In the Name of the Emperor

Another chapter!





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"Where have you been all day? Out in the ruins?" Her eyes widened and he did an admirable job of not laughing at her horrified expression. Her left eye wavered just a smidge, like it always did when she was about to lie. she burst out with a "NO!" but the King hiked a brow and she gave a defeated, exasperated sigh.



"OKAY! OKAY! OKAY! Verrun and I went to the ruins but the guards were all in shouting distance. I swear! And i didn't even mean to push him!" She rambled on, as a child was won't to do. "and he fell and broke his arm but I fixed it and-"



"What? Is he alright? Where is he Jenavive?" The King straightened and looked a little worried.



"He'd fine! I fixed his broken arm!" Her father suddenly looked very interested in what she was saying but Andrus dismissed it. There was no way she could have done something of the sort, was if she said Verrun was fine, there was no doubt in his mind that he was running around somewhere. "He called me a demon..."



"Why?"



"Because I fixed his arm-"



"Alright then." Andrus shut her up and she knew the conversation was finished. "I suppose you will be punishing her for disobeying the rules?" Jenavive sank a little lower in Andrus' lap.



"Of course my King."



"But she must be rewarded for coming out with the truth."



"Then I will only spank her twenty times instead of thirty." She could already feel the burn on her backside. Oh...he was mad.



"As you will learn my little spit-fire, no good deed goes unpunished." He chuckled and rubbed her head again. With a sigh, she deemed the guard correct in his assumption she'd be getting a spanking.



"Oh! King, I have a question." She looked serious and he had to hold a straight face.



"Yes?"



"The guard was telling me about an invasion in the East and how our neighbors were fighting 'demons'. What is happening? He was really nice by the way, can I have him as my personal guard?"



"I thought I was your personal guard?" Andrus actually looked miffed and a little hurt. He'd protected her for the better part of her life now and that she requested someone else was a direct blow to his big heart.



"YOU ARE!!" She squealed and grasped his bearded cheeks. "But I need someone who can live with me. You live up here and I live down stairs. Besides, i can't climb on you to get into daddy's library so the other guy will have to do!" She leaned over and whispered in his ear. "I can't use you since daddy guarded the library against you remember?" She pulled back and tilted her head to the side, squeezing his cheeks and playing with the rough hair there. "You are always so fuzzy King." Andrus chuckled.



"Thank you m'lady."



"So about our neighbors being attacked..." she turned to her father. He started speaking but Maricce had the gaul to interrupt.



"Since she already knows, we may as well use her. it's not like she wouldn't have figured it out eventually." Well, he was right. Galrick swallowed his words and continued speaking. He prided himself on his daughter's ingenuity and wit but was firm handed with her attention grabbing antics. as he spoke, Andrus stood and placed Jenavive's butt on his shoulder, holding her legs so she didn't fall. She held onto his golden hair for balance.



Andrus had shoulder length hair the color of spun gold. He stood nearly seven heads tall and was the biggest man the world over, or so everyone thought. When one of the royal horses had fallen from a broken leg, Andrus had lifted the steed onto the back of a cart without so much as breaking a sweat. Women fawned over him from each region, calling him handsome and a stud. During the birth of the Prince, Andrus had lost his wife so the fawning of women was lost to him. He was a kind heart King who cared for his people and loved ones with his whole spirit. His courage was legend. It was needless to say that when Jenavive rode around on his shoulder(s) she felt like she flew atop the world.



Galrick and Maricce lead the way to the war table. Jenavive leaned over and looked at a map, splayed. It was a world map displaying all of the kingdoms and their surrounding regions. The Eastern Kingdom of Ferresha has a large black 'X' through it. Small red beads, used to indicate enemies, were all over the eastern side of the map and were moving in a semi-circle towards their kingdom. Compared to the red beads, their kingdom looked like the head of a pencil lead.



"Ferresha has fallen. It was taken by swarms of what are being reported as Demons," Maricce said.



"Do you remember the stories I used to lull you to sleep with about the 'other realm' Jenavive?" She looked at her father and nodded once in ascent. "Apparently these swarms are from that realm. But they are not faeries." She frowned and looked back to the map.



"Everyone was wiped out. Everything in the path of this semi-circle is falling without any fight." Marrice continued speaking but Jenavive studied the map.



"Were there any survivors? Surely Ferresha didn't have all of it's spies in the Kingdom at once. Weren't they lending aid to the Southern Kingdom of Voulgth recently?" she spoke as she studied.



"There was a soldier. he came to us with--" Maricce looked to his father who nodded. "He came to us with large holes in his body. They are roughly the size of our long spears and the outer edges of the holes looks like someone took heat to the wounds to stop the bleeding. There is no healing them. He came in rambling incoherently and our healers are not confident he will make it."



"But he is alive?"



"Barely." She thought about it.



"I'll go speak with him later."



"I assure you Jena that I have my best healers handling his care." She shrugged and vowed to herself that she would go speak with him later. As Jenavive study the map, she voiced a question to her father.



"Father, how many Mages of high caliper do we have at our disposal?"



"Why?"



"Humor me."



"Two."



"Excluding you."



"Two." Not raising her eyes, she leaned over, Andrus holding her steady as she started poking the map.



"How long until they reach us?"



"Seven nights a best," Maricce said, watching her with interest, just as the other two men were.



"Can we not call on the West and the South to come to our aid?"



"Kantradim and Voulgth are, at the very least, six days journey on the fastest steed. The enemy will be chewing our bones by the time help arrives Jenavive." she frowned and rubbed her chin.



"How did they get here father?"



"Through a portal from the other realm I can surmise."



"So why not send them back?"



"And how do you propose we do that daughter mine?" He quirked a brow. Jenavive tapped Andrus' arms and he set her on the table. Careful of her scrapped knees and pals, she sat delicately on the table and grabbed up a sheet of parchment and a pencil. Her wrist and hand moved in furiously quick movements and it became apparent a moment later that she was working on a very complex equation. The only one standing at the table able to understand it other than herself was, of course, Glarick.



"It is quite simple actually. We box them in and reverse them out." All three men stared at her like she had just lost her mind. They didn't understand. "Uhg." Moving over and leaving the equation in her lap for a moment, he started illustrating a box on the map with a triangle in the center of the box. Jenavive went between equation and map as she started explaining. "Think of making the color black. Black is not actually a color you see, it is devoid of all color. It is what mages call "Null." TO make black you simply combine a splotch of all colors until they swirl into no color but become a null of black. You can do the same thing with magic. If we put our two best mages at these two corners, Father in the center and four of our intermediate mages on the remaining two corners, we can throw a spell of each element in the center of the box and father can manipulate it into a portal. When the portal is ready, he can shoot it at the enemy and...poof." She raise her hands above her head for emphasis. "No more enemy. They return to wherever they came from." The equation was explained flawlessly and even though it took Galrick a moment to fully comprehend what she had just said, he looked at the other men. Maricce and Andrus tried turning their heads away to laugh but failed miserably. Their bodies racked with great laughs.



"Even though I understand what you are saying Jenavive, what you explain is impossible. The only way to be rid of them is to kill that which summoned them, or kill them."



"It's not impossible! If they originated from the east, we can send our fastest fliers out there, or teleport the mages into their places!"



"And if they have archers?" Maricce had finally composed himself and looked at her. She simply stuck her tongue out at him again and watched the vein in his forehead throb before turning back to her father.



"We simply go around them. The teleportation spell would move them without them being seen or sensed."



"There are reports of the enemy coming from the north and the south. If what you explained was based off of their origin of origination, then how to you propose we 'reverse' them out then?" Her head slowly turned, almost as if a woman was looking behind her in horror, and her eyes narrowed dangerously on Maricce. He subconsciously swallowed and stood up straight.



"We send the Kings fastest and strongest warriors to those points to slay what might have summoned them." She turned and drew some lines to each possible summoning spot based on numbers and angles the enemy was moving.



"And wait for them to slaughter us?"



"FINE!" She hollered. Jenavive stood and ripped up her equation, only noticing that her father had started reaching when she turned to jump off the table. He had a slightly crestfallen face. "You smart adults figure out how you want to protect this kingdom and it's people. I don't care what you do!" Jumping off the table and started for the door, stopping in mid step to collect the pieces of her equation off the floor. She grabbed it only because she thought to lighten her inevitable punishment later. When she had all of the pieces, she stomped out of the throne room and went to her bedchamber located in the palace cellars. Sometimes it was harder to be smarter than everyone around her, even her own father.





The rest of the day passed and her punishment came and went. She was hurting by spank number five but because she knew how much her father despised her tears, she held them in and took it like a grown up. To finish up her punishment, she was doomed to stay inside for three days and read the text on Quantanimos the Vibrant. With a half-hearted sigh, she pulled down the text and opened up to the first page. Half way through the text, she stood up with a half idea, half thirst for knowledge. What she had read so far was Quantanimos had been revered as a very powerful Magus and was said that he journeyed to the other dimension. Pawing through her fathers texts, while standing on one of her brother's shoulders, she found five texts that described the other dimension and Quantanimos. Once she had them on the floor, she opened them and pulled them into a circle around her. When her father made a comment on her reading habits, she silenced him with a dirty look that had him shutting his study door rather quickly.



According to Quantanimos, the other dimension was actually a dimension that existed because of human emotion. Human emotion had shaped it and breathed life to it and it's creatures. There was a color for every human emotion, the most notable were white for honor, pink for love, yellow for happiness and red for rage. After his journey, Quantanimos had come back wearing only those colors which represented the better human emotions. He had mentioned, according to an unknown source, that the colors he surrounded himself with were his protection and how he'd gotten back to the present dimension. It was also mentioned that he spoke of time being different. Where he was in the other dimension for fifteen seconds, one year had passed in the present dimension.



After a whole day of research, he child-like mind decided it was time to play with her dollies, the pages of words finally starting to get to her. But after naught but a few hours, she went back to the texts. On day two, she hadn't found any more information. Her mind got distracted yet again half wya through day two and after that, she didn't go back to the books.