We rode for nearly six months straight and went through near a hundred horses in our attempt to find any trace of the Queen or her assailants. We found nothing.
Not an errant foot or hoofprint, anyone who had seen a single strange thing, nor an errant payment or bribe in anyones payroll or accounting from the capital to the coast or to the southern boarder. There wasn't any magical residue or Aether Ash in the castle, the queens bedchambers, or the keep. Nowhere at all.
It's like she just....evaporated.
-The Tellian Accounts, written by John B. M'kellik
The disparity in safety between the haves and the have nots has always been a point of contentionwithin the general populace. Violence against the lower classes has regularly inspired demonstrations, examples, and revolts all across the world, wether that violence comes from shadowy assailants, other civilians, or those same nobles everyone is jealous of.
A new serial killer slinks into a city or officer gets too vigourous in the application of a nightstick against a young boy, and a societal shift is bound to happen so that the people like you and me can feel safe again.
What happens when the person in danger is on the other end of the pyramid? Are the nobles going to rally together and argue for more provisions to keep them safe, or are they simply going to purchase more security for themselves?
What if the individual was a queen? Who argues on her behalf?
This was the conundrum brought about by the Tellian Affair. A missing queen, a list of suspects that spanned continents, and a populace that just could not be bothered anymore.
Queen
Agnés dan Labrait had proven a popular ruler after her election to the throne at the hands of the council of lechtors, thinking that she would be an easy puppet to control. In response, she had them all killed and she reformed a facet of government that had regularly frustrated the common people and she had earned their respect. To increase the nations resources as well as their general land coverage, she got involved in several wars with neighboring countries that she fought well, discovering a tallent for both strategic and frontline tactical planning. However, the wars kept happening and dragging on longer and longer, accruing more and more casualties that had to be made up with conscripts, further worsening the casualty problem. Eventually the people had enough, and the wars came to a close as the nations armies were let loose by necessity.
It didn't solve the people dissatisfaction at that rate, however She staved off completely popular revolt with a few more well thought out reforms, but the people remained stuck in the rut of their depressing feelings. Nobody knew what was causing them to sink eaver deeper into those feelings, but given enough time they would eat away at the foundations of the kingdom completely.
They never got the chance, as on the morning of 02/12/937 TSE, the queen completely and utterly vanished. An investigation was launched by the government, or course, but it found itself unable to proceed in any way. Peasants regularly confounded their search, either on purpase or unknowingly. Hiding information from that would be replaced next morning, acting like it wasn't there in the first place, or just not knowing what in the world the investigators were talking about.
Officially, the investigation went on for six months, but in reality it went on for years, even after the nation of
Tellia was conquered by a handful of neighbors that had taken advantage of the internal chaos. It was carried on by many of the royal agents that had been investigating sine the beginning, though vastly reduced in number as some retired, moved on, or just plain old gave up on the search and the queen.
The original agents should all be dead by now, unless any of them figured out reall immortality inbetween searching for the queen, but it's a fairly confirmed rumour that the descendants of those men and women have also been set to the task, the poor bastards.
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