No, I deserve more than a single night,
No quit thinking and relax,
This was going to be a long night.
I didn’t sleep and I didn’t dream, The sun eventually rose.
I could almost pretend that my queen was the girl I met yesterday when she was sleeping.
She slept soundly,
I contemplated killing her a few times. But didn’t this was still a chess game, and she, it, whatever this thing in my bed was, it was still the queen.
I might have wondered if the enemy queen was cute before. But I don’t really anymore.
When a Madoka Magica Girl grows up without becoming a witch she becomes a chess queen I guess.
See if you look at it that way, you won’t beat yourself about it.
How could I get out of bed without disturbing anyone?
You don’t want to end up a rookie,
out of commission…
It’s the natural way of things.
I looked at the staff, resting against the bed.
Clean white, marble, I almost dared not touch it for fear the queen would possess my own body.
No little jewel from a distant cartoon jumped out at me. No gleam in the dim twilight of morning.
But that was an interesting theory.
I stood up, equipped a small change of clothing,
A furry coat, the least itchy tunic. I remembered to grab a pair of thin hunting, no riding? gloves. Whatever, When I worked as a mechanic I would find these in the Mercedes spare tire kits.
To think I was wearing the inspiration as a precautionary form of PPE. Against fingerprints I guess, heh as if the queen would realize I was in her library from my finger prints...
My queen didn’t wake, surprisingly. Maybe magic makes her sleepy.
No it’s probably the new body. She probably isn’t used to it.
I never figured out King’s Quest Three.
I’m that old by the way.
But I left anyway and trudged to the wizard tower.
The sun had risen by the time I arrived at the tower. I knocked on the door, A sleepy old man opened the door for me.
“O king?”
“I’m here to read, I need to understand your indexing system.”
“Your majesty?”
“Yes?”
“Why?”
“War stuff.”
“Oh ohh… ok ok…”
The little man in his night cap hurried to open the funny security air lock.
I marched through and looked down at him.
“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with the index system, is there a key anywhere? The queen told me to ask for a key.”
The nervous man hurried through the clean tables, and to a filing cabinet.
A filing cabinet…
I wasn’t that old…
A long receipt looking piece of velum.
I was suddenly aware of my clammy hands.
No matter, that the king’s hands mess the clean leather is the point of civilization.
I thanked the man, and pausing to examine the notation.
Handwritten and cludgy, I puzzled through.
Budget, floor one,
Lineage records, Floor two,
Holdings, Floor three,
Generic knowledge, Floor four,
Unsorted, All other floors.
I lit a candle for the sun was not yet bright in the sky, and if it was the windows would not have let much light in. I rather hated the deep fog of darkness. Or… Rather, I found it a satisfying blanket that called me to more primitive times.
I belonged the monster of a maze that’s what I would do, I wanted to carve a maze into the mountain. Where I could sleep forever.
Hardly productive idle daydreams.
I perused the documentation. A tiny library by the standards of the modern world. It was probably only a some megabytes of text. Maybe a gigabyte of art.
I was looking for something about wizards on the fourth floor.
“Hiztoriez of Kweens” ahh freespelling! A better world for the dyslexic as myself. A promising book if I could decipher the cryptic handwriting.
“Great wizards of eons!” The books had no authors associated with them.
I flipped “Great wizards of the Eons” open.
No Ctrl+F. No table of contents.
Oh… wow…
heh, no matter. I began to skim the first few sentences of each page.
“The raising of the first recorded tower was done to survey land and dispel a disagreement between farmers.”
“Many wizards seek to retire to the depths of the earth under the bowels of the mountains, they are said to turn to stone in meditation.”
“Trust not the words of a wizard for tongues unknown they speak, fool yourself into understanding and live a newt if you are lucky.”
“Petty rivalries 1: The wizard of C Eight has mastered the puppetry of corpses while the bishop of E Six rejects it as ‘child’s play for those who cannot comprehend loss.’”
None of this was useful.
“Genealogy of nobility.”
It was a scroll.
I opened it.
A family tree complete with fanciful and colored art, the paint used to decorate my lineage had already cracked before I opened the thing. Primitives.
I was married to Dove of White. But this picture was fanciful, it removed the angularity of the women now dead. I didn’t know who the artist was depicting but they were apparently blonde.
I was the Lion, son of Brilliant tiger and Dauphin most White. I had a younger brother by Swan of Black named panther. I had an even younger son, himself depicted as only a baby next to the teenagers that I and my brother must have once been. This baby by Dauphin as well. Winter Ptarmigan.
But that wasn’t interesting.
Dove of White had four sisters. She was third, the fourth had died young it looks like.
The older two had already had children when this tree was drawn.
One had married on each side of the current war.
“Nephews” my queen had said.
Nobility was related even in World War One, no doubt they would be in every war.
Any other situation would just be a farce fought with weapons Einstein can probably imagine but doesn’t put to paper among polite society...
But the interesting thing was the ‘third parent’ of the queen not shared by any but her dead sister.
“Two Rattlesnakes that Dance” Neither black nor white, a witch/wizard of some sort. “Magical lineage is not comparable to blood.” A cautionary warning placed by some scribe.
“My king.” Some voice at the edge of my attention.
I ignored it for a second, long enough for them to repeat.
“O Splendid Lion of mine!”
I turned to look, realizing I was hunched in front of an open scroll with an open flame among a dusty dark pile of documents. It was knight Steel, a dim silhouette against the spiral stairs.
The sun was up and rising. Bright light shone in from the stairs above.
“Your wife is looking for you, O lion… I… fear she may be distressed, do you know why?”
“No what’s up?”
“Go to your wife O lion, I fear the worst for the way she speaks. I have not seen her as she is. I know not her ways.”
Now why would my wife be distressed? She seemed so rational only six hours ago.
Hangover? No we had sobered yesterday night.
New body’s biology? No that seemed too reductive. Surely it couldn’t be that different.
Did that girl she hijacked have some chemical imbalance perhaps? That would be an awkward ride for a demon I suppose.
“Did you tell her I was in the library?” I asked,
I didn’t know if anyone knew I was in the library.
“That’s what she was complaining about, that you went to the library without her.” Old Steel replied.
So she knows where I go even if I don’t tell her? The possibilities were interesting, my modern paranoia may pay off with dividends in this strange world.