The sky was a perfect blue. A winter wind descended from the mountains and passed quickly through the crowd. The king watched a few of his people shiver in their autumn clothing. He waited behind the glass doors leading to the balcony of the palace. The heralds had been sent out earlier to gather the people to hear the king politick. It was strange to get out among the people again. He addressed them on the yearly anniversary of the Event, but his speech then was formulaic and scripted. Every king throughout the years said the same words. It stood on ceremony, remembering all that had been lost, and more importantly, all that had been saved.

To speak with the people, both humans and elves alike, and to tell them that things would get much worse before they got better was the purpose this day. The prophet had convinced many of her people to attend the speech. He ruled them in theory, but over the years, his rule on the elves had weakened as they spent more time in their caves and less time amongst the humans. The king knew he needed the trust of not only his people but the elves. Much had been lost with his choices. He knew that the rumors about his relationship with the prophet had eroded much of the trust that he and his predecessor had enjoyed with the people. He also knew that he had sacrificed much with the elves when he agreed to have the child, his only child, his now dead child. No king while serving had dared to violate that one law that the elves had set down. He had paid for that violation in a way that would never allow him to forgive himself for his weaknesses and choices.

There was so much hatred of the elven people now, much of it directed at the prophet. Some of it even bled over into the king’s reputation, and the people’s faith in his right and ability to rule. He knew that the rumors about his relationship with the prophet had intensified. Had the elves not started pulling back, started distancing themselves from the valley, it might have been dismissed or perhaps looked at as an indiscretion. But most of the valley was already convinced that the valley would be better off without the influence of the elves. Rising unbidden to his mind was the lanky figure of Theodore, the leader and prime minister of the elected council. They had always been around, and they governed the day to day affairs of the valley. It had worked for hundreds of years like this, but in these times, things were different. They were beginning to exert a control over the people that threatened his rule. It was time for that to stop. The first step was his speech. He knew that now, he knew he had allowed it to go on for too long.

Not for the first time the king wondered how the information about his indiscretion with the prophet had become public. When his advisors began telling him what the people were discussing, he dismissed it with a laugh. Perhaps he had been a bit indiscrete in front of his guards, but they were trusted men, trained in the orange dust for loyalty and strength. They knew that the good of the kingdom needed a strong king and the cooperation of the elves. He could not imagine that any of them would tempt his loyalty. The prophet had assured him of that. She had seen that their child would rule the valley and bring about the valley’s renaissance in a time of need, after a horrific Event of which the people would not otherwise be prepared. The prophet had never been wrong before. The king now knew that she could be wrong, terribly wrong.

His thoughts of the prophet led him to look over to look at her. She sat on the far side of the room in a white rocking chair. The chair was smaller than the rest of the furniture in the waiting room. It was elf sized. The prophet long reminisced with the king about the times when the elf-size furniture littered most homes throughout the valley. The elves and humans lived together well for hundreds of years in the valley. The elves lived in the caves throughout the mountains, and in the lower levels of the palace and the towns that popped up around the valley and humans. That the prophet could reminisce about a time when she was not alive told the king much about the elven culture. The spent much of their time growing up remembering their past. It was passed down in the same energetic and frenzied activity that made up most of the elven world. With their energy and enough time, they could complete any task. Remembering their civilization is what their youth was focused on. It was a long memory with none of the judgment the humans would have found so inviting and hard to resist.

The elves remembered the times they had brought the humans to the valley to rescue them from the chaos that the outside world was going through after an Event. It was not after the first Event. Few of the humans remembered even the last Event, let alone the one that eventually convinced the humans that the valley was their one and only salvation. The prophet herself was not around for the Event. It was two prophets ago that had seen the last Event and passed it down through the position and the elven people. The last Event was not catastrophic. It barely registered in the memory of elves. The preparations had been minor and the then prophet and her chosen queen had worked hard to minimize the impact on the daily lives. The orange dust had leaked over into the valley for a few months, but it was not the intensity of even a single day beyond the protection of the mountains outside the valley.

For all of their short lives, the elves were long in memory. They spent much of their time reliving the lives of the elves that went before them.

The prophet rocked in her chair slowly. Her hands moved quickly on her lap, weaving and pulling on a ball of yarn, creating the form of a pink sweater. She had no need of the sweater. Few of the elves would talk to her anymore, and the sweater was too small to fit even the smallest of human babies. She knew what she had sacrificed when she took this position and when she followed her prophecy to its conclusion. She wished it had been different, she wished it turned out differently, that she had been able to change the course of history as she had foreseen it. It was a difficult thing to be angry with herself for her failures. Prophets have failed in the past, but their failures have never cost the elves or the humans so much. What she most regretted was her lost memories. The elves would no longer allow her to pass on her story to the next generation. She would be lost with not a footnote that she existed during this trying times. She had gone against the elven council’s wishes, and she paid for it each day. She knew it had been the council that had changed the course, killed her child. For that she could forgive them. They did not share in her prophecy. They could not understand the power of what she had seen, and how her mind had walked down the only valley that had brought about the conclusion that saved both the humans and the elves. The sacrifices would be great, she had told them, but it was too great for them to accept.

The king paced across the room, stopping in front of the prophet. She looked up and smiled at him. “You will do fine, my king,” the prophet said. She rocked in her chair slowly while her hands moved quickly across the beginnings of one arm for the sweater. For all of their small size, the elves were incredibly fast in movement. She had explained to the king that they paid for the fast movements and high energy with their short lives. For the time and what they needed to do, it was a worthwhile trade. She sounded convincing. When she was alone with her own people, she was not as convinced anymore.

“The people,” the prophet said. “They need your reassurance of what will happen, of how you’re gathering the food, saving it for the times ahead. We are only a few years away from the next Event. And we must be prepared. We have to start preparing. There are dark times. This Event will be worse than we have seen one in many centuries. It may be worse than even the first Event that drove our people into the mountain caves in the valley.”

“Event, shevent,” the king said, not for the first time worrying more for his own self than his rule or his people. The prophet had chose him because of his ability to focus and be brilliant at times. His brilliance, however, was always balanced against his inability to sometimes focus on the issues at hand. His love for the prophet, which she had to develop and cultivate and then destroy, was only the symptom of this fault. She had sworn herself to him as all prophets had to their kings. She chose and now she had to live with her choice, be it for the good of her people or his people, or all people. That had been her promise to him. The elves forgot about that part of the bargain when they ousted her from their council.

The king wore his royal blue tabard over the traditional golden threaded blouse that had been passed down as the symbol of the monarchy. The prophet had told him that it had been weaved by the earliest of elves as they first ascended into their power. Where their power came from, the prophet would not tell the king. She held many secrets of her people and the valley that she did not share.

The king had read through the histories and diaries of previous kings. It was a theme throughout the histories and diaries that the prophets for all of their loyalty, was would not share everything they knew with their sworn liege. Their prophecy was shared only where necessary and their loyalty ended at serving but not always obeying the monarch. For all that she counseled him, he wished he could give more back to her, to lift the burden that he saw weighing down her shoulders every day. That he still loved her was without question. His question was only about her love for him. Her loyalty was certain, but whether her feelings had ever been real, whether those nights, those amazing nights, had brought about something real in their relationship still haunted him.

The king’s shirt glowed in the morning sunlight that poured through the glass doors and windows leading to the balcony. It created sparkles on the floor and on the walls as he moved across the room. He ran his hand through his blue-black hair. “I should not have to do this,” he continued, still pacing. “If Theodore would stop riling up the people, we could implement our Event planning much faster and with the cooperation of the people. He must know that. He knows what is out there and what the valley protects us from. What could he possibly be thinking about, what does he hope to gain?”

The prophet knew the answers to the king’s questions. They were not answers she could share with him. “I know many things,” the prophet started, quieting her voice as she spoke. “What I do not guess are the hearts of men. That is why things are as they are.”

“Yes, yes,” the king said. “I know of your ways. I know of the choices you have forced me into. Now we have to live with those choices. We have to move beyond them, to find out where to take this valley kingdom.”

“How is the food supply?” the prophet asked. She was not privy anymore to the king’s morning briefings with his advisors and the members of the elected council. They had become less civil over the years, and her presence made things worse with the council members. Theodore, the prime minister of the council, had refused the council’s presence until the prophet no longer attended. The council was an advisory body. The king knew that they had no such authority to make demands. But when they pulled their support, the king could no longer get the reports he needed to make the decisions to prepare the valley. The king believed in the power that the people held over him. He knew that his power was given only through the people and the grace of the elves. For all that he had given the council, he had not believed that they would try to rise up and challenge the king and the ways of the monarchy. But it was short lived, and the king had given on the prophet’s presence in the morning briefings. It was the first time a king had to make such a concession.

“The food is the same as it was last week,” the king said. He did not enjoy talking on this topic. Unlike the prophet, he was not worried about the food supply. It was the same as it always was. They received most of their food from outside the valley, where the orange dust and the outsiders worked the ground and enjoyed enormous harvests. There was never a need to go hungry with the orange dust on the outside. His ancestors had converted most of the farmland within the valley into housing. As the people grew, their needs grew with it, and their biggest need was space.

“We sacrifice much for the food that you grow outside,” the prophet said, thinking of the orphans of the orange dust, and the sacrifices they make for the valley. This was another thing the king did not know. The elves did not condone the practice, but it had passed into being by the older monarchs, and the people had grown fat with the work of the orphans. To protect the king and his rule, the prophet could never share the truth with him.

“It is nothing,” the king said. He shared the views of his people, at least the people that knew the truth. There was much wrong with the politics of the valley. Their decision on food was not one of them.

Two guards entered the room. They held large pikes with curved blades. Hanging loosely around their necks were heavy gray bandanas. The orange dust still clung to it from their times outside of the valley.

“Your majesty,” the taller of the guards said. “We are about ready to start when you are.”

“Yes, yes,” the king said. “Let me get this over with. Wait for me, prophet. We need to have a long conversation about this when I return.”

The king’s shoulders were bent and he approached the double glass doors that led to the porch that overlooked the crowd. The guards went through the doors first and took positions at either side of where the king was to enter. The held their pikes out to the side, an honor guard for the king to speak down to the crowd.

Theodore stationed himself in the front of the crowd looking up to the palace’s balcony where he knew the king would stand to address his people. In these events, the council did not have a position of honor. They were advisors and as such did not have the authority to share in these discussions directly with the people. The council was the people, Theodore reminded himself. And as such their place of honor was standing among them. He had arrived early to be at the front of the crowd. He found the king’s speeches uninteresting and uninspiring. Most of the people did. He was the king, however. He was chosen by the prophet. That had been good for the generations that had moved to the valley to escape the wasteland outside, a wasteland he knew only too well, having been raised there for the first fifteen years of his life.

Theodore had lived in the orange dust as an orphaned child. He had made the trip over the mountain as a young child, and raised the food that the people in the valley lived on. The elves had taught the humans how to grow crops in the orange dust. The crops grew amazingly well even without sunlight making it through the dust.

Theodore looked up at the blue sky. He could stare at the sky and the sun for hours. It was so different from where he was raised. When he first arrived in the valley, the sky terrified him. It was so large and unbounded. He was used to the orange dust that covered everything and created a sense of boundaries in the world. To live in a place with no walls, no boundaries, no limits to the vision was overwhelming. He eventually learned to take comfort in the mountains that surrounded the valley. The valley was large, but the mountains were visible from any place. You could look around and see the walls of the world. Where the orange dust created a ceiling, the mountains created the walls.

The council members slowly began to arrive. Nobody stood on the balcony of the palace. He could see figures moving beyond the glass doors and the sheer curtains. A few thousand people had gathered to see the king speak. There would be more in time, and others would listen in the comforts of their home. They would miss much, Theodore knew. There was little doubt that most of his supporters would be here in person. He had been stumping in the neighborhoods throughout the valley to encourage people to hear the king. He liked to compare his own politicking to that of the king. He encouraged them to listen to the words of the man who led them. Understand who he was and what he was saying, and why he was so terribly wrong in his choices. That he would not make many more wrong choices was a small secret he had kept from the people he addressed.

“Sure, the king had been chosen by the prophets,” Theodore remembered his last speech. “But what have the elves given us to believe in lately? How had they helped us or assisted us? Their lives were so short, their magic consumed their bodies in their twenties. How can we expect them to know what is best for the long-lived man? We have seen more of the world. Even the prophet who is ancient at thirty one, we would not consider mature enough to sit on our council.”

His words had inspired the people. They were beginning to question the ways of the cave dwelling elves. The elves brought the humans to the valley and they rescued them from the orange dust. But Theodore was not sure if rescuing was even necessary. He had lived in the orange dust. It was not good living, but it was living. And if anything, the terror of it was because of the guards and the old women, the slavers, as he now called them. The people still did not know the truth of where their food came from or what existence looked like for the people who raised their food and worked the land outside the valley to enable those within the valley to live so well.

It was a secret among those who returned from the orange dust. They were stronger for the experience, and they were quiet about their secrets. Theodore had drafted many such survivors into the council. He found loyalty through them. They would understand what he wanted and how he would change the valley. He knew that the elves were behind the slavery. They had taught man how to use the orange dust. It only made sense that they set up the way for them to exploit it. The elves shared in the human’s bounty. If they were not behind it, then at the least they knew of it. The king and his cronies did not do anything without consulting his evil witch.

Theodore was a tall man. He wore a long dark coat with a formal shirt. Around his neck hung the gray bandana covered in orange dust that marked him as someone who ventured beyond the valley. It also marked him as a survivor of the tents. Not many people knew what the meant. He had convinced the other survivors to always wear their mark, to be proud of where they had been raised and what they had done for the valley, even though the valley did not know of their sacrifice yet. There were many scattered throughout the valley. They did not need much convincing. Their anger had always been under the level, waiting to erupt.

Small elves could be seen scattered throughout the crowd. Theodore searched throughout the crowd looking for their small forms. They were mostly on the corners, standing two at a place. Unlike most of the crowd, they were not focused on the balcony. They were looking through the crowd. They did not stand in place for long. They seemed to be still but they were moving slightly, almost buzzing as if they were not quite in place. For all of their short size, the elves were powerful. They had kept order in the valley for hundreds of years against people who believed that a monarch was not the way the world was supposed to be governed.

There were fewer elves than Theodore expected. They had moved amongst the humans less and less, spending their time in the caves at the base of the mountain. Theodore had scouted the entrances to the cave. His plans did not involve conquering the caves. Such thoughts would have to wait until he had more control over the valley. Knowing where his enemies lived was the first step in ensuring that he had control over his own destiny. He had taught himself that much at least in the tents.

There was much he learned while wandering around outside the valley. There was much left from the civilization before. The valley of Civ was not that civilized. They lived in peace but that peace was hard fought and not real. Without a choice of war what was the peace really worth. Theodore worried about this more than he knew was healthy. The people living in the valley had grown soft. In this he agreed with the king. They would need to toughen up to move beyond the valley and begin to bring civilization back. Theodore no longer believed in the threats of the Event. The elves used it as a way to control his people. He no longer would wear the yoke of that affliction.

The king walked out onto the balcony. He glanced back at the prophet. She looked as young as ever. He knew for elves she was old. She had passed her thirtieth year this past summer. Her hair was still golden. Unlike when he first met her when she chose him as the next king, she no longer wore her hair long down her back. It was one of the first things he noticed about her. Unlike other elves, she did not seem to shimmer when she moved, at least not when he saw her. He knew it had something to do with their magic, but the prophet would not tell him what.

He had given up much to be the king. He knew that when the prophet choose him, groomed him early in his life. He had given up family and love. His thoughts stopped in the middle as he looked back at the prophet. Unlike other kings, he had not given up love to ascend to the throne. It was the one thing she promised him, and she had kept her promise. He had a family, if only briefly. He never understood why she did it, why she allowed it to happen as it did. He did not have any regrets. His only regret was that now he had rule the people, to follow through with her plans.

The prophet continued to move her sticks through the yarn. In times past she knew there would have been other elves in the room. The elves would be scattered throughout the crowd to keep the peace. They were there now, but there were fewer of them. There were less of them left, and the ones that were left were spending more time in the caves. They knew the Event was approaching, and they did not trust the prophet’s decision to rely on man to see them through it. The elven council had come down hard on her decision, and there was much that needed to be decided before moving forward.

The king walked out on the balcony. There was a large ovation. The king did not address the public often, and the crowd, for all of their riling up by Theodore and the council, still trusted the king to take care of them in the valley, to prepare them for the upcoming Event, whether they believed in the Event, or questioned its authenticity.

When the crowd quieted down, he heard the pop in his ear. He glanced back briefly and saw the prophet standing up with her hands held out in front of her. Her eyes were closed and saw her small mouth moving quickly, chanting the incantations that allows his voice to carry across the crowd and into the homes of the people who decided not to come to the palace to hear the speech.

“My fellow citizens,” the king said. “It is yet a good day. The orange dust stays outside the valley, and while the Event always approaches, we have good reasons to be thankful that we will not fall victim to its destruction.”

The crowd clapped and cheered. Theodore, still standing in the front, slowly clapped his hands together, as he looked up at the king. He heard the king’s claps amplified by way of the elven magic. He looked over to the side of edge of the palace and saw the first of his troopers. He wore the orange scarf and stood at ease with the crowd. He did not look over to Theodore even though he must have felt his eyes bore into his back.

Theodore looked to the other side and saw his people begin the slow walk across the edge of the palace. He smiled and clapped louder at the king’s address.

“The prophet chose me ten years before,” the king said. “And in those years, I have faithfully served the valley. I have supplied food and we have lived in a time of unparalleled success. While we have found it easy to live in this time of plenty, we have not been idle. We do not forget the teachings of our ancestors and those of the prophets. There will come a time when we will need to be save, to survive again. It is sometimes difficult to think on the orange dust that surrounds the outside of the valley. It is there and it is there because there of the destruction that the Event brings.

“I am here to remind you of that destruction. There is talk amongst the people that there is forgetting of the destruction, that people rely on themselves and their own ingenuity and farming to raise enough food to survive us through the fallow times.”

The lines of his speech appeared before the king. He read them, adlibbing only occasionally to replace words as he thought of better ones. He was not comfortable speaking in this way. He avoided these types of events wherever possible. He had hopes that he could have retired by now, that he and the prophet would settle down. Such a silly thought he had. He was not a normal person. He could never be normal, and he could never live with the prophet. She was an elf, and as such would not be around for much longer. He momentarily lost his place in the words and the words rewound and paused slightly while he found it.

Theodore watched the king. He seemed distracted on what should have been a very important moment. He wondered about the instincts of the king. Could he know something was up? Could he know what he was in store for on the moment?

The guard on the balcony looked down into the crowd and located the tall lanky form of Theodore. Theodore did not look to the guard, and the guard could not acknowledge his presence. Theodore had lived with him in the tents. He had not shared tents, but even back then, Theodore had been a leader amongst his men.

The guard pretended to study the crowd. He knew they were ornaments of the power of the king and his palace. They were not needed on the balcony. The elves provided all the protection that the king needed. Nothing could penetrate the bubble that surrounded the palace. The elves scattered throughout the crowd would keep the peace in the event of a riot. The prophet would protect the king from other threats. Theodore had known all of this, and Seymour had thought long and hard on his mission. He had worked his way up through the ornamental ranks of the guard. It was a plush spot to be with the king, to share in his life the same way his servants did.

Seymour had been around when the king and the prophet had their affair. Few people in the valley knew of it. He had told Theodore of it, and he had started the whispers in the valley. It was well known that the prophet had more control over the kingdom than any previous prophet. He had been around when their son had been born. It had been him who had taken the son to the orphanage. The prophet had been particular about which one. Theodore had intercepted him and switched babies. The orphanage that he was ordered to deliver the baby to burned down the following day with no survivors.

The orphanage that he had actually delivered the baby to was emptied the following week. The children had begun the long trek over the mountains into the tent city. Theodore had known all of this and entrusted this knowledge to Seymour. They had not shared the truth of the tent city or the orange dust with anyone else. There was much that needed to be told, but that telling would wait until the monarchy was taken down, and the influence of the prophet and the elves ended.

The timing had to be perfect. Much of the plan relied on the timing. If the coup was to be successful, everything would have to work at the right moment.

“We are a year away from the next Event,” the king said. “There is much we need to plan. The Event will be upon us again and we must concentrate all of our efforts to overcome its intensity. Even now, our food output has increased and we have begun retrofitting the storage containers to ensure we have places to store our excesses. This is a time of plenty and we must be prepared for a time of wanting.”

The king looked down and saw a disturbance among the crowd. On the far side a man had run through the crowd and approached the two large doors that led into the castle. Two guards stood at the entrance. The ir polearms were crossed in their at guard position. They lowered the polearms and held them out to protect the door. The king knew there was little need for such protection. A pair of elves had worked through the crowd, vibrating intensely as they approached. The people they past felt only breeze and saw the blurred colors of the elves colorful cloaks. They were shorter than most of the children in the crowd and passed the man approaching the door.

The man was gaunt and held a sword in one hand a small dagger with the blade down in the other. He was low to the ground in a pouncing position. The guards at the door held their polearms in front of them and pointed the curved blades toward the man. The king saw that the man wore a gray bandana around his neck. He had seen such bandanas before. The bandana had highlights of the orange dust from outside the valley.

The elves positioned themselves in front of the man and the two guards. They held their hands in front of them in a fist. The king knew that sprouting from those hands was an invisible energy that was sharper than a sword. The elves used their magic as weapons, and this magic was incredibly potent and dangerous. The king did not envy the disturbance. He watched in fascination as the man approached the elves’ position. He must have known what they held, but he did not seem fazed.

The crowd stood in silence as they watched the scene unfold. The door leading to the palace was slightly raised from the crowd. The castle was built on a small hill that stood at the center of the valley.

Word count: 5,650

Words remaining: 38,059

I wrote lots of words today. Similar to yesterday, most of them were telling and not showing. I’m comfortable with that approach for now. This reminds me of the last few days of most Nanowrimo years: I get to a point where I’m pushing words to get to the end, and coming up with ideas for what the story should have been. I’m only telling the story in the technical sense. There is little craft involved and the words themselves show little in the way of skill. What I am doing is putting the pieces and characters of the world together. What I need to do is go back through those pieces and turn them into scenes that develop story. I think that’s known as a second draft.

We’ll see how tomorrow goes when I return to work. I highly recommend Marathons that start on weekends. There’s great freedom in having an entire morning with nothing to do but push words.