[Can’t Opt Out]

Meridian’s life was filled with problems—so many problems, in fact, that he had a list. For most of his life, the top item had been the lack of control he had over, well, anything. He was a His Royal Highness, Prince Meridian of Crishar, heir to the throne and so on—there were too many titles following his name and his father seemed to have some obsession with adding more every time he was allowed to attend Cayenta parties. As a result, Meridian had a thousand titles and he remembered very few. Being Lord of the Zathar Isles was nice—it was a pretty piece of land, although he wasn’t sure how the trail of islands were isles, as they were located within a lake. It was a large lake, but Meridian generally had the impression that isles were supposed to be isolated—which these definitely weren’t—and possibly within the ocean?

It was unclear. Part of the issue lay in the fact that asking questions of anyone was tiresome. Really, that whole law about not disagreeing with the royal family was a nuisance. He would ask questions, and whoever he was asking would ask what he thought the answer was. Unless he told them what he thought, they would then refuse to answer, afraid to accidentally contradict him and suffer some punishment or another for having the audacity to suggest he was wrong, even when they could have no idea that they were contradicting him. The fact that there was precedent for bullying royals using the tactic of ignorance of my opinion or knowledge on a subject is not an excuse for contradicting me for killing of people they didn’t like may have contributed to such fears. No one had done this since his grand uncle had been killed almost a century ago, for, well, contradicting Meridian himself—not that he had encouraged the killing of his grand uncle! His father had just used his grand uncle disagreeing with his opinion on something as an excuse to kill the man off.

It was all very terrible, and okay, Meridian could maybe understand why no one wanted to risk accidentally contradicting him. It still didn’t erase the fact that trying to learn anything was exceptionally tiresome as, if he told them what he thought, they would say he was correct—and let the aether shatter to pieces if some other member of his family, living or dead, had ever said something on the topic! Depending on the faction the person he was talking to, they might think there some strange order in which one member of his family sat the top of the pyramid of having the most correct knowledge—and there were a number of ways in which that pyramid could be organized, depending on the faction—or they might think the person they were talking to—him—were the most correct in that moment.

It was exhausting. It was exhausting enough that while Meridian hated always been agreed with, no matter what insanity he spewed, he had memorized who would at least agree that he was correct over some random relative who was centuries dead—and don’t even get him started on the amount of research some of those people who worshipped the words of those ancestors did. Some of them had been dead for millennia, all their words relegated to fragments in ancient dialects that then needed to be interrupted, and yeah, Meridian would take the people who would agree with him no matter what as opposed to those who would get back to him in two to four research years.

Thankfully, the ardent supporters of ancient words was a relatively small faction at the moment—factions were an always fluctuating thing, and when he had been in his early adulthood, being a supporter of the second to last monarchy’s insanity had been all the rage. Really, the man had been deranged, constantly dragging his enemies—as in, people who dared do things like wear a colour that he had, minutes earlier, declared unsightly—into fighting pits and leaving them to be mauled by prava.

So yes, people agreeing with him no matter what was highly preferable to the months—and thankfully it had only lasted a few months—in which the Cayenta had attempted to sway his father into reopening those fighting pits. Ironically, Meridian’s father had been so done with these people—and the irony that the laws protected the factions contradicting their king, as long as they were following the words of some royal or another—that they likely would have been the first to be thrown into the pits, had they ever been opened.

They hadn’t, and the strange obsession with adhering to the insanity of a long dead king had died back into more mellow factions and a general leaning into following the words of the highest-ranking royal currently expressing an opinion.

This was still annoying, though.

Meridian could say the sky was always black and night eternal in the middle of the day and everyone around him—save his family itself—would be forced to agree with him. As for if his family were around? Well, then it was just as much a mess. Perhaps due to having people constantly questioning him, even when he was right, Meridian’s father now took always being right to such a level that, even in private, very few people dared disagree with him—there were always less legal ways to make someone miserable for daring to support the opinion of a long dead royal over the current king. Not being invited to Cayenta parties, and therefore being deprived of networking opportunities, lay at the top of the list. The rest of them—himself, his younger sister, and their mother—were much more relaxed when it was just the three of them, but in the presence of anyone else?

Well, in the current climate of the factions, Meridian was almost always right, and no one had any idea whether his sister or mother were to be agreed with over the other. Every faction might have their hierarchy dictating who was the most correct, but his father had bestowed so many titles on each of the women that no one knew who outranked whom anymore.

Very annoying, and in general, Meridian had spent most of his life avoiding having to spend time in public with his family.

This resulted in his other problem, which was the general source of his misery at the moment: he had no friends within Crishar. There were a few friend-type people who lived elsewhere—people like Lan’za and Emilia and even Julian, although the Norvellian prince was rather prickly—but they were, well, elsewhere and Meridian needed a friend—preferably a majenstra friend—who was, well, there.

There, as in, in Crishar because he was Prince Meridian and he couldn’t leave Crishar and he needed someone who could. The only solace he had, at the moment, was the reality that even if he had attended more of those terrible Cayenta parties and managed to make himself a friend, this would have been of little help: any member of the Cayenta would face similar issues in leaving their nation, while the majenstra were subject to the whims of the Majen, who very much would not support what he wanted to do—not without consulting his father, anyways, and his father would not support what Meridian was doing in the slightest.

Unfortunately, he needed someone he could trust and who could leave Crishar and who was a majenstra. Preferably, he also needed someone with some medical and combat training because that was the point of all this: to get someone to Emilia who could help her friend while she seemed to be in an increasingly more dangerous situation. The person Emilia wanted to help did seem to be more friend than accidental ally now, based on the occasional message the girl he had never met had sent him over his last few hours of searching for a doctor who might know of a way to care for someone with such advanced olthagri.

Finding someone with any idea of how to help had been annoying, to say the least, and had he any friends—or even anyone he could trust, really—Meridian would have assigned them to go around and ask all the doctors they could for their opinion on the matter.

Unfortunately, as previously stated, he had no one he trusted, nor even anyone he could demand do such questioning for him. Why? Well, if he asked someone to go question doctors on whether there were any treatment for advance olthagri, whomever he asked would ask what answer he wanted, then refuse to go ask around until he gave his answer!

He would say, “Well, I’m hoping someone has some idea of a treatment.”

At this point, whomever he had asked to go on this fact finding mission for him would either say, “Alright, I will go see what I can find,” or demand to know what he thought might be a potential treatment. If he knew, he wouldn’t need to ask!

Either way, off the person would go, only to eventually come back with his own hopes and opinions as answers to his forsaken question.

“Well, these doctors all agree with you that it is possible to treat advanced olthagri,” they would say, and depending on whether they had asked how he thought it might be treated or not, when asked on the potential treatment, they would either regurgitate whatever made up answer he had given them as a potential cure—“They all agree with Your Royal Highness that piss from someone who had survived olthagri, injected into their bladder three times a day over the course of a year is the cure”—or they would say the doctor didn’t know of any treatment, but as he had said one existed, one must exist.

Meridian hated everything.

Everything was terrible.

Stupid laws and their stupidity.

Thankfully, after travelling to the eastern edge of Crishar, where the greens and purples of the flora that spread over most of the nation broke into the sands that reached towards Mitine Dyn, Seer’ik’tine, and the highly disputed southwestern corner of the Cyrenix Desert, he had found a doctor who was a refugee from Mitine Dyn and didn’t care much for respecting their nation’s laws—at least, not when their Crown Prince was asking her not to. Someone with sense! Amazing, and definitely not shocking that THEY WEREN’T ORIGINALLY FROM THIS STUPID NATION!

“Always thought it must make learning anything difficult myself,” the old woman, who from what Meridian had been able to tell was more a folk doctor than one who had attended some sort of formal schooling, had laughed, ushering him into her little house at the edge of town in order to tell him about a story she had once heard, about a powerful majenstra who had been capable of curing virtually any disease.

While currently Meridian couldn’t do anything with what he had learned, he still thought it fortuitous that, when he had asked a small child if there was a doctor in the town, upon arriving there via the aetherstreams that circled and crisscrossed Crishar, the little boy had barely looked up at him and simply pointed him on his way. Many times, Meridian thought it unfortunate he was so recognizable—it would have been much simpler to be plain and uninteresting. Unfortunately, while he didn’t think him something particularly nice to look at, he was easily identifiable, and it was yet another item on his list of problems.

Worse than being so recognizable, however, was the reality that despite his looks—which, were he someone not of royal blood, he thought would have easily removed him from consideration as a potential romantic partner—he was still expected to get married and create children. Meridian didn’t much think marriage would suit him, and he was rather horrified by the idea of having to create children—he barely felt like more than a child himself, despite being nearly two-hundred, because as the old doctor said, learning anything was difficult.

Most of the time, Meridian felt himself to be swimming through the world, a second from drowning—and really, despite being the lord of a set of isles, he couldn’t swim, because NO ONE WOULD TEACH HIM! He was always right, and therefore, however he chose to swim—even if he was literally sinking—was the proper way to not drown.

Had Meridian mentioned that everything was terrible? It was, and with his father increasingly pushing for him to marry some nice Cayenta girl everything was sure to get worse.

Stupid royal blood.

Stupid answer of “No, Meridian, you can’t just adopt a child in order to avoid making one of your own”—his mother’s words. Meridian didn’t think she’d meant to be cruel, but he also didn’t think she got it—didn’t think she understood that he didn’t think he wanted to have sex. Instead, she only told him he would learn to live with the things expected of him, just as she had. Generally, he didn’t have the impression his parents’ marriage was something happy. Maybe it once had been. Not anymore, and Meridian didn’t want to be miserable—didn’t want to have to spend his life with someone he didn’t like having uncomfortable and awkward sex with them and—

And Meridian walked into someone because of course he had. At the very least, neither of them went down—Meridian didn’t want to be responsible for knocking someone over in his absentminded worrying about marriage and sex, and he definitely didn’t want someone panicking when they realized who they had knocked into the dirt. Instead, a pair of hands grabbed his shoulders, keeping him from tumbling backward.

“Whoa, are you okay?” the man asked, their voice soft and strange—it wasn’t normal to hear a palace accent this far towards the border.

When Meridian glanced up—the man wasn’t much taller than his own average height, but he had been staring at his feet; hence the whole walking right into another person thing—he found a pair of oddly familiar eyes staring back at him. Immediately, recognition filled them—not that that was surprising. What was surprising was the way in which the person turned and bolted away.

That… definitely wasn’t normal, and unfortunately for the mystery man, Meridian had spent his life running from his bodyguards. There was no way he was letting the strange man get away from him.