Thread: the prince and the dancer

Tonight was one of those rare nights when the old Royal Palace in Old Bluvale was filled with light and color. In honor of the fiftieth anniversery of the Treaty of Elves' Gate Pass, High Queen Andrea Soliarous was putting on a grand feast for all the visiting dignitaries from Marinia and for her Sierrian government officials. It was a fine change from the rest of the day's festivities, with solemn speeches, a grim military parade of soldiers in full combat gear, and a ten gun salute where each of the ten, antique field cannons fired five shots from the First Sunlit Realm Field Artillery Battalion in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the treaty that ended the War of the Great Dividing Range. Yet for Alexis, the whole day was a waste. The son of the High Queen, and her future successor, cared not for speeches, military parades, and ceremonies. They were all meaningless guestures, and he was sure his mother would agree with him. After all, the Soliarous Family once ruled the whole continent of Terria from thier seat in the ancient Sierrian capital of Bluvale. Thier realm, named for the way the blessings of the Sun Goddess shone upon thier domain, included the great southern coastal nation of Marinia, which before the formation of the Sunlit Realm had been Sierria's sworn enemy. But several generations ago, one of Alexis' ancestors let his kingship go to his head. He couldn't have picked a worse time, as his predessecors had been moving to accomidate the growing movement for a new system of government, called a Constitutional Monarchy, which would have given them a better voice in running the Realm. So the people rose up and overthrew him. They installed his infant daughter on the throne, and while her father's prime minister ruled in her stead, the revolutionaries almost all Sierrians drafted a constitution that was even worse than the rule of the king they had just overthrown - at least that's what the Marinians and other none Sierrians said. When the young queen finally came of age to assume rule on her own, her first act was to ratify the new constitution, rather than contest it. In anger, the Marinians, and many other ethnic groups, seceded thier ancestral homelands from the Realm. Freed from the shared government of the Realm, Marinia and Sierria resumed thier poisonous rivalry, now more deadly than ever with the invention of gunpowder and fire arms 400 years before. And with the coming of industry, things only heated up even more. Although the Marinian people still loved their former sovreigns, the Soliarouses, they bore a deep, mutual mistrust of the rest of the Sierrian people that lead to countless wars over the international border between Marinia and Sierria, high in the Great Dividing Range. No mere treaty could ever erase that. Although the current peace had held for 50 years, Alexis knew it was only a matter of time before they were at it again. And with the technological advances made over those 50 years, the next war promised to be even more violent. So, Alexis sat glumly at the feast, picking at his food. His loyal bodyguard, maid, and future Prime Minister, an ethnic Marinian girl named Melissa Lucia, sat next to him, looking equally uninterested. Melissa's family had served this role to the Soliarous family since the formation of the Sunlit Realm, as a guesture of friendship between Sierria and Marinia, though now most Sierrians thought of them as good little ethnic Marinians remembering thier place next to Sierrian nobility. On Alexis' other side, his mother, the High Queen of the Sunlit Realm an honorary title the Soliarous family kept as one of the few luxuries they were allowed by the new constitution sat chatting with her loyal bodyguard, manservant, and Prime Minister, Melissa's father. Like her son, she seemed oblivious to everything else that was going on. Alexis had heard the Marinian ambassador had promised a special treat evening, but so far, the man had yet to make good on his promise.