Chapter 1973: Clipped Wings - Part 1

Chapter 1973: Clipped Wings - Part 1


Chapter 4 – Clipped Wings


It was hardly the result that Oliver and his faction had wanted for themselves. Lacking the backing of the old Pendragon King to lend justice to their claim, there was the very obvious and easy to throw question of ’King of what?’. He wore a crown upon his head, a Pendragon crown, but he saw no true claim to the Pendragon lands. And if he were to enforce a claim despite that, then what would the results be?


It was a deadlock of a situation, as they swirled their way around the Capital. Every time they looked towards the centre of the Stormfront, there was that pulling urge to see their armies mounted, and turned inwards. To walk towards where they knew the High King to be, and to see the solution set about entirely with military intent.


It was Hod that set them against it. His debate and his council continually stumped them, whenever Oliver’s own blood was set to peaking, as it was now with the rejection by the Pendragon King, and he declared that it would be easier to see the job done now, and have the pieces fall where they lay.


"Patience," Hod said. "It is not the High King’s armies that we need defeat now, but his legal place as the Stormfront’s monarch. To cast him down from his throne, and have justice be done, we need a solid place for that justice. A legal precedent."


The crimes that he had committed, according to Hod, lacked that conviction. For a start, they were crimes done through the hands of others. It was spoken word that had driven them, and had revealed the High King as the string-controller behind it all. But to fetch physical evidence from that, and assert strongly, that indeed that King they had sitting on the highest throne in the Stormfront was a King corrupt enough that he was detrimental to the interests of their people – that was a far more difficult task.


Two Silver Kings, if Oliver could be counted, was what they had in their favour. The legal assertion, of all four Silver Kings binding together to state their unified discontent for he that currently ruled, any could appreciate the weight that such a position would carry. It would be beyond question. For something – or a great multitude of things – to have occurred that would unite all four Silver Kings without a crack between them, the existence of that something seemed implicit by the very fact that they were joined together.


Now they had no such union, failing almost immediately with their attempt.


The Treeant lands seemed at least more promising than the Pendragon lands that they currently marched slowly away from, but even there they would be met with no certainty. The Treeants might have strange customs in regards to the slaying of their Kings, but the fact remained that Oliver did see their armies defeated, and their old King cut down. It seemed too optimistic to expect that all Treeant citizens would be content to simply bear that fact, and that they’d have no resistance at all.


The only thing stopping them – and Oliver in particular – from feeling entirely defeated was that alliance that they had managed to secure with King Emerson. In the moment, it had seemed like a pain to enact. He’d had to summon up his energy, and trust that Hod was making the right decision. He’d had to direct his mind in a single direction, when it was tired enough that it wished to go nowhere. It had been a chore, if he were to be honest with himself, and admit the childishness of the emotion that made the task seem all the more troublesome, even if he were to blame it on the pain that he currently felt. Yet it was that task done, as if he were simply following the orders of his mother, or someone similarly as concerned for his well-being, but similarly as nagging, that allowed him to cling on to some degree of hope.


The Emerson King, in allying with them in the way that he had, gave their cause validity. He gave the crown that Oliver bore a degree of validity. For it was an agreement made between two Kings.


The King too was of the same agreement as Hod. He disliked the intensely military approach to see the war ended.


"The optimal outcome would be to see the High King surrounded and pressured enough that he would abdicate the throne of his own free will. There can be no higher form of justice than that."


Hod had been quick to agree, but he had seemed doubtful that such a thing would ever come to pass, given the personality of the man that they had come to know increasingly well.


"If one does not put themselves in the position to receive such a gift from the Gods, then they never shall," the Emerson King had countered, stating that at the very least it was worth trying.


Still, it was left as an ideal, and still the fact did remain that they had already crumpled. They had hoped to be a tidal wave sweeping over their political problems off the back of their military victories, so strongly fought and heroically won, but that wave had only run so far as the Emerson King, whose son had already strongly advocated for them.


In his saddle, on the ride back, with a strong twist of his lips on his face, Oliver was set to the most intense of thinking.


Thus far, he had allowed the planning to Hod. Matters of the diplomatic, and the political, they seemed far more his territory, and that of Verdant. More still since he did not find there to be room enough on his mind to think of much as of late. It was a storm that sat there, between his ears, eternally reflecting on things that he would much rather have forgotten. Whenever he slowed, grief was not far away. Whenever he threatened to turn his mind off, his body would talk of its own accord, in the form of violent twitches, and the occasional stirring of absolute terror.