Chapter 454 — The Ancestral Vault of the Wildes
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
After a moment's silence, the duchess raised her head and said to the maid beside her, "Leave me now. I would be alone."
The black-haired maid withdrew from the hall in silence, and Victoria Wilde stepped forward.
She came to the stone platform at the far end of the hall—a slab about waist-high, broad as a tabletop, ringed about with an arcane script of runes and traceries, while its surface was smooth as a mirror, bearing no mark of ornament at all.
The duchess hesitated a moment, then laid her hand upon the platform and softly spoke the ancient incantation.
The mana in the air stirred. One after another the runes about the platform kindled, and the mirror-smooth surface began to ripple like water. Amid a pale milky radiance, a silver-white metal plate about a foot square rose floating from the rippling stone.
The plate had been sealed within the dense stone itself.
Victoria lifted it—it was not heavy, and quite thin, its edges bearing crisp ornamental lines in the classic Gondorian style. She ran her fingers across its surface, and characters emerged upon the metal.
Charlie Moen, Guide, Leader, Protector, Founder of the Kingdom, whom we honor as King.
Gao Yang Cecil, Lord of Knights, Pioneer, Protector, Founder of the Kingdom, whom we honor as Warden of the Southern Marches.
Snow Wilde, Frostgrip, Keeper of Knowledge, Pioneer, Founder of the Kingdom, whom we honor as Warden of the Northern Marches.
Anthony Lauren, Lord of Warriors...
Even the Northern Duchess—ever cold and aloof, a woman like an ice queen, keeping all at arm's length—could not help but show a look of awe when she beheld this metal plate. Her gaze slid across those luminous names, and behind each one seemed to stand a mountain that propped up heaven and earth. They stood for the cornerstones of this kingdom, for the strength that had hacked a path through the calamity which nearly destroyed human civilization seven hundred years ago, and for... the first compact of this land.
This was a roster—the register of all the founders of Ansu at the kingdom's birth, ranked by merit and title. But it was more than a roster.
Victoria turned the plate over. On its reverse, a passage of text emerged clear upon the metal:
"...Should a nation-destroying calamity break out, or should an irrevocable event come to pass, causing the King's death or rendering him for any cause unable to continue guarding the kingdom, then in the absence of an available heir, those named herein shall inherit in order and take up governance of the kingdom..."
Seven hundred years ago—that was a time of storm and drifting.
Those who live in settled and peaceful times can scarcely imagine what it was like when humankind had just struggled forth from the wasteland and founded a kingdom upon a wild and savage land. Even Victoria Wilde could only read of those years in ancient tomes, or hear scattered and fragmentary accounts from the few long-lived races—never truly to understand it in her bones.
Yet each time she looked upon this roster, and upon the words on its reverse, she could still picture how perilous the kingdom had been in those first days of Ansu, upheld by her forebears.
The afterwaves of the mana tide kept battering the realm. Until the Great Wall stood complete, monsters still poured from the Gondorian wasteland to assault the human world without cease; and when the breath of the tide ran thickest, great swaths of corruption would bloom out of thin air even in the heart of the Spirit Plains. To this day, a stretch of the inner-city wall of Frosthold still preserves a single blackened, corrupted brick, silently recording those desperate times.
In that age, the King might die at any hour. The Warden Dukes might die at any hour. Every soul might die at any hour.
And so came this roster—and the "emergency succession rule" on its reverse.