The Battered Flame: The Meeting
Star POV
Another set of quick rapping on my door pulled me harshly from the last fleeting vestiges of my dreams, bringing me back fully to the land of the living. After a long yawn, I rolled to the side of my bed, grabbing my wand off of it's normal place on my desk, as I drew myself to my feet.
"Damn it Manfred, I'm already awake." I shout back to the next bangs of my door.
"Sorry princess Star, shall I send in your maid to help you dress?" Manfred asked from the other side of the door, as I began searching through my large closet, looking for my favourite dress for the day.
"No Manfred, for the last time I can get changed by my self, I don't know why mother even gave me one." I replied shortly, my handmaiden was as obnoxious as she was as bad at fashion.
"Of course my princess, I have also to tell you that their will be an emergency counsel meeting in an hour, and your mother expects you to attend." Said Manfred, his receding steps fading away as he made his way to preform his other duties."
My head shot up at the mention of an emergency meeting. My mum had been forcing me to go to every meeting for the last few months as to 'step up my training for being Mewni's next monarch'. It had all been as boring as I expected, full of trade tariffs, and 2 percent decreases in corn output, and such like that.
But I'd never been to an emergency meeting before, this meant something important had happened, and, most likely, something interesting.
After pulling on my normal blue dress, and popping my Red Devil horns back on my head, I rushed my way down to the dining hall, sliding down the banisters from my room, and promptly stopping myself from kicking open the doors. Instead I let the guards on either side open them, and earned a relieved glance from my dad, River, for my troubles, as he sat at the dining table.
"Oh, hello their darling, I hope you had a good night, you didn't sneak out to go partying with any boys did you?" River asked, his eyes twinkling with humour.
"Oh you know me dad, the perfect princess, I would never do such an 'improper' thing." I joked back, a smile beaming from my face.
"You certainly are perfect to me my little munchkin, and don't you know it." River complimented, making me fill with a warm feeling of affection. I slid into place where my favourite cereal lay in its bowl, freshly poured in preparation of my arrival. I look up from stuffing my face, noticing an empty place beside my dad.
"Where's mother." I garble, food spraying everywhere from my overly full mouth.
"Oh she's away preparing for that meeting later, says it's more important to do so than eat, despite my complaints, utterly ridiculous if you ask me."
"Do you know what it's about?" I ask.
"Not a clue, you know Moon only breaks the news to us when she does the rest of the council, but I do know Hekapoo will be there, so it must be important." River told me, and I grinned in spite of myself, knowing that if a member of the magic high commission was going to be there then shit really must have gone down.
I sat twitching nervously in my seat beside the head of the table. To say the other members of the council were surprised would be an understatement, when they saw me in the council chamber not just on time, but early, though from their faces, it was not an unpleasant surprise. But I was far to interested to miss any of this, and I didn't really have anything better to do right now, so I had headed here straight from breakfast.
Hekapoo, the magical forger of dimensional scissors herself, stood in the background, the sound of her two scissor blades scraping across each other sending a tingle down my spine, even with my wand gripped close. Sir Scarsguard, my past royal babysitter, and Lady Whosits, both sat stoically in their chairs, while Sir Muscleton still lay unconscious from a blast from my wand, after he thought that he could get away with calling me 'Baby Girl', I mean, who does he think he is? My dad? The rest of the small council sat around the table in their places, waiting for my parents to arrive to start the meeting, each knowing that my mother would expect them all to be here upon her arrival.
The door swung open to reveal the king and Queen walking in, as any chatter in the room silenced immediately, and everyone stood to receive their monarchs, and I even managed to resist rolling my eyes at the display. What caught everyone, seemingly except for Hekapoo, off guard was queen Moons attire. Gone was her cumbersome crown, and puffy ornate dresses. Now her clothing showed a side of her I had rarely ever seen. She now wore her specially designed, magical plate armour, her two blades strapped to her side, and a jewelled tiara in place of her larger crown, sitting on her hair, now done in a simple braid instead of the elegant heart shaped updo that she normally sported. Beside her King River also walked in adored in his engraved and golden rimmed armour, with his large familial battle axe strapped to his back, leaving no doubt in the room what type of meeting this would be.
My mother quickly sat the council down upon entry, and her and river took their places at the head of the table.
"First of all I would like to thank all of you for coming on such short notice, but this meeting was unavoidable," Moon started, "earlier today, before most of you would have been up, Hekapoo here payed me a visit with rather concerning news about recent developments within the kingdom of Swanen, developments that may be a massive risk to the security of the kingdom of Mewni. And so I will be giving the floor to Hekapoo to explain the situation." Moon gestured to Hekapoo, and stepped aside as murmuring swept the room.
Even though I had not heard too much about it, I did know that Swanen was one of the smaller kingdoms on the outer edge of Mewni, outside of the sphere of control of the main Kingdom of Mewni, but I didn't know really anything else, as its distance left it with minimal connection to us.
Everyone gasped in awe as Hekapoo stood forward, throwing her fiery scissors through the air, just barely missing my skull before they boomeranged back to her hand, with a dark circle now hovering over the table as she stepped up to talk.
"Thank you Queen Moon," Hekapoo said respectfully, with a slight bow of her head, before continuing, "So, everyone, over the past 3-4 months the Kingdom of Swanen has been experiencing a number of raids upon their undefended villages, caused reportedly, by disgruntled groups of monsters, that had apparently been banding together in a group of what was effectively just bandits." Hekapoo's hand drew everyone's attention to the previously black circle in the centre of the room, that now showed an image of a burning village, with monsters running people down in the dirt streets. "Now, as these raids became more frequent and brutal the king of Swanen began sending out small army detachments, unsuccessfully I might add, to find the monsters base of operations and weed them out. Even then no one saw the situation as a massive concern, until , a bit under a week ago, a massive army of these monster, of unknown size, was said to have poured out of the Moonbeam forest, where they had been hiding, under the reported leadership of one of the last known Septarians, the monster known as Toffee." At this the image changed to show a lizard person, standing smartly in a red suit, with an unmistakable, evil, glint in his eyes. Around the room people just looked shocked. They all knew what a Septarian was. They were a now almost extinct race of lizard people that where able to heal from practically any injury, and were greatly feared as leaders and warriors in the wars against monsters in the old times. "From there on, the last we or any of our allies have heard was that Swanen was gathering whatever forces they could to oppose them, and since then silence."
Hekapoo finished as I just sat back in silence, considering what I had just heard. If a kingdom had fallen then this was big. And that meant I was probably going to have an interesting few weeks.
"Okay everyone," Moon called out, "now that we know the facts, let us begin discussing what to do."