“Children’s tales?” Stasia asked him once when coming to inform him that dinner was prepared. As if to mock him, she’d even tapped him on the shoulder before he noticed she had entered the room.

“I found it interesting,” he said defensively.

She snagged the picture book from his grasp and flipped through the pages.

“What’s interesting about pictures of animals?”

He grabbed it back and set it on the table beside him.

“This,” he said, after finding the proper page. On it was a pencil drawing of a pack of lions hunting through tall grass. Above it was the name of where it supposedly depicted, an area known as the Highlands.

“Oh, I’ve been there,” Stasia said. “The grass stretches on for miles. You should see when the wind ripples through it in waves, almost like an ocean.”

“And are there lions? Regular lions, without feathers for manes, as this picture shows?”

She’d laughed long and loud at that, her amusement a reminder of how ignorant he was of the lands beyond his island.

“I forgot, you know them only through Endarius. Yes, little prince, there are lions in the Highlands, hundreds of them, and if you aren’t careful, they will eat you for dinner. Speaking of dinner, come eat yours before I carry you out of this library over my shoulder. I swear, you push the limits of what is healthy when it comes to reading…”

Instead Cyrus buried himself deeper into the books, determined to remove the ignorance wrapped about his worldly understanding, starting with his ultimate foe. From what he pieced together, the Everlorn Empire had started out as a tiny city-state known as Eldrid some three thousand years ago. The history was thin, and notably overwhelmed with fanciful tales of epic battles and betrayal. At some point the king of Eldrid had declared himself God-Incarnate and crushed an invasion of a neighboring country so utterly, their name was no longer permitted to be written. Through the might of the God-Incarnate, and his chosen warriors known as paragons, Everlorn had first conquered its invaders, then set its eyes hungrily on its neighbors. A lone city-state became a nation, and a nation soon became an empire.

His most shocking discovery had come a month later. Drawn in the exact center of a history book was a map showcasing the boundaries of the Everlorn Empire. It offered little in terms of geography, barely more than a faint scratch of lines for major rivers and mountains. The map’s interest was explicitly on national boundaries, of which there were depressingly few not listed as either part of the Everlorn Empire or existing as vassal states. The map tickled Cyrus’s brain, something about it that didn’t feel quite right.