Queen Dahra became ill; at first just a cold, but the fever rose and she became delirious; then she fell into a coma. King Dargon, never much of a ruler, seemed to lose all sense of the world outside, spending all his time watching over his young wife.
State business was neglected. The barons, never very loyal to the Crown, saw their chance to power; only their mutual distrust kept them from open revolt, but civil war was approaching. And the Queen's health kept deteriorating. The court buzzed with rumours of poison, a curse, an enchantment; doctors came and went, shaking their heads; the King remained at her side, oblivious to the world outside.
When old Grodrig, the court magician, first mentioned the Stone of Aayela, the courtiers just laughed at him. A myth, an old fairytale - how could he talk such nonsense? But he kept retelling what he had read in his dusty old tomes: how Heliax the Wizard had captured a spirit of light, Aayela, in a perfect crystal, bending her power to his will; how the Stone lay hidden, deep below the roots of the mountains, waiting for a hero to retrieve it.
And as the Queen got steadily worse, all conventional cures failing, people started believing him. Perhaps the Stone was the only cure for her illness? Finally the King himself, in one of his few lucid moments, decreed that the stone was to be found and brought back. As the youngest and most dispensable of the King's knights, you are the natural choice for a fool's errand like this.
And what are you to do, but obey?
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