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Chapter 7

The Council members stood around the massive room that only contained a table and nine chairs, some of them clearly anxious. The High Council was made of eight members and held meetings with the king two to three times a week to check on the state of Elven Guard and Arün. Despite the nation being a monarchy, the High Council positions were elected by members of the city.

Sellion sat at the table, his hands visually showing his temper.

"Jinora," he said, annoyed with his inflection zeroing in on the last part of her name. He referred to a female elf with dark skin and black hair. Jinora was born a noblewoman. She had married another noble and had a child. Jericho thought bright colors looked good on her against her dark complexion. Elves wore bright colors no matter the occasion. Jericho only cracked the door, refusing to open it all the way when he heard the verbal bickering going on inside.

"Sellion, you don't understand what I just said, do you?"

"I do," he threw his hands up. "except it had nothing to do with my point! In fact, you missed the point entirely like a terrible archer!"

"What?" Jinora cocked her head at him, arms crossed.

"You think you are intelligent but simple points go over your head like a bird in flight," Sellion pointed a finger at her.

"I'm certainly clever. Perhaps more so than somebody. I will not name names." The rest of the High Council had been used to their bickering, it happened almost every time there was something to debate. On important subjects, it was a good thing.

"You think you have the right to call yourself wise because you were born a noble?"

"I was given a private education and was expected to be better. It's not like any of you are nobility." Everybody had classified Jinora as a pretentious person before they knew her personally. They had heard stories. The way she made noises of displeasure were always a clear sign of her personality.

"You're not the only one who's nobility here."

"Oh, like you were born to a lord?" She couldn’t even believe he could’ve been born to a semi-wealthy merchant. Sellion never spoke of his past. Nobody knew what he did before Valka showed up one day and told them Sellion would be joining the Council under his preference. Sellion pressed on no further, staying silent. "You, a noble? Ha! You have all the grace of a barbarian eating sloppy joes!" Jinora picked at her fingernails, the nail polish coming off in little pieces. "And besides, last time I checked, in Arün, there's no family with the surname ‘Dunes’."

"Who said Sellion came from Arün, Jinora?" another girl known as Inari said to Jinora before Sellion could slap Jinora in the face with a ridiculous revelation, that surely would've made her piss herself.

Inari’s brown hair was kept braided. She often fiddled with it, running her fingers through them as if she was ready to pull them out at any given moment. Sellion thought it to be a nervous disorder. And of course she was playing with her braids as Jinora Lilica and Sellion Dunes verbally fought over his secret lineage.

"He could've come from some place like Lidën and stayed in Arün for the five years required to get this job," Inari continued. Sellion cringed when Inari said the name of an Elven city across the Sea of No'ereth.

"King Valka gave him this job out of thin air," Jinora shot at Inari. "Remember when he waltzed in acting like the high and mighty hero of this town and introduced Sellion and said he's joining us on the Council?" Half of the members of the High Council were present when that happened a century ago.

"You weren't even there for that," one of the other men who'd been on the High Council since the times of King Valka's father spoke.

"My father, Lord Elbereth, was, though. And he recited that memory so much it practically burned into my mind as if it had been my own." Jinora reminded everybody how much they despised how she would bring up her father any time she saw fit. To them, her father had been an interesting person to work with due to his background and personality. His only daughter had set his sights on his job early on. But Jinora turned out to be the exact opposite of him. She wasn't fun or interesting to work with at all. Most of them quickly despised her before she even took her father's place.

And despite it being only about six months since Jinora had replaced her father as a member of the High Council, she was already a natural at voicing her honest opinions. She'd been preparing to take Elbereth's place since she was six years old, after all.

"Kirrox died! We needed a replacement anyway!" the man added onto his previous statement. Jinora shrugged in response. Jinora shrugged in response.

"Kirrox didn't die. Well, I'm certain he's dead now, but he didn't leave because he died," Sellion muttered, studying his cuticles.

"Wait, he didn't quit because he died? That's what I was told!" His lower lip quivered for a slight second.

"Who told you that?" Jinora snickered.

"King Valka, I think?" More laughter broke out between the councilors. "Why would he lie to us?"

"High King Valka never lied to us. Maybe he lied to you, Sequoia. Either way, you would dare insult our deceased king—calling him a liar—like that?" the third woman joined in, her vocal vexation like the sound of thunder. Everyone became quiet when they heard her come close to shouting. She was called Margoth and she looked more like King Valka than anyone else in the castle. She shared his black hair, sky blue eyes and fair complexion. Many of the elves in Arün thought them to be related, including Jericho and Khaleesi.

After a moment of terrified silence, another man came over to the table between them and slammed his fists on the table between Jinora, Sellion and Margoth. His flesh was tanned like he spent most days on the beaches just outside Elven Guard. "Damn, hold on. Lilica, Dunes, Vaughn, you guys do this almost every time there's a topic to debate. Like some sort of..."

"Debate team?" It was easily seen that Sellion was annoyed. His eyelid twitched. "Is that what you were going to say, Crémïne? "He pronounced the other man’s name creh-min.

Crémïne was a man of average build with platinum blond hair and somewhat dark, dreary blue eyes. He had tanned skin, smelled of saltwater and was always seen wearing a seashell necklace. It was obvious to anyone that he spent most of his free time by Lake Adgränia or on the beaches to the west of Elven Guard.

When Jericho mustered the courage to open the door all the way, the fighting immediately went to a standstill when all the councilors' eyes stopped on him. "Oh...Am I...interrupting...something?" Jericho raised a brow. "If I am, I can leave."

Prince Jericho had always been the meek one out of the three princelings. The nigh forgotten middle child. He was not the child born to inherit the kingdom, nor was he the child King Valka suffered with his own identity because of.

"Sit down, Prince Jericho," Sequoia instructed. Sequoia was an oddity among elves, having fiery red hair tied into a ponytail and an uncountable amount of freckles.

Jericho reluctantly sat at the head of the table while the eight High Council members took their seats, putting their bickering on hold.

"I really don't like being bossed around by a man who's named after a tree," Jericho referred to the burnt redhead. Sequoia frowned, probably having some choice words for the prince about his name. Sellion chuckled and somebody kicked him under the table.

"We have a proposition for you," Sellion coughed. "Inari."

Inari nodded at Sellion and began to speak directly to the prince, "You said you don't want the crown in the weeks following the Great Fire of Arün as Prince Laverne is the crown's rightful heir, correct?"

"Correct," Jericho mumbled.

"Your brother shows no signs of waking up anytime soon," Inari continued, twirling a finger in her brunette, braided hair, and slowly unraveling it, "and Arün and Elven Guard need a King. We'll offer you this, we will give Prince Laverne ten months on the dot from the day of King Valka's funeral to wake from his comatose slumber, a month for every day he was supposed to be crowned. Otherwise, we will crown you. But until then, you will be acting as King-In-Waiting. You will still get to make all the political decisions."

"Oh, great." Jericho's words were utter sarcasm. He accompanied his voice with a hard roll of his eyes that could've easily knocked the planets out of alignment. Jericho wasn't a mean person, he just had been going through a lot and was depressed. It did not help that he was getting pressure put on him by everybody around him.

"What do you say?" Jinora sang, oblivious to Jericho's unacceptance to the plan.

"Fine, then. I accept this proposal." Jericho stood, eyes narrowing at them.

"By the way, a healer has been summoned for your brother, he should be here any day." Margoth added on before he could fully leave. "He's known as the Berserk Healer in the valleys down south." Jericho raised an eyebrow in question about the man's nickname. It was certainly odd.

"A healer? Prince Laverne is as good as dead. It would take a literal miracle of the gods for him to survive that many chest stabbings," an elf man with a shaved head chimed in. He had hair color. His hair was as short as anyone could possibly cut it. It was so short; it may as well have been tattooed onto his scalp.

"Doesn't hurt to try, Zelovitch," Inari touched on the nearly bald elf's words.

Jericho stared at Zelovitch's tribal tattoo's ink that began on his wrist and wound up the length of his arm and stopped on his neck, just shy of his jawline. Zelovitch had always been known for wearing clothes made for warm weather—except in the wintertime when Arün was blanketed in seventeen feet of snow and the slightest disregard to the freezing temperatures would easily kill a man. That was the only reason anyone knew Zelovitch had a tattoo that wasn't his hairline.

Jericho had nothing else to add to the councilors' discussion. They had already voted on it.

Days later, multiple reports of a dragon sighting—it being seen flying over the city with what looked like a figure riding it, flooded the town guards' posts. The townsfolk demanded the city watch send out scouts as they claimed to have seen the dragon land in the forest. Dragons were a rare sight, many fleeing to the outskirts of the world when people began to build cities. The scouts came back empty handed, only finding an elf with horns eating a sandwich at the base of a tree. They jotted down the strange encounter as a record and moved on with their lives. The healer was given access to Prince Laverne. His name was Kitto Sperry and he had come highly recommended. He wore all black with shoes decorated with patterns of flowers. He had platinum blond curly hair with a thin mustache, beard and a genetic disorder known as heterochromia. The genetic disorder made pieces of his mustache, eyelashes and left eyebrow a sand brown instead of blond. Large, circular glasses rested on the bridge of his nose. He greeted the royal family with simplicity.

Moria stood in Laverne's bedchamber, closely watching Kitto like a vulture waiting for its meal to die of starvation.

"You do not have to be here," Kitto declared, preparing his instruments.

"He is my son. I want to make sure you don't screw this up and hurt him even more." Her tone had a hint of unpleasantness to it. Her gaze locked onto Kitto, giving him more than an uneasy feeling.

"Very well, then." Kitto had no interest in telling her to go away, nor any intention to hurt the prince. When he faced the prince lying in bed, he felt an odd energy he could not explain.

Kitto magically healed Laverne over the course of eight months, every time bringing his dragon that would disappear upon landing. Moria shadowed him. She confused him with her strange questions and he would give vague answers. The holes in Laverne's chest became scars. Kitto said to Moria that they would be unfixable beyond that point and that it was likely Laverne would live the rest of his life in immense physical pain. Moria knew she could not undo what she had done to her beloved son.