Excerpt: The Powers That Be

In the world of Avid there is light and there is darkness. The two great kingdoms of the world have taken it upon themselves to be dark and light. That does not mean, however, that one is considered evil. Each family is born with a power that passes down from family member to family member baring the mark of what they control. The power struggle between the family has lead to a conflict that has gone on for generations. The castle of Argon with the power of white and wearing the color of red against the Klides with the power of black and the color of blue. The kings of these two great castles clash over who will rule over the land and one will not back down for the other. The conflict has come at the cost of many lives yet whenever it seems like there will be peace something seems to get in the way. The world of Avid seems doomed to forever be at war with itself.

There is something that binds these two castles together. The nature of the power they both control are both unpredictable and thus, if left uncheck, can be the undoing the entire compound. There is an object that makes controlling the power much easier and even enhances it. It is a sword known only as The Sword of Avid. It is not something that can simply be picked up and taken by one person or another. The sword chooses who will hld it each generation and that is the castle that has control over its own power until the sword passes to the next generation. There is no way of controlling who will get the sword and the only way for someone to take it is through assassination. There could never be peace between the castles for someone always wanted someone else dead.

Within each castle lay a family that was considered nobility. It was within this family that the wives of the kings came from. Generations upon generations had come from these families and no one had the chance to marry into the royal family. Princes of the past had tried to break this tradition but their fathers would sooner abandon their own kin than let them marry outside of the nobility. In the end the princes always married the woman that they were scheduled to marry and often times they found themselves falling in and out of love with others. To make up for the lack of love within their own marriage the kings often had affairs with commoners. Wives also knew of this and did not push the matter. It was as if it was some sort of unspoken rule that the king could find comfort in others if he wanted.

Daughters of the king were not completely ignored but were not allowed to assume the position of ruler. However, because they were not as important as their brothers, they were the one’s that fell to the assassins. The Argon’s would kill a daughter of the Klide’s in an attempt to get the sword or vise versa. The blood of daughters paved the road of the conflict. Yet even watching their loved one’s fall the importance of the sword could not be ignored and the deaths proved futile. Their deaths were brushed aside as something necessary to keeping the sword within the family. And when the sword passed to the next generation they were mourned only as lost members of a family and not the princesses that they truly were.

The number of generations that had fought over the sword were lost to the pages of history. It was unknown even to the scholars how many times the sword had passed from family to family. The origins of the sword and the magic that governed each family were unknown as well. To the rest of the world it seemed like something that had always been there like some looming creature that could kill everyone with only a thought. True control of the magic, even with the sword, was impossible and the chances of everything falling to ruin seemed to hang in the air at all times. There was no rest in the land of Avid for it seemed like the end of the world could happen at any moment. That the magic that they so depended and leaned on could turn against the people and destroy everything they worked so hard to obtain.

The consequences of disobeying the written and unwritten rules of the magic were terrible. Despite there being almost no record of when the sword or the magic appeared there was plenty of history of each family nearly losing everything. Almost taking the sword and having their own castle falling to dust in front of the king’s eyes as he watched everyone he loved go with it. Even with these terrible happenings neither family seemed to ever be truly wiped out. Someone always survived and somehow the sword continued its journey from generation to generation.

The origin of the magic and the sword that seemed control life and death itself in Avid was seldom spoken of. All that the people seemed to know is that their lives were governed by some unseen force and a blade stained with the blood of countless people.