Prologue

It started about nine hundred years ago, you know, the usual. Some young noble hot head comes along and decides to take over the land of some old noble hothead. They fight, one wins, one loses, and ta-da! We, the people, are reward with a new ruler. Some laws change, the holidays are renamed, and nothing else is really different. We don’t care. There’s a rebellion, soldiers die, the people are punished, and we end up hating the ones who caused the problems. But still, as to who wins or loses, we still don’t care. Because nothing ever really changes, you know? There’s a lot of yelling, pledges, threats. A promise for a new age is made! And once the war is won everybody forgets, because the toll of life is too much, people are weeping, people want peace. So does anybody really notice when the taxes don’t go down? Of course not, we need the money to fix things. What about those new freedoms? Sure, once they’ve caught all the old loyalists, and hey, if that takes years, it doesn’t really matter, right? Of course.

But nine hundred years ago, something, a small something, in fact, it didn‘t really affect anyone for another two centuries, but something did change. The Tournaments were created. The new ruler, he was a little smarter then the rest. He decided that the best way to keep people liking him was to allow the common masses to influence the way society worked. I know, it sounds obvious now, but then, not so much. In the Tournament, groups of average citizens would get together, team up, and complete tasks set for them by the nobles. It was a competition to see what team could complete the task first and best. Whoever won was reward with some sort of position befitting their skills. They had Tournaments for everything. It was good. It gave us something to do, created a feeling of glory around winning. Everyone was so determined to do well in the Tournaments that nobody had time for rebellion.

My grandfather was into them. He was a Player, the term for those who sign up to compete. He even won a few of them, the smaller ones. That’s how he became a big council member in one of the cities. My father didn’t like the city life much, it didn’t quite fit his gnomish style. A pretty big, small town man he was. So he moved back out into the Welsth, where my grandparents were born. Eventually, my grandmother came to live with us as well. Grandpa would visit, a lot, actually, but he didn’t want to give up his career that had cost him so much to get. My parents didn’t mind, my grandma understood, and I got presents every time he came, so it didn’t make a difference to me. I was their baby, the only one my parents ever had. They loved me, and, ha, well, I might’ve taken advantage of that at points. But hey, what else would an only child in the Welsth do? I mean, seriously! Look over at the Brimmings, they have, like, twelve children! Honestly, you’d think Mrs. Brimming would take it easy, you know? It’s not healthy for a gnome to have that many kids. And the Whitewaters? Seven. Mother says it’s something in the water. I mean, I have like, twenty uncles and seventeen aunts. I’m not even going to get into counting cousins. But, maybe because I was an only child, I always felt Grandpa and Grandma loved me best. Father and Mother never explained why they only wanted one child. Maybe because they had so many brothers and sisters themselves. But that’s fine. A younger sibling would have only gotten in the way. Of what, you ask?

I’ll get to that later.

Anyway, growing up in the Welsth wasn’t so bad. At first at least. It was a small town, and hard to find somebody who wasn’t related to someone else. With family values the way they are, it’s hard to have just one friend without some sibling coming along and wanting to be a part. I spent a lot of my time alone. The younger kids were always getting in the way, you know? There was this boy that was my friend for a while, Etlerole Gutterslip. I could even stand his stupid younger sisters and brothers coming to play with us once in a while.

Play. For the record, I don’t play. But that’s what they wanted to do whenever they showed up, and Etty was too nice to send them packing.

Whenever I was able to get him alone though, we did all sorts of things. We explored the forest part of the Welsth, climbed the cliffs and attempted to catch the element lizards that hung out up there. We had to stop that particular pastime when the lizards started following us home. We weren’t suppose to be up there in the first place, but there was nothing to do if you only followed the rules. The town got so boring. And that’s where we started to have problems. Etty kept trying to drag me to do town things. Go to the school dance, come to the fair, watch the only movie that’s showed in the theatre for the last five months a hundred different times. I did some of it, just to keep him happy. Gotta give to take, you know? But it started to be too much. He didn’t want to go exploring, or leave the town boundaries. That time when there was a Bugbear making trouble in Bottomdweller Wood, he said to wait for a profession to take care of it. He didn’t even want to see it.

Finally, he started getting onto the old ‘you’re an only child and have to make your parents proud’ sentimentality. We had some fights, and stopped hanging out. I’m not sure what he did after that, though I think there was a girl named Penny involved. Like that’s an original name. She was probably one of the Brown’s kids. Although, honestly, I never realized he had wanted a girlfriend out of me, I just thought we were friends. Maybe that’s why he had started getting so mad, I hadn’t wanted anything back. In the end, it didn’t make a difference to me. He had been in the way.

And I told you, I’ll get to what later.

I went back to catching the lizards, even trained a few of them. I re-explored the forest, found some new caves that we didn’t notice the first few times. Started hanging out at the dam a lot, the guy that worked there taught me all about mechanics and how it worked. (Mark this, it’s important.) He never found it odd for me to be curious, a lot of gnomes had started going into the engineering fields. For the record, my parents tell me I’m either interested or apathetic. Apparently I don’t have a lot of middle ground. I disagree.

Finally, I got so bored I started bugging Grandma to tell me more of Grandpa’s old Player stories. When he was around, I’d ask him, it was always more interesting. Then I asked for some of his old weapons, just to look at, I’d said. A memento. Obviously, this was not the case at all. The caves I’d found in the forest turned out to be a perfect training area. No one was ever there, and there was a stream right nearby for me to wash up in so my parents wouldn’t find out I’d been training. After a while I started getting really good, I had started making my own style of fighting out of what my Grandpa told me about. You might be wondering, that if my parents knew me at all how they’d miss the fact that I was secretly training. Well, my grandpa had been a hunter. He used guns to fight, and shot from a distance. And I had his guns. They were kept in my room on my shelf. I never liked them. He had also given me a dagger he had had, something he didn’t use a lot and didn’t appear in his stories at all. My parents probably didn’t even know it existed. Since Grandpa’s guns never left my shelf, they had no reason to suspect I had any way to practice. Besides, I didn’t have bullets or anything. There was no way for me to do anything.

So when I accidentally tripped over a tree root while walking to the stream after practicing, and stabbed myself through the elbow of my left arm, it’s needless to say they were surprised. And a little angry. Alright, fine. Very angry.

There was the normal, ‘where did we go wrong’ speech from my mother and ‘why would you do this’ crap from father. I gave them the only answer I had. If you’ve been following me so far, you should know what it is by now. Ready? Dun dun dun…! I told them I wanted to become a Player.

Mother fainted.

I almost got off in the aftermath, with everyone worrying over her. If the door hadn’t squeaked, I probably would have. But it did, and my Grandma gave me the ‘I’ll tear apart your innards and use them in my next quilt’ stare, so I stayed, resigned to my fate in the normal ‘life is over’ fashion, popular with the girls in school. I thought I’d try it. As I knew all along, it didn’t work.

You might be wondering what the big problem with me being a Player was. After all, Grandpa was one, and we all still loved him. Well, Grandpa was a Player nearly three hundred years ago. Us gnomes live a while, you know? Since then, the title of Player has come to mean a lot of different things. Normally, it’s a arrogant, high-horse, think-they’re-better-then-everyone-and-can-do-anything-because-they’ve-trained-longer type of reputation. You get these Players everywhere, especially in the cities. They start fights all the time with each other and damage property to no end. They’re even egotistical enough to think they can go into people’s homes and just steal things. And the big thing is, the guards and nobility let them. There’s really nothing we can do. True, you get those Players who join guilds and help people out, taking care of dangerous monsters and whatnot. But even they’re oblivious to the way normal Non-Players look at them. The way that says, ‘you’ve done what we needed you to, now get out of our town and move on with your life’. And the gods forbid you don’t show them gratitude. They’ll hold it against you to the end of days, like they’re royalty or something.

So when I told them this is what I wanted to do with my life, my parents freaked. Then the next part of questioning came about. Why were you using a sword? Gnomes can’t wield large weaponry very well, that’s why we’re normally hunters or spell casters. And, well, I told them. I wanted to be a warrior. Mother had woken up by then. She started talking about therapy. They thought I had gone crazy. I had heard enough of what they were saying, and decided to share my view about things. Basically telling my parents to get off my back, and that I was going to train to be a warrior whether they liked it or not, and once I had enough skill I was going to become a Dark Knight. I told them I had plans, and that I was tired of people getting in my way. My way of what? You know, that thing I’ve mentioned already a few times? Simple.

I wanted to take over the empire.

...

Yeah, that was their reaction too. My father came out and asked me if I was crazy. I wanted to stab him. Mark me, I love this man. I’ve been closer to him then any other family member. Grandpa wasn’t around enough, if he was, it might’ve been close. But my Father did everything for me. He taught me to stick up for myself, not to take any crap from anyone. He taught me how to build things, and how to fish. I was his perfect little tomboy daughter, his renegade princess. He was my Papa, the icon of everything right in life. But I truly wanted to stab him, teach him the pain of questioning the future Emperor! I quickly mastered that impulse, as it was my father. I had gotten into enough trouble a number of months before this in school when I stabbed Lurcia Dimmesh from History class. She was commenting on my clothes, which I’d accidentally worn forgetting they had burn marks running up one of the sleeves. Hey. Don’t look at me like that. It was early morning, I wasn’t thinking straight. So I told her to shut it, at least I could take my clothes off, while she was stuck with her face. She was blushing enough to match my hair (which is a dark pink, for the record), and threw my books on the floor. I stabbed her with my pen. The teacher got angry, and sent me to the office while Lulu was taken up to the nurse. She started it, really. No reason for me to be suspended. But do you think they listen? No. The one losing blood is the victim. It’s always been that way.

Anyway, point is, my father wasn’t stabbed. I didn’t even kick him. I was a good girl.

I wasn’t really punished, I guess, for wanting to be a Player, or practicing swords. It’s not like I had hurt anyone but myself, and that was a mistake. So I got off, with my dagger taken away. Grandpa was called, and he came down to talk to me about it. They decided I should be sent to therapy. So, after that, three times a week I’d go in to talk to some creepy woman about life. This woman happened to be Penny Brown’s aunt, so things got out.

No, she didn’t reveal private patient information to all her little children or anything. It wasn’t like that. She just saw me once when she went in to school for some community activity I had to take part in for class, and started talking to me. Like we knew each other, or something. Rumors started, some truer then others, and eventually everyone knew that Vivace Bluebell was seeing a shrink. That’s the Welsth for you. I got into a lot of trouble after that, saving my honor. Whenever someone made a comment about the Bluebell name, I’d stab ‘em. Eventually they stopped. I’d been suspended several times, but my family pride was saved, so it was good.

I bugged my father to let me continue sword fighting. He said no. They made me join school groups, to take up as much of my free time as they could. I did what I could, practicing with wooded swords I’d carved after sneaking out at night. I didn’t want to be caught off guard and rusty when I finally went into the city to join the ranks. It was a few months before my sixteenth birthday, when the Welsth started seeing trouble. It was rainy, we had a lot more water in the river then usual. We normally did in Water Moon. We thought we were prepared for it. The year was a little rougher then normal.

One day, the northern part of the river overflowed. We lost a lot of the farmland, and the townspeople feared it would spill into the town. There was a huge mess made out of it, everyone gathering in the town hall, trying to plan something to help. No one knew what to do, and while they were planning, the river kept getting worse. A little fact you should know is that gnomes aren’t great with water. We can do forest, fields, cities, even snow. We can adapt to our environments really well. We’re a lot like humans in that respect. Though we smell better, I’ve heard. But water, gnomes and water don’t mix. This is why the river was such a big concern. I was in the town hall, with my father and mother. Papa took after Grandpa in the way that he wanted to be involved in the running of the town. He knew the importance of being involved, and went to every town meeting, even the ones that everyone knew were useless and where nothing was ever accomplished. Grandma was at home, politics wasn’t her thing. So she didn’t hear about the incident until after it happened. And seriously, that woman can grill you alive for details, as I learned.

Some kid, I never found out who it was, came running into the room about half way through the town’s meeting. He was screaming something and crying. Once the adults had gotten him to calm down enough to talk straight we found out that the water had gotten into part of the town, where the businesses were. A group of children had been playing in the old warehouse and had seen the water coming. We’re gnomes, remember. A few feet of water might not mean a lot to other races, but that can be deadly to one of our children. Especially when none of them know how to swim. The parents began panicking, none of them had brought their kids with them to the meeting hall, and there was an instant uproar of where everybody’s child was. The meeting was halted, everyone left to locate family members. My parents were smart, only having one child, whom they had started keeping on a leash. For everyone else, they had to find all nine or ten children, including any senile old grandparent who was hanging onto their remaining lifespan, without the ability to think for more then a minute without going into cardiac arrest. Once we left the hall, we saw how bad it really was. If something wasn’t done, right then, our town would’ve been lost.

Enter the apparently insane, future emperor into the picture. Or empress, for all you gender specific freaks out there. I took off, leaving my parents to join the joyful ‘freaking out and panicking club’ of all the other child-seeking adults. Didn’t want them to be left out, you know? I headed straight for the dam. Seems obvious? It wasn’t. The problem with unlocking the dam was that we’d prevent water from building up on our side of the river, but it would kill off all the land on the other side if it was let out. We had been trying to prevent that from happening, since we needed the other land during the dryer months of the year. Going there was a last resort. A very last resort. None of the town’s officials would have been able to get away with it and still keep their career. I didn’t have a career to lose, and more than likely, because of the fact that I was currently involved in getting mental help, I wouldn’t be punished by the town. This isn’t what I was thinking at the time, but it started running through my mind afterward.

Before I could get to the control room, I had to get to the dam. The streets were flooded, I was practically running over the top benches and window ledges. When in finally came to the point where there was nothing left for me to jump on, I took a breath, made a couple of threats to anyone above who’d have the nerve to kill me, and dived in. Those threats? Might not have been the best idea. I was able to swim, or flounder, the rest of the way, letting the current do most of the work and using my strength to prevent going under. The amount of bruising I got was absurd. It was water, where the hell was I getting bruises from? And my arm got smashed, along with a twisted ankle. Finally, though, I was able to climb onto some water free land, and hobble the rest of the way to the dam. The door wasn’t so hard to break into, and I was able to get the control room with a minimum amount of cursing. And when I say a minimum, I mean a lot of cursing. Enough where Grandma would have gone into her ‘I’ll rip out your tongue and shove it so far into your ears that you’ll be digesting vowels’ rant. Pulling the proper levers wasn’t hard, since the workers had already taught me so much about the mechanics of the place. The water went into the other side of the river, ruining the fields and causing the town to go into debts for the next few years to cover the costs of the damage, but I’d saved the town. Nobody was hurt, not badly at least- unless you count me- and the homes and businesses were spared further damage. Overnight, I became a type of town hero. Everybody still thought I was crazy, even more now, but it was a respected type of crazy.

I spent the next few months healing and trying to convince my parents that I wasn’t insane, for the record. Because I’m not. Just because I have big plans for my life, doesn’t make me crazy. It makes me…ambitious, is a good word I think. I’m ambitious. That’s all, so could they please get me away from that creepy therapist lady. They finally said yes. A few months after I was completely healed, a new Tournament was announced. A big one.

The next Royal Guard was being chosen; they were the private defenders of the King, the dream of every respectable Player. There was riches, glory, and honor, wrapped up in one nice package. The old King, His Royal Majesty, Polonus le Geiveth, was dying, leaving the country heirless. A young Duke, Sir Ketliun le Fortinaph, was the most likely candidate to take the throne next. Since the old Guard had been disbanded years ago, the winners of this Tournament would make up the new one completely, it wasn’t simply filling in the blank spaces of fallen Guard members. What better position to be in when I wanted to take the country?

I didn’t even get the chance to ask my parents. The day after the news came out, I went home and found a knapsack of supplies, a bag full of gold and silver coins, new garments made for fighting, and a high class short sword and scabbard waiting on my bed. My parents and grandparents were there to see me off. Apparently the money was going to be my dowry when I was wed, but none of them seemed to think that was likely now. I maybe almost cried.

The next morning, I left to the city to start my adventure. I swore that day that I’d be the best gnomish warrior Dark Knight Emperor that the Kingdom of Burmexia had ever seen.