Storyline: Start from Genesis
The king is young, but he’s got a long way to go. The Manticore King is still alive waiting to exact his revenge having being left all alone when Alistair, Zaid’s great-great... grandfather wiped away his army a 1000 years before.
There are rumours that the people of the castle have been making bets on what his life will be like when he finally takes hold and makes himself known as a leader.
Rumour says he’ll be kind and generous, strong and just.
Rumours also say that the man who’s always been with him from birth, someone who’s been there since before his own father was even born, has left him with this one task. A task he thinks he can do well.
He hopes he can do well.
He’s had many teachers in his time, and he’d rather not think about why they thought that particular idea was important enough to make him take their place for longer than ten seconds, because frankly it’s ridiculous.
He knows what he wants, what he has to accomplish, and he’s going to succeed because that’s what all his tutors have wanted.
They were hoping that if they gave him the right tools they could change the world. But he doesn’t need tools – he needs them to stay still, or get out of his way.
Because he doesn’t want anyone interfering with his plan. Or his work. He needs to show them.
So he tries not to think about what they might have said to the king when they told him no matter how good he was, no matter how hard he tried he would never amount to anything.
They had been right, of course, because nothing that had ever happened to him since had allowed him to try at all. But he won’t allow them any part of him to teach him that feeling of uselessness.
So he concentrates instead on the people around him. Not everyone thinks that he should rule, of course.
People see him only every other day, but those are the people whose opinion he pays attention to and respects – the ones who don’t believe he’s destined to fail and have the rest of his days wasted on trying to find a worthy successor, because he’s clearly an idiot who thinks he can change the world by himself.
No, they all agree that he should be left alone. It would only bring him pain in the end, they tell him – it would hurt so much worse when he found out the truth.
So that’s why it’s so nice of him to offer for a bet on what his life will be like when he becomes king.
