Kyra the Red looked at the door across from her. The door to her office was closed, but she expected that soon her squire would open it and announce a visitor. Her cheeks were flushed to a shade of red as bright as her clothes, and she could feel her jaw muscle strain with the effort to bite down to keep from screaming. She formed her left hand into a tight fist, held the palm of her right hand open, and punched her left fist into her right hand, making a loud clap-like sound that sent a jolt of tension and alertness through her small yet athletic body. She held her left fist clenched and clutched in her right hand. She lowered her eyes from the door to stare at her interlocked hands.
Kyra’s office as Commander of the City Guard of Imperia was a small room, but not too small, in the corner of the third floor of the City Guard Headquarters. The room was perfectly square, its walls lined with paintings, its floors made of wood, its only points of exit the door directly across from her desk or, if made necessary by rogues attacking the Headquarters, the small window above and behind her to her left. The Headquarters was an old Manor House that had once belonged to a noble family; the king had bought it and gifted it to the City Guard, at a time when the Imperium had a rising middle class and a rising assertiveness among the merchants, who demanded protection. She commanded the City Guard in the capital city of Imperia, a long, flat city built along the coast of the ocean, its buildings made mostly of shiny white marble in the Fancy District and of dirty dark-brown wood or cheaper gray stone in the Poor District.
Kyra the Red breathed in, savoring the smell of the ocean air coming in from the Eastern Ocean through the window. She had just recently been informed by her squire of an unexpected visit by an emissary of the White Wizard. Stay calm. Do not be afraid of the White Wizard, or of his servants, she thought to herself. He is the world’s most powerful wizard. I don’t care. I fear no one. She repeated that thought for emphasis. I fear no one. See what he wants, and then see to it that he leaves as soon as possible. If he tries to interfere with how I run the City Guard, do not let him.
Her squire knocked at her door. She looked up. The squire opened the door and announced a priest, Ogglethorpe of White, to see Kyra the Red. Kyra sighed and motioned for her squire to let him in. The squire bowed and left.
A man walked in. He wore voluminous white robes, which formed folds that draped below his elbows and down from his knees to the floor, and his neck was adorned with multiple gold necklaces that glittered and sparkled like dazzling night sky stars in an ostentatious display of his status as a powerful high priest. Elf gold, judging by that shiny glitter. Expensive. Tacky. I wonder how he could afford it. His robe had a hood, but it was pulled back behind him, like a short cape. His scalp was clean-shaven bald, and he wore a long white beard and mustache pulled into braids that fell down his chest, as was the custom among older priests of a certain rank. He also wore eyeglasses, their thin wire frames made from the same gold as his necklaces, the lenses custom cut by gnome lens-makers.
Without asking, the man took a seat in one of the chairs before Kyra’s desk, facing her. The chairs in front of her were intentionally lower than the chair in which Kyra sat, so that she could look down at whomever she faced, but this man was tall enough that he looked down upon her, regardless of the chairs.
“You are the priest, Ogglethorpe of White,” Kyra said, phrasing it as an assertion, not a question, even though she had never met him before.
“Let’s cut the small talk and get right to the reason why I am here, Red,” the man said, and Kyra’s cheeks flushed to new levels of redness at being called out by her color in a derogatory tone. “I do not know why the King would choose to place a Red in charge of the City Guard, but there you are, so here I am having to talk to you. The White Wizard is concerned, deeply concerned I might add, about the amount of contraband and counterfeit goods entering the city of Imperia through the marketplace. He wonders why the City Guard cannot stop these rogues.”
“And is it the job of the Temple to wonder these things?” Kyra asked abruptly, so quickly that she did not have time to stop and think about what she said before she spoke it.
“The White Wizard is one of the closest allies of the King, the man whom you swore an oath to serve and obey when you were appointed Commander of the City Guard,” Ogglethorpe said. “The Temple of Light will wonder about whatever it is that we want to wonder about, including the City Guard’s incompetence.”
“My loyalty to the King is absolute, but I never swore fealty to the White Wizard!” Kyra said. She took a deep breath. “We are trying our best! It is not easy! What business is it to the White Wizard? You priests have your proper job praying to God, tending to the religious needs of the people, and guarding the Crystal of Light. You have failed to make me understand why the White Wizard sent you here to see me.”
Should I kick this man out of my office? Kyra thought. He does seem to want to interfere with me. The White Wizard might turn me into a newt or a slug if I annoy him. And the King could find others to replace me if I magically vanish. But I never back down from a fight. Should I?
Ogglethorpe stared at her, his tiny blue eyes made even smaller through the lenses of the glasses perched upon his long, thin nose. He arched his eyebrows at her, a gesture of both curiosity and patronizing belittlement at the same time. “Do you not know? Can you not know? The White Wizard is, after all, of White, and, as of White, he is terribly upset about the moral and ethical depravity of his people. Some of the stolen goods—I choose not to say what, but I am sure you know—are corrupting the moral and ethical status of his people.”
“His people? They are the King’s people! The King rules this Kingdom! The White Wizard does not!”
Ogglethorpe frowned, slowly licked his lips, and furrowed his brow, which emphasized the wrinkles on his bald, pale-white forehead. He stared directly at Kyra through his glasses. She met his gaze and did not flinch, despite the thin sunlight from her window reflecting directly off his glasses and into her eyes.
“That is true,” Ogglethorpe said cautiously, “but please do not forget that the Temple of Light and the King are close allies. And do not forget that the White Wizard protects the Crystal of Light, a sacred task appointed to humans by none other than God, as the physical manifestation of the covenant between God and the humans by which God rid us of the dragons ten thousand years ago. We are, if I may say so in a humble way, very important. The White Wizard’s displeasure should, and will, concern you.”
A pompous ass who knows nothing about what the City Guard does, Kyra thought. Why did God entrust a sacred duty to these idiots?
“The amount of stolen goods sold in the streets is not higher than it used to be or than it normally is! I do my job well!”
“The Druzilch Consortium of Merchants begs to differ. As you know, Druzilch is our largest guild of merchants. Recently, a certain product that they sell has seen competition from many fake knockoffs sold in the streets. I hesitate to name the product, but recently the common folk have started buying it at a frantic pace. It is a certain, I do not even know how to say this, magical device that is fae and pornographic in nature—”
Kyra burst out laughing. Is that what he is concerned about? The elf porn balls? One year ago, a minor Blue wizard in a small town in Skagor, a distant kingdom to the southwest, had figured out how to use Blue time magic to freeze a section of time and then replay that section of frozen time repeatedly within a crystal ball.
This wizard had promptly gone to the lowest possible use of his high art, made a deal with a local fae man and fae woman to be his models, and he had used his Blue magic to capture a scene in time and copy it into a crystal ball. And then he used a duplication spell to mass-produce it. It was genius, typical of a Blue. It was the type of commercialization of magic that most wizards looked down on with scorn, but he wanted money, and he got what he wanted. This Blue wizard had gone from being a nobody to becoming a rich man overnight, although Kyra did not remember his name. Druzilch had licensed his product for sale in the Imperium, she knew.
You could buy a copy of this crystal ball, shake it, hold it up to your eyes, and stare into it, and, for forty minutes, you would watch an elf man and an elf woman do the most dirty and disgusting things that any elf man and elf woman had ever done. Of course, the elves had eternal youth and perfect beauty naturally, so most humans were already secretly curious about them or had some sort of weird fetish for them, and the elf porn balls fed right into that. It even worked dozens of times before the magic ran out and you were forced to buy a new one.
The elf porn balls had become incredibly popular, rising in profile month after month. Bards sang of them in their nightly songs in the taverns. By now, everyone knew about them, although while in polite company one was supposed to pretend that one knew nothing about them. Kyra herself owned two: one kept at home in her apartment bedroom, for use both by herself and with her various partners, and one right there, in the bottom drawer of her desk at work, in this room, for when she was bored at work and needed something to entertain her. Both were fake ones she had taken from the hands of Red rogues whom her soldiers had arrested for dealing in fake and stolen goods. Ogglethorpe does not need to know what I keep in the bottom drawer of my desk! she thought. And he does not need to know that I have used it so much it is almost used up.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Kyra stopped laughing. “Why does the White Wizard care?”
“I do not think you understand how disgusting it all is, or how much money the Druzilch Consortium makes on those erotic fae orbs and how much money it is losing to the market for fake goods. You people really need to step up your game, and fast.”
Suddenly Kyra understood. “So the Druzilch Consortium has made some sort of sizable and recent donation of gold coins to the Temple of Light,” Kyra said, her face arching into a sneer, “to pay you to put pressure on me, because they have no influence with me directly. I do not take bribes, so here you are, to try to bully me. How much did they pay you? Five-hundred gold coins? A thousand gold coins? I wonder what you are worth.”
“Silence!” Ogglethorpe said, and he stood up and raised both of his fists in the air. Because Kyra was short and sitting in her chair and Ogglethorpe was tall and was now standing, he towered over her. The light from her window shined directly at him so that she could see every inch of him, from his trembling mouth to his shaking fists to the dazzling radiance of his necklaces to his immaculate white robes billowing around him like a ghost. Ogglethorpe, standing upright with his arms raised, seemed to fill up the entire height, length, and width of her small office. Kyra did not cower back from him. Instead, she leaned slightly forward in her chair.
“Know your place, Red,” Ogglethorpe said. He spat the words, and she winced as some of his saliva hit her face. “This is not the only reason the White Wizard is disappointed in you. The White Wizard is no fool. He has not become the most powerful mage in the realm by being an idiot. He has spies. There is conspiracy afoot. The Kingdom is in danger. You know this.”
What the Hell is this crazy old man talking about? How soon can I get this man to get out of my office?
“I know nothing!” Kyra said.
Ogglethorpe leaned forward and down, placing his hands upon the surface of her desk. Hunched over her desk in this fashion, his head was mere inches from hers. He looked into her eyes, and she returned his gaze, seeing the blue smears of his eyes from within the lenses of his eyeglasses. He just stared at her, for a moment, and then another moment. Kyra expected him to say something, to scream at her, to shout to the moons. He said nothing, and he just looked at her, staring into her eyes, like examining a bug.
Suddenly Kyra’s eyes widened, and she shoved Ogglethorpe’s head away, so forcefully that he fell to the floor in front of her desk.
“You were trying to read my mind, you scumbag!” Kyra said. “You were casting a magic spell on me!” I will bet his magic spell for reading minds is in those eyeglasses, she thought. I should smash them. I wonder if he knows about my elf porn balls now.
Ogglethorpe grabbed the desk from below and used it to pull himself up to his knees, and then stood back up. He did not retake a seat, but instead stayed standing, looking at Kyra, his mouth wrinkled by a deep frown.
“You know far less than we had expected. You truly are a Red, worthless other than for drinking a potion to get high or rolling some dice for mindless fun. Know this, Kyra the Red: right now, in the Kingdom, there are conspiracies, and conspiracies within conspiracies. Trust no one. Do not trust the Star Knights. Do not trust the Order of the Servants of the Sword. Do not trust the Noble Houses. Your loyalty to the King is admirable, but do not trust his advisors and ministers. Even they are merely human.”
Kyra saw no evidence that the priest was aware of the elf porn in her desk, or that, if he knew, he cared about it. “Should I trust you, then?” Kyra asked.
“The Order of the Priests of the Temple of Light are the most loyal servants of God. Yes, of course you should trust us. What a stupid thing for you to have said. But, as I was saying, a plan is brewing, one which we suspect might target the Crystal of Light, and one for which we have been led to believe that the criminal underworld might be used as an attack vector to enter the Temple of Light to target the Crystal. As you know, or at least as I would have hoped you would have been taught in school, if you ever went to school, if the Crystal of Light is ever destroyed then our ancient covenant with God is broken, the dragons return, and all Hell breaks loose. The dragons were angry at us before, and I cannot imagine that ten thousand years of banishment have lightened their mood. The dragons were hungry for humans, too, if the history books are to be believed. The dragons were very hungry for humans. You simply must do a better job at maintaining law and order on the streets of this city. We cannot allow rogues to even walk near the Temple of Light, let alone breach it.”
“Is the Crystal of Light safe?” Kyra asked, her voice reduced to nothing more than a low soft whisper of fear. The fate of our world is tied to that Crystal. If these stupid priests make a mistake… “Are you priests doing your job? It is your sacred duty to protect the Crystal of Light. You have been doing it for thousands of years. Do you have information on a credible threat? This is not a joke, and it is not about us. We need to tell the King, his generals, and everyone, if that Crystal is in danger!”
Ogglethorpe smiled. “No, no, no, we are doing a wonderful job protecting the Crystal of Light. Teams of Reds have attempted to steal it many times, and we defeat them, every time. I speak merely of whispers and rumors, not of known threats. Just to be safe, we recently hired a team of gnome analysts to analyze our defenses and look for weaknesses. The gnomes were extremely impressed by how trustworthy and reliable our defensive measures are.”
Kyra exhaled. Then she arched an eyebrow at Ogglethorpe. “Gnomes? They must have cost a lot. Gnomes are always smart. And gnomes are trustworthy. What did they say in detail?”
“We were told that a team of thieves who included one of every color: Blue, Black, White, Green, Red, and Yellow, with a mix of wizards and knights among the rogues, might have the best chance at cracking through our extensive and multilayered defensive precautions,” Ogglethorpe said. “But every criminal organization tends to be of only one color. We know of no crime gang that could field a crew with every color. Who could be crazy enough to assemble a team with one of all six Colors when the Colors work so poorly together, and how could such a thing even be done? It is impossible! The gnomes told us they have heard rumors among the criminal underworld that someone might try to do it, by hiring six new people, one from each of the Six Colors, to form a brand-new thieving crew, instead of by using one of the established crime guilds, because all of the established criminal gangs are all of one Color, and, indeed, most of them, like you, are Red. But it would be a truly futile effort if someone were to try.”
“You sound like you are very confident,” Kyra said. Perhaps too confident.
“And with good reason!” Ogglethorpe said. “The eyes and ears of the Temple of Light extend very far, and we see all that happens in the Imperium, so any effort to hire such thieves would need to be done in some other kingdom, where the rogues are unlikely to covet a sacred magical item within Imperia, and are far more likely to be concerned with the loot local to their own area to be stolen. Yellow is worn only by the elves and fae, and they will not cooperate with human criminals, anyway. And even if they broke through, they would have to defeat the White Wizard, which is impossible! And, after having done the impossible and defeating the White Wizard, I can tell you that this legend is true: the Crystal of Light is held in place by a powerful magic spell ten thousand years old and we humans no longer remember how it was made or how to undo it. The Crystal of Light cannot be physically removed from the Temple of Light. We cannot be defeated. The Crystal of Light cannot be stolen!”
“It is interesting to know that there are spells in your own Temple of which you have no knowledge, but it is nice to know that those spells protect the Crystal of Light,” Kyra said.
“We protect the Crystal of Light and uphold our sacred duty in many ways! But my point, you stupid woman, is not that the Crystal is in danger, but that, if you allow a culture in which crime is allowed to flourish, then you are courting danger. If we permit an army of rogues in this city, it becomes only a matter of time until thief, after thief, after thief, tries to break in. And the greater the number of rogues who try to infiltrate our Temple of Light, the greater the chances that one might break through. The gnomes told us that your soldiers are our first and outermost line of defense against all rogues, so, if the protection that you provide us with at the perimeter of the Temple is invulnerable, then our own defenses become almost irrelevant.”
“I do a fantastic job! I do not create a culture in which crime is allowed to flourish! My soldiers are the best soldiers in the world! I will not be frightened by old ghost stories about the dragons of ancient times! And I will not be ridiculed over a lack of my soldiers controlling the supply of elf porn, real or counterfeit! I am Kyra, Wingardian Zealot! Do you know why they call me Kyra, Wingardian Zealot? I am a Zealot of Wingard, the Order for good Reds! You of White do not have a monopoly on ethics and morality! We Reds care about good and evil too! I will crack down on the contraband rings! I will guard the Temple of Light against rogues, Red or of any of the other Colors! And I will get the criminal underworld under control! I will institute a reign of terror in the streets so severe that the pavement stones across the city of Imperia will drip red with the blood of rogues! But I will do it for God and for King! Not for you! Now GET OUT!”
The force of her scream was so loud that it made the high priest’s beard and necklaces tremble. Ogglethorpe slowly walked to the door, pointedly took his time opening it, and exited, his long white robes flowing and flapping about him as he left.
Kyra bent down, opened the bottom drawer of her desk, and took out her elf porn ball. She spoke to the elf porn ball, which she had come to regard as a friend in a joke way, but which she did not feel up to hiding from Ogglethorpe and the spies which she suspected he had lurking somewhere within City Guard Headquarters watching her. She would look for his spies and try to root them out, obviously, but she had no confidence about her ability to catch them, if any existed. The Temple of Light was powerful, and it had many friends.
“Well, my small round glass friend, it looks like the powers in charge will not let you and me be together anymore. I will always cherish the time that you and I spent with each other. Farewell, friend.” She used both hands to toss the illicit fae erotic orb into the waste basket in the corner of her office, without getting up. When it fell in, it hit the floor of the basket, and the glass broke and shattered. Kyra winced. Something for my squire to clean up. Then Kyra the Red looked up at the ceiling and sighed. And then she looked back down at her desk, where her work was waiting for her, because now, after that nasty man’s insanity, it was time for her to get back to work. She took a scroll of parchment from her desk, unfurled it, and began to read it.
It was a draft of the plan for how her soldiers should tackle the criminal underworld gangs, a plan which she had asked her senior lieutenants to draw up. She had a meeting soon to discuss it with them. What she had told Ogglethorpe was true. She had been planning to increase police raids throughout the city long before his meeting with her. Soon, her crackdown and police reign of terror would begin. It would be meticulously well planned. And it would not fail.
