a member of the clergy. He regularly held back alms for the poor if he felt they didn't deserve it and was just generally a bitter, judgemental old man. He put Jera down at every possible opportunity and had her running around doing every conceivable errand around town whilst he sat on his arse drinking wine. His bulbous, red nose was a testament to her version of events.
Jera tapped Ignas on the shoulder to indicate that she was all done and he stood up to get dressed. "How is your brother doing, I've not seen him about for a while," she asked.
Ignas stared out of the window half-dressed, apparently unconcerned that he was exposing himself to some of the council members that were probably conspiring together in the courtyard below. "He's getting worse Jera. I don't know what to do. Not only is his madness bad for the family, it's also weakening my position as leader. I'm struggling to rule both counties like this and I can tell that the councillors can smell blood and are using the situation to their advantage. I suspect at least half of them are taking money out of the coffers but they're all covering for each other. What can I to do?"
Jera put an arm around him for moral support, "you can only do your best, Ignas."
"Hey Jera, before you go, are you around tonight? I want to come up and say a prayer or two and I'd like you to be there with me when I do," he asked.
Jera was quietly shocked that he was considering prayer, he never visited the temple otherwise and this was not a normal request. "Sure," she said "anything you need, just ask."
