The morning routine for Evie was the same as it was yesterday, but today she was looking forward to the library cleaning. At least that gave her something to look forward to. So, as usual, she prepared a basin with water, took her rag, and left for the library after breakfast. She reached the library and stood at the gate, gazing at the shelf she had cleaned the day before.
"I have to finish more shelves today," she said, putting down the basin. She went to the shelf closest to the one she cleaned yesterday, removing the books. Clank! Something fell, and Evie looked at a scroll lying on the ground.
Curiously, she picked it up and checked, and there was a paragraph that read
"He was a ruler known for his tight control of the region, and he transformed the Valerian Empire into the strongest empire on the continent. He left a very peculiar edict in his reign. Find all his records and move them to one shelf. If you do, you will be rewarded".
With regards, Elan.
Evie finished reading the scroll. "Who is Elan?" Evie wondered. "Clearly not the Emperor, as she knew her target's name was Reign "Then, who is he?" she asked herself again.
"Anyway," she said, "whoever it was, they were powerful enough to use the library," she added. What mattered to her the most was the reward part. "At least he knows all about Performance-Based Compensation," she said, tightening her apron. "Unlike the idiot I worked for before," she added.
"Okay, it's now time to find Valerian history books," she said, starting with the other shelf as she remembered all the books she cleaned and it wasn't within those books here. "Here," she said, picking books from the shelves, moving from one shelf to another. Within half an hour, she had a mountain of books next to the chair.
She went through the books, focusing on the emperor who accomplished lots of projects, and it wasn't hard to figure out. She found him easily: Reign Casper Valerian, the fifth emperor of the Valerian Empire and the great-grandfather of the current emperor, whom he was named after
"Found you," Evie said, tapping at the portrait of a silver-haired man pictured in the book. "Now all I have to do is gather all his records and put them on the shelf," she said happily. "I wonder what the gift I'm going to get is," she said, scratching her palm.
She moved through all the shelves in the library, getting all the books with the mention of Reign Casper Valerian, and stacked them one after another. Then she cleaned the shelf, dusted the books off, and moved them to the empty shelf. "Done," she said, stretching her arms. "That was heavy. Now I understand why the librarians in our city library have muscular arms," she said, giggling at her own joke.
And then an idea clicked in her mind. "Let's arrange the books and records by dates moving forward," she said. "That's better than arranging them alphabetically. It will be easier for Mr Reward as well," she added. "As I am assuming he asked me to do it since he wanted to find a specific record, so organising by date will be easier for him. And my gift would be bigger. What a great motivation," she added grinning.
After all the books were cleaned, Evie moved all the books she had removed from the cleaned shelf to another empty shelf. "Done for the day. Yay, time to clock out," she said, her smile now wide and her dimple showing.
She stopped. "What was the weird edict?" she said curiously. "Let's find out," she added, she had always been the curious type, even as a child; the adults used to hide from her with the amount of questions she asked, so that's why when choosing a career she ended up choosing HR, because then she would know every secret of the organisation and coworkers.
She considered her curiosity both a blessing and a curse as it put her in trouble or in the middle of a fight, and today, it turned out to be a curse.
She sat down to read the books she had organised, one by one, looking for any weird edict. And then her eyes fell on a page, and she froze, her eyes almost popping out of their socket. "Ooh no, God, please no," she said. The more she read the paragraph, the more her anxiety grew.
"What am I going to do now?" she said, staring at the book absentmindedly.
And there were the few lines that changed the perspective of everything she thought. According to her plan, Everything was going to be easy: find the emperor, seduce him, and save the Ashborne Kingdom.
But there, written in bold, were the words that broke her heart completely:
By the Divine Grace of the Heavens and the Will of the Eternal Throne, I, Reign Casper Valerian, Emperor of the Great Valerian Empire, hereby declare that none of my descendants and their descendants, be it male or female, are allowed to marry any foreign national at any cost. Whoever disobeys and sets out to do so will have to undergo three of the set rules, and if those rules are not fulfilled, the person will forfeit his or her title.
And at the end, Evie could see the stamp of the royal family of Valerian, with the symbol of the Valerian Empire: a Silver Frost-Wolf, sealing her fate.
"Why?" Evie said, almost in tears. Then a memory flickered in her mind. "Ooh, yeah, this is probably the reason why they rejected the proposal from Ashborne Kingdom," she said, almost in disbelief. "What do I do now?" she asked herself. "Should I change targets?" she asked. "But to whom? And which other empire can I go to?" she said, exhaling, and the air in her lungs constricted.
Her shoulders slumped. All the happiness she felt about getting a reward was forgotten by now, "How am I going to save your kingdom, Elara?" she asked staring vacantly at the roof of the library.
Grrr, her stomach growled. She looked outside to see the sun setting. "Dammit," she cursed. "I missed lunch again," she said, holding her stomach. Despite being hungry, she had lost all her appetite, and she didn't feel like eating.
So she picked up the scroll, took the quill pen, and started jotting down a paragraph. Then she stood up, put the edict in its place, picked up the basin and the rag, and exited the library, dragging her feet listlessly.