“You just make sure to fulfill your role to the best of your ability, Riviere. I’m sure that’s what my mistress would have wanted.”
I’ll be fine on my own.
She ran a hand through her hair as if she might convince herself of her own statement. The blue ribbon that held her hair back was the proof that she was able to stand on her own two feet; Cururunelvia had given it to her on the day she had become a full mage.
And who was Riviere? Just some woman Cururunelvia had dragged along. An ordinary woman. She hadn’t received Cururunelvia’s personal instruction. She hadn’t grown under Cururunelvia’s guiding hand.
The great witch of prayer had only one student, and it was Carredura.
“If you need help, please call me anytime,” Riviere said.
“Thank you very much.”
With that studied reply, Carredura left the funeral venue behind.
Ask her for help! Inconceivable.
There’s nothing I would ever want or need to ask you for, she thought. Carredura had her pride as the witch’s student. If it weren’t for those sancta, she could be exercising her magical powers even now. If it weren’t for Riviere, the sancta would never have been completed.
So it was that Carredura hated two things: the sancta, and Riviere.
After Carredura had been promoted from student to second ruler of the country, her life became an ongoing series of tribulations.
At first, she stayed cooped up in her office, working constantly. The citizens began to complain: Our new ruler is so cold. What was that supposed to mean? As it turned out, Cururunelvia had taken almost daily walks into town to connect with the people.
Her student Carredura hadn’t even known.
“Well, if that’s how the game is played…”
If that was what people wanted from their queen, then Carredura would oblige. She went into town as the people desired.
One day, the owner of a restaurant she had gone to approached her, pleading. “Please, milady, might I ask for your advice?”
The owner said that a beastkin had built a house beside his restaurant, but this newcomer was apparently of a nocturnal disposition and had complained that the noise from the restaurant during the day was a disturbance. Could she do something about it? He was indirectly asking her to speak to this beastkin herself.
Carredura had only been waiting for her food to arrive, and she was openly confused. “That’s not really the ruler’s job…,” she said. So she declined. If she got personally involved in every quarrel among the citizens, there would be no end to it. If she agreed to this request, soon people would be knocking on her office door whenever they had the slightest grievance. It was important, she decided, not to set a precedent for this sort of thing.
“What? It’s not?” The owner seemed genuinely surprised. He grumbled, “The last queen always helped with things like this,” and then he left Carredura alone.
It seemed to take a very long time to get her food.
Was she wrong about this? No, she kept telling herself as she ate her tepid meal.
She learned later that in fact the previous ruler had indeed listened attentively to the citizens’ problems and endeavored to resolve them. Hence why people seemed to approach her every time she walked through town.
“My queen! The crops in my field suddenly withered. Do you think you could help me figure out what’s going on?”
“My wife and I haven’t been getting along lately…”
“I tried to tackle a new project, but it’s not going well at all!”
Maybe the first queen really had lent an ear to each and every woe of the common people, but Carredura simply couldn’t manage it. She was beginning to think she was just built differently from Cururunelvia.
Instead, she turned down all these requests. “That’s not the ruler’s job,” she would say.
This was never what the people were expecting, never what they were hoping to hear.
“The last ruler would’ve done it,” someone whispered.
“Our second queen is so cold,” came another murmur.
They all wanted help, all felt like they were standing in front of walls they couldn’t climb.
Carredura and her mistress had each become a mage after expending blood, sweat, and tears, yet she began to think there was something fundamentally different between the two of them. Each time the thought entered her mind, she knew in her heart that she couldn’t live the way the kind, gentle Cururunelvia had.
The people of this town her teacher had loved began to look foul and ugly to Carredura.
Finally, she returned to the way things had been when she first became queen, staying shut up in her office. If she never saw the people, then they couldn’t dampen her mood.
Already, the only reason Carredura continued as ruler of this nation was out of a determination to see through the duty her mentor had given her.
One day not long after she had retreated to the sanctuary of her office, Carredura was reading the newspaper as she did every day, when she spat, “Such foolishness!”
The front-page story was about a crime involving sancta.
There had been an ongoing dispute between a nocturnal beastkin and a man who operated a restaurant during the day. Unable to take it any longer, the restaurant owner had gone to the cathedral and prayed, “Let my noisy neighbor shut up!” That was how it had started. The cathedral had granted his wish and given power to one of his possessions.
Sometime later, the man was getting ready to open his shop when his beastkin neighbor came in yelling. The owner, in his chef whites, was trying to work, so he shooed the beastkin away like he always did, giving him a shove to get him going. But to his shock, the moment he touched his neighbor, the beastkin was seized with agony and collapsed on the spot. People started to gather around the strange scene. The beastkin began to have trouble breathing and died shortly thereafter.
An investigation revealed that the owner’s chef whites had become a sancta. The effect? Touch a noisy neighbor, and they’ll be shut up.
And just so, the beastkin had been silenced forever.
A sancta had killed somebody.
Carredura saw it all too clearly: She had been right. Sancta were too powerful for the people as they were now.
People didn’t know how to pray, because they didn’t know how to use power. Because they didn’t know how to pray, problems arose with the sancta their prayers created.
Eventually, Carredura announced limits on sancta. A very small portion of the population, mostly those who had once been mages themselves, supported her policy. They were derided as rebels, plotting with Carredura to take over the government. Most people regarded the limits as a repudiation of the project that Cururunelvia had poured her heart and soul into.
Voices of dissent got louder. People flocked to the cathedral and prayed that the second ruler might be deposed. Thankfully, no sancta that might have harmed Carredura were produced, but day by day the people grew more vociferous in their disagreement.