Torren pushed through the doors and into his home, where he noted that nothing had moved from its precarious location. His desk may be cluttered, but Torren knew where everything was, and in what position it was placed, and what order it was arranged. He did not find Sagacia in his study, and decided she might be asleep, and let the idea rest.
He collapsed into his chair, and wondered at the proceedings of his long and tedious day.
He had gone to the meeting first thing in the morning, and returned in the afternoon only to be consulted on certain economic anomalies by Ole Ole, and asked to help in discovering a pattern for the Gut-Spiller’s murder splurges by the Keeper of Borders, who was absolutely panicked, because if anything, measurements of the criminal’s average time spent from place to place were an indication that he was no longer anywhere near the borders, and in fact quite near the capital. The Keeper of Borders could not commission officers within the country; that was the Keeper of Order’s job, but being as it may, the Keeper of Borders had to work it out, and the poor bloke had no clue what to figure. Torren attempted to offer aid, but found himself of little use, and so he withdrew to his home, where he now lay.
He heard a sudden scuffling, which he knew to be Sagacia, deciding tactfully to stir from her stiff statue-position behind his nightstand and alert him to her presence. Torren tried not to appear alarmed, turning his head only slightly so he could vaguely see her shape from the corner of his eyes.
“Come, child. I would’ve liked to know you were here, for I am something of a bore when I do not know others are watching.” He winked, and gestured for her to advance. She did, very cautiously, only to sit immediately behind his chair, within his blind spot, so he could not see her at all.
Oh lord, this life, it is so difficult! She mistrusts the wind I blow as I breathe!
He hunched over his desk, picking up an old map of the continent and scanning casually. His gaze lingered in the very North, and he decided it would make a splendid story to tell. And all children enjoyed stories, no? It was their most common illness.
“Y’see this map here,” Torren said. “It’s a map of the Great Land; the world we live and die upon, or at least, as far as we’ve seen of it. Now look up here, right here, in the North.”
Sagacia, struck by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, stood from her seat and advanced cunningly, positioned just so she could clearly see the map over Torren’s shoulder, but he could not see her unless he turned his whole body. He managed a small smile at this devious action.
The Northern land to which Torren was pointing was labeled on the map, “the Silver Country”, and there seemed to be no recorded land-marks or titles on it at all. Just a blot of colorless, expressionless land, devoid of detail, and of history.
“That..” he said, tapping the spot, “was once called ‘Yennilis’, a country formed by a slow trickle of rebellious peasants, crooks, and farmers into the southern valleys in escape of the unbearable aristocracy and high tax in the large kingdom of Core. They had declared themselves a republic—a people’s state, they called it—and the first one of its sort that the continent had ever had. It was ofcourse, an absurd idea. Once they declared secession from their tyrant under the clever leadership of the cunning blacksmith, Yenni, the mentally-distorted Corish king Vieyere, announced them a province in open rebellion.
“Many believed they wouldn’t hold out, that the mere peasants, with their untrained hatchets and picks swinging left and right, would fall like flies and return to their posts beneath the skirts of their mother country upon the firing of the first arrow. That, however, was false. The people of Yennilis proved their valor, and defeated Vieyere’s forces with their wits, and not their numbers.
