Introducing a new story for World of Comalan's line of serials! The Malorans are a line of magic users descended from Resta's first king and the founder of Hem Academy. This story is about how the Malorans passed their legacy on to the elves who have succeeded them in modern times and how the history of Resta's throne became so turbulent.
Thea
Freedom at last! The world changed the day the Malorans abdicated Sunburst Keep to their Blackstone allies. Those with opinions about her father's decision to pass the kingdom into the hands of the new king, Rudolph Blackstone, considered this great change to be her responsibility. The logic was sound. After all, no one ever thought she was fit to succeed the great Artix Maloran. From a young age, she had proven to be unconventional in how she presented herself to the world. No matter how her father and the family retainers tried to get her to act more like a man, she could never deny the person she saw herself as. Despite the daily pressure that she was under, young Theodore Maloran could never accept the life that everyone else laid before her.
This was a source of great shame for her father, but Thea never understood why. Who cared if she identified more with her Aunt Isabelle than her father? It wasn't as if she lacked the intelligence to protect her people. It wasn't even as if she lacked the power to carry on the Maloran family legacy. She was a skilled magic user, but that was the only thing she shared with her father. Somehow, this meant that she could never fill his shoes or his throne. This was something she could live with if the alternative was accepting the narrative that others had foisted on her about herself. Wasn't she entitled to determine her own identity? It was this belief that had turned her into a joke and somehow ended the Royal line.
Now she lived in Gyanda, where there was little to do but worship Chaos day in and day out. Here in the Grand Temple, many of the problems she experienced in the capitol didn't matter. Everyone here knew to take her seriously because she had been given plenty of opportunity to prove her strength. Here, where power was all that mattered, she was free to be herself without consequences.
Cierra
The world changed for the Blackstones when the Malorans abdicated the throne. Before Cierra's family name became synonymous with Royalty, their lives had been very simple. There were two choices for all of the children as they grew up. Some chose to be groomed for life in the clergy at the Monastery her grandmother Karla founded while others chose to preserve life by toiling on the family farm. As the source of the majority of Resta's food, Blackstone Farm was the pride of the kingdom. Many of Cierra's relatives jumped at the chance to experience a life of decadence at Sunburst Keep, but even that wasn't enough to convince her to give up the life she grew up with.
The upshot of this was that she had the farm all to herself. She still had farmhands to help her, but no one around to argue with. She was free to plant whatever she wished and set her own schedule. This was what it meant for a devoted farmer like herself to be free. On the day this realization struck, she might have turned the entire property in her jubilee, but she had work to do.
The morning of Cierra's very first harvest was wracked with anticipation. The time had come to pull up the very first of her special golden potatoes. This marvels of agriculture were the culmination of many years of selective breeding that her father would never have given a single row of their precious fields for her to grow before. This was what she had been looking forward to since long before the abdication: the chance to bring her experiment into the world to delight the masses. But just as she was ready to rush into the fields with glee, an urgent knock rattled her door.
A messenger came to tell her that her brother Gaston had been murdered.
Kalaal
The last of the trees in the westland forests offered a strange sight to Kalaal as they scattered and broke away, revealing a clear blue sky. The wagon he rode in jolted as the horses pulling it took their first steps onto a Restan road. This was it; a hundred-year life in Tanis ended in that moment and gave way to something new. The forest he grew up with was now gone and in the sky he had already seen something few elves had seen before. It was hard to imagine that this was what people in the world beyond the trees were used to seeing when they looked upward.
Everyone called him crazy when he announced that he would be going to see the world. His parents even threatened to disown him, but he didn't care. Kalaal had never felt at ease in such a dark home as Setria. All that surrounded the places where he worked, ate, and slept was stone. To even have a chance of seeing the sky meant leaving the city entirely. Even then the skyline around Setria, the closest city to the Restan border, was almost nonexistent. Ever since he received that fateful letter from Olenia, he had been enamored with the world of blue skies and bountiful light. If his little sister could find more happiness there than among their people, who was to say he couldn't and who were his family to try to stop him?
The wagon turned southward to the city of Amora, where Olenia said she was staying. He supposed the odds of culture shock were minimal there, as the people there were said to worship the same goddess his people did. The cultural values that his sister described seemed so familiar, but couldn't be exactly the same in such an unfamiliar place. Kalaal was ready for all of it; what the humans had in common with his people, the ways in which they were different. In this country, he anticipated a harmonious blend of what he loved about his old home and something new.
And if everything was different, he could handle that too.
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