A Song of Askaldenfirsts and Dragons. Part eight: The New Queen
Chapter 5: Gaellkoet

Ansell slapped his cheeks and was about to cast a spell.

“Finally! You’ve done well, my friend!” Ansell said. “Bitch Alchi turned into an agrundawar and devoured the First bitch!” he winked at Gaell.

“Don’t call my wife that!”

“Sorry, yes, Gaal burned her later,” and Ansell chuckled.

“What?! You should have teleported her here!” Gaellkoet got angry.

“Oh, don’t worry so much. I’ve lost a lot of wives, too!”

“They were your prisoners, not your wives. My wives trust me. And anyway, your methods of intimidation and violence are worse than my methods of charm and deception.”

“If I hadn’t remembered who Ilzeth was, our enemies’ plan might have come to fruition,” Ansell said.

It was snowing lightly, and it was windless but chilly. Gaell felt cold, but it was not cold, but fear...

“How many more of the emperor’s spies could be here?” he asked, fearing Ansell might sense that he was frightened.

“I don’t know, and that is the biggest problem, my friend,” Ansell smiled slyly at him. “At that meeting of ours, I showed that I didn’t trust you and was watching you, but did the rest of the Firsts fall for that trick? I don’t know. But you were moderately neutral about me, even positive, and many might have noticed that.”

“I think it was not very reasonable to say that I was copulating with the tukhtaashes. Others might have sensed something, at least curiosity, and started following me on purpose,” Gaell said.

“I don’t think many of them are aware of what’s happening on Farstarlar. I’m sure they don’t know about the change of emperor. They have such a fear of the thought of reporting failures that no one has ever dared to contact home. As long as they’re not touched or questioned, they’ll try to avoid contact with Farstarlar. Let’s go with the plan. You overthrow king Pfensh and establish your pseudo-democracy of eleven councilors, and then the council sends notice to the army that there has been a coup, that the new rulers are now,” he pondered. “There’s one problem here, what if the higher officers consider the overthrow of the king to be treason and send their troops back instead of obedience? I always run into that problem in my analysis.”

“And I always answer you that we’ll furnish the abdication of the throne with a difficult economic situation, and we’ll support further conquest, we just need to replace Gaal and, using him, destroy the greyskuggies, otherwise everything will end.”

“Or we can also use ghosts. So, next, we set the crystals and deprive almost all of Ermir of magic, except for my cabin in the mountains, where we’ll place the dragons nearby. I’ll replace some fake kings or queens of the countries of Ermir, and you and I will invite the new emperor to his dominion in order to introduce the population to an advanced ruler. He’ll fly in, and then you’ll fly on a dragon with a crystal to my cabin, and we’ll capture or kill the emperor and his entourage at once.”

Gaell thought, “That’s not a very clever plan.” But he didn’t tell Ansell of his doubts.

“Yes, let’s do that,” he said.

“All right then, I have things to do,” Ansell said and disappeared.

Gaellkoet thought it was time for him to go too, so he cast a spell and teleport to Taashtar. He specifically chose a small village by the ocean to make it easier to get from it on one of his relatives, who could turn into a dragon, directly to the Freedom Stairs Island.

He went into the little house and took off his winter clothes and changed into summer clothes.

From the second floor came down his son, Leslaruan(Elroy) UulBildallik. Gaell gave him his last name and his elvish name. The Firsts had names similar to those of the arqilunians, and were similar to the forest elves in some ways, but they were not forest elves after all...

“Elroy, are you ready?”

“Yes, father,” Elroy replied.

“Then let’s fly home,” and he smiled and patted his son on the shoulder.