The King of Daenia

It was a very unpleasant affair.

I was one of 19 assassins sent to kill the King of Daenia, each of us sent by someone else, for a different purpose, reason and pretext, and none of us knew anything of any of the other.

The way I had gotten the job was bizarre to say the least. In short, I was a poor young graduate of the University of Lorkhan in Daenia, long unable to get a job because all employers believed my education offered me no practical skills.

Until, that is, one day I was hired as a caretaker for an old and fairly wealthy Dark Elven lady who had moved in and bought a house there days earlier. She sent me off to buy enormously expensive enchanted clothing and jewelry for her.

However, on the fifth day working for her, I came back from buying trinkets and forgot to knock on the front door, opening it directly in a rush of overdone attempts at efficiency, hitting the lady with it, who was standing behind it just then at an odd angle, thus making her lose balance, fall on her back and hit a wall with her head and die.

As soon as I realized what I had done, and had looted what I could and ran away, I saw a Khajiit looking at me conspicuously, who afterwards vanished into the shadows.

That night at the inn, as I was laying in bed shocked by what I had done, someone knocked at the door and ran away. I assumed it was safe to open the door, given how they had run away, so I did. And behind it was a huge box in gift-wrap. At first I wondered what it could possibly contain. Then I saw it was another box, containing another box that contained yet another box, and so on. After unpacking several dozen boxes, I finally got to the last one, containing a perfumed letter.

"Incredible work, master assassin," it read, "no sooner had the weakened cult queen of the demilich Zelaxudin found secret pasage to High Rock from Black Marsh, that you tracked her down in Daenia and slayed her with the utmost grace. The client, her husband, who had sought our services so he could remarry, has been taken aback by the news, claiming he didn't REALLY think she was going to die, and hadn't thought about it all that much, and loved her after all, but our Dres guildmembers have politely explained that there's not much turning back now, although he's a bit skeptical about that given his former experience with her.

Which brings us to our current business! And pay attention. And bring a map.

As you may have heard in passing from your informants, there is a war going on between the Northmoor and Ykalon. Our contractor, the King of Shalgora, allied with Daenia, both of which are as of yet uninvolved in this conflict, would like to take this opportunity to conquer all three. That is, Northmoor, Ykalon and Daenia.

Of course, the only way to get to Northmoor and Ykalon is through Daenia, therefore Daenia is the priority. However, Shalgora does not have an army large enough to conquer them, and would certainly require an alliance with Ykalon and Daenia to defeat Northmoor. Which is where you come in.

You are to assassinate the king of Daenia at a time when it would be most convenient for Northmoor in their desire to conquer Ykalon, as they would blame the latter for the plot and try to take control of the weakened Daenia for its own supposed sake. However, as it would be most convenient for them, we will blame the assassination on them, which they will inevitably blame on us - which no one would believe, because we don't have any reason to assassinate the King of Daenia, but which would give us reason to take over Daenia for their own good, then ally with Ykalon against Northmoor, and then conquer both.

Ykalon is surely evenly matched with Northmoor at the moment, but we have confidence that Glenpoint, Northmoor's allies, will aid them in the struggle and help bring Northmoor's borders up to Daenia, which would be the moment when you would be killing the King of Daenia so it could all make sense.

Therefore, your task is this: infiltrate Daenia's royal court, kill the king at the right geopolitical moment, and plant blatant proof that Northmoor did it, like a note saying 'hi! I'm sorry I killed your king. I only did it because Northmoor asked me to. Please forgive me and be mad at them instead of me?' We leave the exact message to your discretion.

As always, we must inform you that, should you break our contract of ten succesive high profile assassinations, of which this one is the last, we will be forced to turn against you and hunt you down to the ends of the earth. We don't know your true identity, naturally; only our agent that's been following you along knows it. But we will figure it out, even if you take out the agent, assuming we try really hard, and just you wait then. And, of course, should you choose to be a nice professional assassin all over again, we will reward you with the ridiculously bountiful riches that you deserve.

See ya.

Guildmaster of A.A.

PS. Sorry about the boxes. We needed to make sure the contents of the letter weren't damaged, and that the package didn't attract attention."

The enticement of the menace of being further mistaken for someone else, and thus hunted down, was nothing compared to the opportunity to finally pay off my student loans. I decided to do it.

Finding the royal court was not particularly hard, given how I lived in the capital of Daenia itself. Well, it was surrounded by a giant wall of shrubbery, the entrance through which was so hard to find that most visitors and retinue gave up and decided to take the shortcut through the sewers, where there were lots of bums. But other than that, it was pretty easy. I even found the entrance after a few days.

The palace itself looked amazing, like a dilapidated stronghold painted in all the colors of the rainbow. Its grounds housed ten hedge mazes, a large terrace with a swimming pool, a huge garden with all the known breeds of cabbage in the known world ("and even some the unknown world, received through divine intervention," the singpost read) and an ancient dungeon of pure evil that no one had ever really been bothered by enough for it to be cleared out. "The immortal unvanquishable undead armies of eternal doom only come out every blue moon," I heard fellow tourists say. "Nothing to worry about."

I went inside the palace and found myself in the lobby, which had somehow started being used as a storage room. Like in the other castles I'd visited, however, the Iliac Bay tradition of having two guards at the entrance was respected, although I could barely see them, as they were between some very large crates. I admired the coat of arms proudly displayed on the walls, behind the heaps of certificates, land deeds, checks, sensitive mail and various legal documents, although it was blank. "They couldn't really think of what to put on it," a fellow admirer elucidated.

I stepped forward into the large main hall and throne room, where I came upon a large crowd of people from all walks of life, from grape tree gatherers to plumbers to scalpel rippers to famous mathematicians, most of them women, sipping their hard drinks, mingling, chatting, sitting on hordes of armchairs, couches and benches, accidentally walking into the crates scattered around. To the left, the hall opened up into the large dining room with monster embryos displayed on shelves, while to the right it opened up into the palace catacombs, housing the royal bedrooms, the torture chambers adjacent to the children's rooms, the astronomical observatory, one chamber that was used both as a kitchen and a chapel, and a set of passages leading down into a gigantic complex of caves stretching all over the Iliac Bay, home to truly primordial life, many of whose representatives insisted that the caves had nothing to do with the evil dungeon outside, in an attempt to avoid having their reputation tarnished by idle speculation.

The king wasn't there, and neither was the queen. Something was amiss. There was, however, a public relations booth on the right end of the chamber, near the stairs leading up to the official catacombs.

"Hi. Where's the King?" I asked.

"He's in shock, or at least recovering from it," the lady answered.

"What happened to him?"

"His erstwhile interpreter and lead scribe quit. He used to read and write for the king. Yesterday, though, he wasn't here anymore, and therefore some people went directly to the king with papers, and the king was misled into reading them, which made him run away and lock himself in an outhouse, and he hasn't left it since. We're getting worried for him, sort of."

"Why did he run away?"

"The king, he's got a pathological fear of reading. He's been that way all his life."

"Can't read or write?"

"Oh, he can write perfectly, besides his dyslexia. It's just the reading that makes him go crazy."

Perhaps I could use that to my advantage at some point.

"Do you think you could go and get him?" she asked.

"Well, sure."

"It's a rather perilous task, I must warn you. The outhouses, you see, are made of gold, so they're kept safely in the catacombs."

"The catacombs?"

"Yes, there are two catacombs actually. The catacombs that are to the right as you enter this chamber aren't the catacombs anymore, since the king lives there, so the upper levels of the castle have been renamed as the catacombs, so they're the official catacombs used for that purpose."

"Fair enough. What dangers await me?"

There wasn't a lot I could handle, in all honesty, even though I was wearing enchanted stuff from the unintentional door assassination.

"Something horrific, but the king has to be taken out of there sooner or later, so it might as well be now, and you seem reckless enough where others wouldn't go five feet in the official catacombs' vicinity."

"How would you know?"

"Your buttons are on the left side. You're wearing a woman's blouse."

I had been discovered!

"Shouldn't it be the other way around, then, talking of recklessness?"

"Nope. You look like the kind that murders sweet old ladies and then wears their clothes in public. You'll do wonderfully."

And off she sent me.

"Listen. You go behind the booth and then up the stairs to the left. Shouldn't be hard. Don't get lost on the way to them. Not even we know where you could end up if you take the wrong turn somewhere. But once you're inside the catacombs, it should be pretty straightforward."

"Where will I find the outhouses?"

"Oh no. They will find you."

"How?"

"You will see... oh yes, you will see."

It seemed like a very dangerous thing to do, but it had to be done. I had to rescue the king, if I was going to assassinate him, didn't I? So I followed the directions to the letter, and soon found myself inside the musty, fungous dark walls of the official catacombs.

At once I noticed, gone through the metal entrance door, that the place was immensely drafty. All of the windows were open in all of the corridors, though only half of the windows actually opened to the outside, with the rest opening through walls - ostensibly, the architect commisioned long ago for the job probably drank way too much.

I wandered around for hours, all the while distraught by the drafts. I found everything from active Daedric portals to slave pens to mothers' leagues for child safety, but not a single darn outhouse. Eventually, though, I asked the attendants of the a golf convention for help, and they luckily pointed the way for me.

At last, I found myself in a chamber with a "lavatory" sign, with a bar counter, a couch and a pool of lava in the middle. I knocked one-by-one on the golden outhouses that had intricate patterns of emerald beads. No one answered.

"Ready or not, here I come," I shouted and started kicking open their doors. They were all empty, but I found a note wrapped around a cooper pullchain, from the king. It said: "Help! I'm being kidnapped by the golf convention!" There was apparently mucking around across afoot.

"No, we haven't kidnapped any king! Other people, yes, but no king!" they said as I persuaded them into cooperating by waving my dagger, obtained through the unintentional door assassination, in the air.

"What about this note here?"

"We didn't write that."

"No, the King did."

"No, he didn't," they said.

"Sure he did."

"The King is dyslexic, remember?"

I had already forgotten!

"Oh. Who wrote it then?" I asked.

"We didn't. We wouldn't have framed ourselves. I don't think so."

"Who then?"

"Well. The Daedric Princes frame us all of the time. Every single time something happens, we become the scapegoats in the end. So it's probably either them or the werecrocodiles."

My task seemed to have suddenly become much more dangerous. It was easily on the brink of being a legendary quest. Well, so be it.

"Any tips on how to find out which Daedric Prince took him?"

"Go to the werecrocodiles and ask them. They keep track of these things. To get to them, you leave this room, walk down the hall, go right past the convent of nuns, follow the underground stream up for a bit, and crawl through the unmistakable hole in the wall."

I did so. I barely got out alive.

"The crocodiles jumped at me and tried to kill me!" I yelled at the golfer. "It's daylight, and definitely not a full moon. What happened?"

"Oh. I forgot to tell you. They're reverse werecrocodiles. They were born crocodiles. They turn into Elves when the moon is full."

"You mean Elves bit them and gave them lycanthropy?"

"Crocodiles transformed into Elves bit them, yes. It's called merothropy, actually. Of course, there are crocodiles afflicted with lycanthropy too, who turn into wolves on full moon nights. But we don't have any of those here."

"Alright, I'll try to talk to them when the moon is full," I said.

There was no full moon for a whole month and a week. I spent the whole time playing golf with my new friends, on their dungeon minigolf courses. I lost a lot of their balls in the Daedric portals, and to monsters, but I got pretty good at it in the end.

"Say. If one of those reverse crocodiles bit me, would I get crocothropy?"

"Nope. You'd get merothropy, though. You'd start turning into an Elf."

We had lots of philosophical conversations too, with me trying to learn as much as possible.

"An optimist looks at the moon and says it's half-full. A pessimist looks at it and says it's half-empty. What does a werecrocodile say?"

Finally, the full moon was up. I returned to the crocodiles that turned into Elves, and was surprised to see that they had in fact all turned into gorgeous scantily-clad Elven ladies.

"I'm telling you, honey, alligators aren't real crocodiles," I heard them gossip.

"Excuse me," I said as they were glaringly ignoring me.

"But the elephant matchmaker said he was good for me!" the other one continued.

"Hello," I said.

"Oh. Oh!" the second one interjected. "What a cute golfer!" she then said, having seen my clubs coming out of my backpack, and I got all blushy and stuff.

"Yeah. You two would make a nice pair if he was a crocodile," the other one said, "but he's a Breton, so not even a real Elf."

"Could you please help me with something?" I asked, interrupting their nighttime daydreaming.

"We could ask our crocothrope friends to turn him into a crocodile," she continued.

"That doesn't make sense. He'd be a crocodile when I'd be an Elf," the first one was saying. "No. He's good-lookin' just the way he is," she smiled and winked at me.

I began an affair with her sometime afterwards, meeting with her when she was in Elven form, and it has even lasted into the present. I almost love her.

She even brought me to the elephant matchmaker at one point, who didn't approve of me at all, though the girl didn't mind. But I won't tell you about us more than that, so don't ask; this stuff is intimate. You don't need to know. You have no business with my personal life. I won't mention her again from now on.

Anyway.

I was told that rumor had it that the Daedric Prince of the Mundane had kidnapped the King. I'd never heard of such a Prince, even though I was a Metaphysics graduate, but the girls assured me that one existed. In fact, they even conjured up a portal to his realm for me.

I stepped inside, and found myself on a vast green field, with windmills and grazing sheep all around.

"Greetings, good mortal!" a bald old man with a long white beard yelled after he snuck up on me and prodded me with a stick.

"Ah! Hello," I said, as I saw the multitude of golf balls scattered around. "I think those golf balls were once mine. There were Daedric portals on the minigolf course, and I kept losing balls in them."

"I had been wondering why they had been coming out of thin air!"

"Who are you, by the way?" I asked him.

"Me? I'm the Daedric Prince of the Mundane!"

"Wow, really? But they never mentioned you in school."

"That's because I'm really recent. They haven't had time to update the books with me yet."

"How are you recent?"

"Well, see. I was a psijic! And I was sent to the Dreaming Cave back on Artaeum, to confer with the Daedric Princes, and maybe exchange a few jokes. But it was incredibly boring. They didn't pay much attention to me, as they were multi-tasking most of the time, and gossiping about each other in their cliques the rest of it - which is why they were there, mostly. But then they just dozed off a lot.

Eventually, however, I asked a few of them to play cards with me. Small games at first, just me and friends, but then others started partaking. And, then before you knew it, we had some high-stakes poker going on with all of them involved."

"Were they good at it?"

"Quite good, especially Sheogorath with the cane that turned into an umbrella. But then we realized that that only happened when he was bluffing, and from then on it gave him away completely."

"So what happened?"

"I won, that's what happened!"

"Wow, they made you a Daedric Prince?"

"Yes! I had to insist a lot, but it sure happened!"

"But aren't there supposed to be sixteen holes between the eight spokes of the Wheel that is the world?"

"That's exactly what they said too. But they had to live up to their bets, so they squeezed me in somewhere. It's great!"

"Congratulations to you!"

"Thanks. I'm still getting used to it."

"Is it hard being a Daedric Prince?"

"It is, when you first start out. But I had a great self-help book called 'How to Build and Maintain a Daedric Domain from Scratch'."

"Hey, that's by the same author who wrote '99 Dissertations on Lorkhan you Have to Read before you Die,' and 'Where to Hide a Huge Booger in Public'!"

"Yeah! The latter one was so great. I honestly don't know how I would have gotten past all those conferences in Artaeum without it."

"Same here. But still. A psijic as a Daedric Prince! You folks were more about the Old Ways."

"You'd never imagine how jealous the other psijics are, actually. Even my ex-wife regrets our divorce."

He seemed friendly, so I decided to ask him at once.

"I was wondering though. Have you perchance kidnapped the King of the High Rock kingdom of Daenia? By accident, maybe?"

"Nope. Afraid not."

"Rumor had it you had."

"Well, I have lots of other Kings, but no King of Daenia, sorry. I could interrogate the ones I have, maybe torture them a bit, find out if they lied about their origins, though, if you like. Maybe the King of Daenia is among them?"

"Please do."

I was hopefuly he'd have him somewhere.

"Alright, hang on."

He went poof in a cloud of sprinkled jelly. I waited for several hours counting sheep.

"Nope. None of them would admit they were the King of Daenia, no matter what I put them through."

Darn.

"Then I really can't seem to find him anywhere."

"Well, did you check under the couch?" he suggested.

Indeed. I had not checked there. I thanked him for the tip, went back through the portal, dodged the crocodiles that lunged at me from one side of the room to another, and returned to the lavatory - and there he was! Right under the couch.

"My rescuer!" the King said as he got out from under it.

"You were here!"

"And I'm glad you've found me!"

"But wait, what about the note? Who put it there, then?"

"I did!"

"But the golf convention didn't kidnap you."

"I thought they were going to. Some of them came in here, started knocking on the doors, saying 'we know you're in there! come play golf with us, or we shall assimilate you!' - they assume people are hiding in the outhouses, so they come and say that. And then they felt disillusioned and they left, though I had already written the note."

"But you're dyslexic!"

"Uh. I forgot!"

So he'd really been there all along, then.

"Why did you go under the couch?"

"They left, and I went outside to check if they'd left and saw that they had. So then I realized the note I had written was probably misleading, so I read it to see if I was right about that - and then I went cowering under the couch!"

"At least you're safe now."

"Yes, thank you! How would you like to be my Stewart?"

"You mean steward?"

"No, no. Stewards make stew, and I already have one of those. I mean Stewart, the one who talks a lot instead of me, and looks at people funny, and tells them I'm dead when I don't feel like talking to them."

"Sure, I'd be honored."

So there I was now, Stewart of the King of Daenia. A well-paid job, yet not necessarily one that would keep me from attempting to assassinate the King once the time was right.

"Now that I have a new Stewart, I can at last invite strange and crazy folks to the court again," he said merrily. "I missed that."

"Am I to select and invite them?" I asked.

"No, of course not. The scribes do that. The Stewart doesn't deal with these things."

We walked around in squares for a long time, then finally found the exit of the catacombs, with the outhouses, now turned magical through the mythical alignment of the stars, following us for a little while so they could say goodbye. We left the place as drafty as we'd found it, and went into the throne room, where everyone was lying on the floor or crates, having fainted from too much liquor, the ensemble of musicians still playing their wild party songs. The public relations booth lady saw me with the King as she had her face on the ground.

"Woah... hoo-hoo-hoo. You found the *hic!* King. You faced the drafts like a hero. Anyone else would have run away for fear of a cold."

Her words made me feel so very brave.

"Don't worry! They'll probably wake up before they start drinking again. Most of them, at least," the King assured me, and led me to my room, down the corridor opposite the official catacombs.

The next morning, some drunkards had woken up, and the others had been hidden in the hedge mazes by the guards. The place looked a lot more solemn now, with the King back in the main hall, and his Queen, a beautiful young lady, beside him, even though the drunkards that had woken up were now drinking again, the party music had only gotten louder, and someone had run away with the throne.

"It's marvelous meeting you, Stewart!" the Queen said. "We hope there won't come a day when you'll go insane, throw down all your clothes, and come here claiming to be a squid, like all of our past dozen Stewarts have."

"We had to throw them into water too, and fast!" the King recounted.

"I started thinking there was something wrong with people called Stewart, but then we had someone called Squid and it happened to him too," the Queen continued.

The chief scribe, a very small man, approached and gave me a list and a thumbs-up.

"That's the list of our special guests today," the King said. "I'm giddy with excitement at who it will be!"

That day, the three guests were a foaming genius brick that spoke in riddles, a primal aspect of Padomay, and an elderly diminutive chessmaster.

"Ah, we're having a good day," the King noticed.

It was shortly after those words were said that the first attempt on the king's life that I was witness to was made, as a dagger fell on the carpet a few feet in front of the King's chair, out of nowhere.

"Or maybe not!"

The guards quickly took and beat up all of the suspects, and detained them in the upper levels, which was the name taken from the official catacombs and given to the real ones; more specifically, they were put in the children's rooms, which were used as interrogation chambers, because the royal couple had no children. I followed the King and Queen inside them.

"I was out of the way resting; ask any sentinel you like, and hear that I had nothing to do with the dagger fall!" an orc was telling the guard captain, who turned out to be the public relations booth lady.

"Stewart, no one saw anything," the King said. "They're going to line them up in front of the screen now. I need you to look at them and choose who you think that you presume you realize that you feel that we should asume obviously did it," the king said.

The suspects were an Atmoran demon, a lawyer, a gardener, a lady with a piece of cucumber stuck to her forhead nicknamed "the rhinoceros," a travelling salesman, a well-known Maormer homicidal maniac, a heavily armored orc with a large collection of daggers in his briefcase, and a midget.

"It's definitely not the orc," I said.

"Indeed," agreed the King.

"It has to be the midget."

The world seemed to stop for a few seconds with that deep realization.

"Why?" the King asked.

"I've... merely searched into the deepest reaches of my soul. The bottom of the core of the edge of my heart. The substance of the waves of all my inner being's extent. It's the midget."

He stood there, thinking.

"Absolutely," he concurred shortly.

"Shall I have him executed, my lord?" asked the executioner.

"So be it."

The midget was hoisted by the guards, kicking and screaming, claiming he was innocent of any wrongdoing, that he was a kind and gentle midget, that his evil queen Akazunkaruzuzaba would get the King anyway, and that she would get the rest of us too besides, and that he was a very sunshine and butterflies person who would never do any harm to the King, ever.

"Midget assassins are the latest craze," the King said.

He was taken to the execution chamber, and strapped into the executioner's most recently invented instrument of death, that consisted of ten spiralling blades coming from both sides of the unfortunate victim, very much towards it. Unfortunately, all attempts to use it on the midget failed; he was simply too short. "Don't worry! I'll just make a few adjustments and it'll work great," the executioner said.

It was noon that day when someone claiming to be the King's son came into the palace.

"I don't know what he's talking about," the King said. "I'm a virgin."

"But your wife?"

"Oh. She doesn't know what he's talking about either."

Being the Stewart, I was the one who had to deal with situations like this one.

"No, seriously. I'm his son," the man kept saying.

"But he says he's never seen you in his life," I explained.

"He sometimes forgets these things."

I went back to the King for clarifications.

"I do forget these things, but I'm pretty sure about this one, and I told you I'm a virgin," the King said.

"Shall I assume he's a spy and a very poor doppelganger, and ask the guards to kick him out?" I asked.

"Oh no. Definitely not. I'm pretty sure, like I said. But I've never met him in my life, so I don't know what kind of person he is, and whether he would lie about something like that - therefore, how can I know if he is telling the truth or not? And he might even be wealthy instead of poor, for all we know. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt."

"What to do then?"

"We can let him stay here. There are no spare rooms in the castle, but we've rented guest rooms in the evil dungeon outside: the fifth and sixth pits. He can stay there, why not?"

"But. Really though. You and your wife never...?"

"She's not really my type, you know?"

So much for that. But the day wasn't over yet.

We were in the palace's so-called official upper levels that were the unofficial catacombs, and the King was showing me his incredibly expensive underground astronomical observatory.

"I had to dig up a large chunk of the palace's treasures - that I keep buried in the cabbage garden where no one would ever look for them - to buy this."

I sat down and started playing around with the little wheels and the pretty buttons, spinning around on the rotating chair, giggling.

To my later horror, I did not notice when a munchkin threw himself at the King with many sheets of toilet paper, strangling him viciously.

"Get him off me!" the King yelled.

Panicking, I turned around, saw what was going on, and grabbed the munchkin's hair and pulled him away.

"I'll hold him!" I shouted to the King as the munchkin snarled and twisted around. "Quick, go get the guards!"

"Hang on to sweet life!" the King said to me as he ran off.

I felt very relieved as the guards entered the room, took the munchkin from me, beat him up, and took him away to the interrogation rooms.

"First a midget, and now a munchkin! I can't believe they've started sending in the professionals already. I can't remember doing anything all that bad."

"Someone must really want you dead," I said.

Just then, I saw the diminutive chessmaster from earlier coming from behind the shadows and preparing to lunge at the King with the Queen.

"By the Nine Divines!" she was screaming.

"Final, real life checkmate!" the diminutive chessmaster was saying.

"Dodge!" I yelled to the King. But he wasn't fast enough, and I knew it. I dashed in front of him.

"Aha!" the chessmaster said, and moved to the right. "Checkmate!"

Luckily, the guards had already heard the commotion this time around, and came in, grabbed the chessmaster, put the Queen down, beat him up, and took him away to the interrogation rooms.

"By Julianos, main deity of Daenia! Are you unscathed, my dear?" he said, hugging his beloved.

"Yes! Thank the gods."

I breathed in relief too.

"I don't know how many more small people I'm going to survive, at this rate!" the King said.

I was beginning to see the King as a friend already, and was reconsidering whether I should eventually assassinate him or not.

"We need to talk to someone about it. Like a seer," he said.

"That's a good idea," the Queen said.

"Should I go get one?" I asked.

"No, no. You're the Stewart, you don't do things like that. It's what we pay the cleaning lady for," he said.

That was all for that day. I slept that night not knowing where my allegiances truly lied.

The next day, it was morning again, and a new throne had been brought, except the carpet had been stolen this time. Hardly anyone had recovered from the last night's drunk revelry.

"I wonder who today's guests are!" the King said.

That day, the three guests were the King of Shalgora, the demilich Zelaxudin, and a famous historian no one had heard of.

"Happy times! Good to have them!" he said.

The famous historian began a speech almost at once.

"When it comes to ancient extinct cultures, Dwarves are the favorite topic of most scholars, school kids and housewives. Research done on them through the ages has ranged from things like failed attempts to translate their books, to as far as failed attempts to discover where they really want. Me, I was never that interested in them again once I found out they weren't small stocky people at all, which, as a young idealistic child, I used to believe in. I lost my idealism then. I understood that life is not what you make it, life is what throws itself on you. I changed forever.

Regardless, everyone seems to have forgotten about that one culture even stranger, even more advanced than theirs, which I am, in fact, quite interested in, because they actually were small stocky people - and this is the fact that has renewed my faith in life. I speak, of course, of the original Elven inhabitants of Black Marsh, the leprechauns.

So few books have been written about them, and so obscure is the information about them, that even the mysteries surrounding them are wrapped up in mystery. Theories abound, of course. We know, of course, that they were the richest race in history (at worst, exceeded only by the gnomes, the original Elven inhabitants of High Rock), having a special gift that allowed them to create gold out of other metals, and in certain places, out of the very air.

But starting with the end, it's possible that they're even among us today. They created the Hist, later appropriated by the Argonians. Does it not seem likely that the leprechauns themselves chose to merge with the Hist, and use the Argonians as a slave race, perhaps? With the Argonians likely a creation of their boundless intellect and vitality.

Just as plausible, of course, would be that they themselves are the Argonians, transformed for a subtle, greater purpose."

I couldn't listen further, because the King of Shalgora came where I could see him and nodded that I come to him.

"Master assassin, what is going on here? Why haven't you killed the King of Daenia yet? It's very important that you do!"

"How did you know it's me?" I asked.

"I didn't. I was nodding at the small fellow, over there. I thought it was him," he said, referring to the chief scribe. "You're much taller than I expected."

"But, you know, Northmoor's borders haven't reached Daenia's yet. Not by a long shot," I told him.

"Oh! Why doesn't anyone tell me these things? Well, good luck then, master assassin! I am sure you will not fail me."

And he started walking around, and dropped out of sight before long. I started wondering who had asked him to come, and why Zelaxudin was here.

"Who asked the King of Shalgora to come, and why is Zelaxudin here?" I asked the King.

"The chief scribe did. His choices always strike the right balance between ecclectic and middle-of-the-road, I think."

Zelaxudin walked around for a bit too, and then I lost track of him.

"Here comes the seer!" the King exclaimed.

A man in dark pink robes approached.

"Good day, my lord and queen," he said.

"Oh, I'm not a queen, really," the King said. "My wife is, though, so I guess that makes up for it, somewhat."

"I recognize you!" the Queen said. "You used to be that famous dancer."

"Yes, I was. But even as a child, I had always wanted to be a seer. I only danced so I could raise money to be one."

"Seer that sees pretty well from what I hear," said the King. "Help me. Little people have been trying to kill me."

"I know this well. And I can share with you that, in fact, a total of 19 assassins have been sent after you. Not all of them are little, though."

"My! That is a lot of assassins," the King said.

"Oodles of them!" the Queen realized.

"And you should be careful who you put your faith in, my King. Hint hint," the seer said.

"Tell us more!" the King said.

"Oh no. I have said enough for now. The vision is faded. Maybe at lunch."

Suddenly, a cannibal broke out of a crate in the throne room and headed towards the King. We all panicked and started running around desperately, but then the guards came, grabbed him, beat him up and then took him to the interrogation chambers.

"Phew," we all said.

"Did that one count as one of the 19 assassins?" I asked the seer.

"No, not really," he said.

During lunch, he said the words that scared me.

"I prophesy... by the power of the shapes of stars... by their movements in the firmament... by the trickles of their meanings... that you will die by the hand of someone that you will have learned to trust. Yes, please pass the corn."

Those words hung heavy in my mind.

I imagined how it was going to happen.

Was I really going to assassinate him?

The chief scribe came to me later that day, as I was sitting on the castle's porch.

"Stewart! I need help! Something has gone really, really wrong," he said.

"What is it?" I said depressed.

"It's really embarrassing, and that's why I can't go to the King and tell him..."

He explained that, being the King's scribe, writer of all the royal correspondence, he had sent certain sensitive documents on behalf of the King without his permission. Now the consequences had become apparent. He showed me the following letter he had received:

"Didn't you call me your plump sugar little bunny-creature honey sweetness, so many, many times?

When I sent you a sketch of my bottom... you said, if my bottom looked cute enough, you would love me forever..."

The very small man had apparently had a postal relationship with another man, and had signed himself as the King so he could seem more attractive.

"It was meant to be a mere fantasy," he explained to me. "But he... he decided he wanted it to be serious. He decided he wanted me - that is, the King - to truly be his wonderful little kitten, that I was in his fantasy."

He showed me another letter. It read: "I can't live without you! I simply cannot, and you know that so very well, beautiful squirrel. I love you beyond everything. I am in an endless loop of love, darling! And you know you love me too, but the pressures of the world have gathered up on you, and now you are having a memory lapse.

You no longer want my bottom in this life, and you will not give me another chance. So we must die together, so we can then be in love eternally. I am coming right now. And perhaps I will catch a glimpse of the leg hair that you described so seductively."

Another threat was on its way, it seemed. What I didn't know was that he had already come, through the sewers, and entered the castle through the back door, and was talking to the King right then.

"He said he never truly loved you!" the romantic was shouting.

"You never truly loved me?" the Queen asked her husband, crying.

"Maybe... maybe I forget these things!" the King said.

"That piece of underwear of yours, that you sent me once, is still my most prized possession," the romantic said.

"I really don't remember!"

"I can describe it most poetically."

Luckily, I came there just in time, with the guards, who grabbed him, beat him up and took him to the interrogation rooms. And luckily, I explained it all.

"Your stamp got on the letters he had only because of an unmended part of a Dragon Break that took place when a certain cookie was dipped in a sauce that had been completely unexpected by the Dragon God," I said, having been bribed well by the scribe.

"Thank the Aedra," the Queen said.

"Really? But I never did find my underwear," the King said.

I went to bed happy to have averted yet another plot on the King's life, but kept being afraid I was the trusted one mentioned in the prophecy.

The carpet in the main hall and throne room, all of it, had been recovered by the time I woke up the next day, but all of the floor had been stolen.

"There's nowhere to stand!" the King exclaimed. "Ah, but worry not. Until we fix the problem, we'll take on the swimming pool terrace as the new main hall and throne room."

So, us that were sober, slowly moved the furniture there. The drunkards were left in a large hole full of dirt, where the floor had been, but we assumed they would get out of there eventually, somehow.

That day, the three guests were Sotha Sil, Ria Silmane, and a frost giant.

"But, my lord," I said, "Ria Silmane has been dead for a while now."

She surely didn't look like a ghost.

"Well, every now and then, our guests aren't actually who they say they are," the King explained. "I think."

The executioner rushed to the King.

"My lord, as I was trying to adjust the mechanism of my machinery, for the sake of the little people," the executioner was saying, "they escaped!"

By that afternoon, lots of people drunk up to that point had woken up and crawled out of the pit.

"The little people have disguised themselves, and are among us," the guard captain said.

No one had any idea how to find them.

"Gather the suspects that you think make sense," the King suggested.

The guards gathered up the suspects, beat them up, and took them to the interrogation rooms. I went inside with the King and Queen.

"Stewart, surely you could spot a rock in a fig tree, if you wanted to!" the king said.

I looked very carefully. The suspects were a frost giant, Dagoth Ur, an avatar of Zenithar, an optometrist, a cat, a leprechaun, the Underking, a giant spider and a very large fern.

"I'm sorry, sir," I said. "This time, I truly cannot find them."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Alright. I'm sure they'll come out eventually, anyway."

And then the King had an idea.

"I know what to do!" he said. "We'll hire an assassin from an assassin's guild to help us find the assassins. Surely, with their experience, they should spot through anyone right away."

It seemed like a splendid idea. Except it meant I might be discovered!

"How does one find representatives of assassins' guilds?" the King inquired.

"Oh, it's quite simple, really," the guard captain lady said. "We just go and buy 'Comprehensive List of Stable Domiciles of Famous Assassins and Guilds'. It's the most popular book of its kind."

"Sounds great!" the King said.

By the evening, letters had been written and sent to all of the assassin guilds that were close-by, could come to the castle on such short notice, and had names that the King liked.

So there we were, with members of everyone: Assassins Anonymous; Budget-Friendly Professional Killers; Happy Shiny Murderers; Users of Auto-Suggestion and Reverse Psychology to Induce Death; Shepherds Turned Assassins; Genocidal Nuns; The Energetic Retired Elderly; The Long-Term Organization; The Farmers of Arlington Creek; Talkers to Death; the Bounty Hunter Pharmacists; the Fatal Yodelers; Necromancer Nannies. All the big names.

"What about the Dark Brotherhood?" I asked.

"They just aren't as renowned as any of these," the King explained. "I hear them mentioned once for every ten times that these are."

The King talked to all of them.

"Yes, we guarantee something that no one else can: that, no matter who you mark for death, your target will die eventually, whether it takes hundreds of years or months," said the member of The Long-Term Organization "It depends on fate, really." The King was indeed impressed with their rate of success.

"The Talkers to Death actually talk their victims to death!" the King told me, astonished.

In the end, however, after thinking deeply about it, he was actually split between Assassins Anonymous, the Fatal Yodelers, and The Energetic Retired Elderly.

"We shared the problem. We came together to try to get ourselves through it. But then we figured... if we were all in one place already... why not start our own organization?" the Assassins Anonymous guildmember explained.

The King liked him the most.

"Why, to show you just how quite prestigious we are," the Assassins Anonymous assassin said, "I'll let you know that, just a short while ago, we were tasked to kill someone quite as important as the King of Daenia!"

"Oh my! That's me!" the King exclaimed.

"Ah! You're right. I hadn't even realized," the assassin said.

"You're hired!" the King said, impressed.

I hadn't realized, either, that the A.A. in that letter of mine stood for Assassins Anonymous!

So there I was, in such a confusing situation. What was I going to do?

"I shall talk to you tomorrow!" the King told the assassin.

"Hopefully, we will find them all now," the Queen said, happy.

Then the strangest thing happened that night, as I was in bed, unable to sleep, afraid that something would go horribly wrong.

"Stewart!" I heard a voice say as I had my nose submerged in my pillow. It was the voice of the King.

"Yes, what?" I said, opening my eyes and turning around.

"Stewart, I've been killed! I was killed, just now," the ethereal voice said, sadness in its voice.

I saw the ghost of the King!

"Oh no! How did you die?" I asked.

"The optometrist! It was the optometrist all along! He was their leader!"

By Julianos.

"He came into my bedroom. You know I sleep separately from my wife. He put an insane seal on my face, and left a demented weasel too, just in case I managed to survive the seal. That was the end for me!"

By the Nine!

"I... feel myself... slipping away from this world. Please, please, please. Avenge me!"

And he faded away...

I couldn't sleep all night. I kept turning in the bed. Then I kept turning the bed around. At one point, I started turning the bed upside down.

Then, in the morning, another ghost came.

"Stewart!"

"My King!"

"The ghost from earlier - that wasn't the real me!"

"No?"

"No! It was the killer trying to shift blame on the optometrist, who is innocent! Plus, I didn't even die that way. It was an otter, not a seal. And a beaver, not a weasel."

Then it started fading away.

"Avenge me, Steeeewart... And the optometrist too..."

I started going even crazier. I glued the bed to the wall vertically, made a ladder out of the wardrobes, and imagined I was the Camoran Usurper.

And then another one.

"Stewart!"

"Another one?"

"Stewart, don't believe their lies! It was a marmot, not a beaver. And a sea lion, not an otter!"

I had no idea what to believe anymore.

That morning, a part of the official catacombs had collapsed down into the floorless former main hall, making it almost like before. The drafts, for once, had been really strong.

With bloodshot eyes, I went to the King and asked him what was going on.

"Ah! They must be assassins trying to divert our attention from something."

Suddenly, behind the King, one of the ghosts materialized.

"Don't listen to him! He's not the true King!"

"A ghost!" the King shouted.

And then another one.

"Another one!" the King noticed.

"Shut up!" it said to the other ghost. "Stop pretending to be me! But yeah, Stewart. He's not the real King!"

"I'M THE REAL ONE," the other one insisted.

Suddenly, the guards showed up.

"Oh no!" one of the ghosts said, and vanished immediately.

The guards grabbed the other ghost, beat it up, and took it to the interrogation rooms.

"Stewart, you have to trust that I'm the true King!" the King kept telling me.

I was far too confused at that point.

"We've done tests on it," the executioner said, "and it's not really a ghost! It's a shapeshifted optometrist!"

"Just as I suspected, according to what that Assassins Anonymous assassin told me!" the King said.

"Shall we execute him?"

"So be it."

"I have just the thing," the executioner said. "A huge tube full of acid, and burning flames in a serrated shape! I invented it last evening."

But it didn't work. It didn't do anything to the ghost.

"Northmoor, with the aid of Glenpoint, has now extended its borders to our kingdom!" the guard captain announced.

Oh no.

"I don't understand this. Why is it still in there, saying it's me?" the King asked about the ghost.

"Err. Well. It turns out it actually is a ghost!" the executioner said.

By now, I had told the Queen what I had seen that night, and it had shaken her even more than me.

"You're not my real husband anymore!" she said to him, when she realized that her husband had never hurt a single ghost in his life, and had never refrained from bringing three guests every day whenever he had a Stewart - which is something that had happened that day.

"I'm sure I can explain everything!" the King said. 

But she wouldn't hear any of it. She went to her room and started crying. I figured I would go to her, and console her, but when I came in, she was talking to a ghost!

"The penguin and the walrus completely maimed me!" it was explaining.

I hadn't realized, however, that I was being followed by guards, and when they saw the ghost from behind me, they quickly entered the room, grabbed it, beat it up, and took it to the interrogation rooms.

"No! Don't harm him! He's the real King, you fools!" the Queen yelled, crying.

"It turns out the first ghost is the doppelganger son pretending to be the optometrist pretending to be Zelaxudin pretending to be the King! And the second one is the midget pretending to be a golfer pretending to be the initial assassin sent by Assassins Anonymous pretending to be the doppelganger son pretending to be the King!" the executioner announced.

"No, you fool! It's the other way around, at least as far as I'm concerned!" the second ghost explained.

It was far too confusing. I didn't understand a single thing. Apparently, everyone was pretending to be King's ghost, to shift the blame on someone else, but why? And which one was the real King?

By chance, however, I managed to see that Khajiit agent that had seen me at the very start, when I had accidentally killed that woman and gotten myself in this whole mess. He was talking to the Assassins Anonymous agent.

"I never saw his face! I don't know which one he is," the Khajiit was explaining. "I know you were relying on me to know the identity of the master assassin, but I only ever went to the victims, saw him take them out, and then managed to discover where he stayed, so I could bring him letters. But I never saw his face."

"I think the real one is the doppelganger son," said the Assassins Anonymous guildmember. "The one who was supposed to kill the cult queen of Zelaxudin. But then someone else, who you mistook for the master assassin, killed the cult queen, and you brought the letter to him. And the real master assassin, out of frustration, got the job of assassinating the King of Daenia from Glenpoint, who were going to conquer it through the Ilessan Hills when Shalgora had made a bad move. And Zelaxudin came all the way here with the help of his insider, the chief scribe, who himself was an assassin. He came here so he could find out who had killed the cult queen, and to kill the King of Daenia on the wrong time just to spite the master assassin. So, basically, everyone is an assassin here, but we just don't know who the false master assassin is."

Everyone was an assassin?

"Even the guard captain was an assassin. Even the cleaning lady. Even the seer he told me about, who said there were just 19 assassins, but there were actually many more. Even the recent Daedric Prince of the Mundane had sent someone to kill him, just to prove to his fellow Princes that he wasn't as boring as they all assumed. They were all merely waiting for the perfect moment, and the best move he ever made was hire me, to get him out of that mess, even though we were hired to kill him," the Assassins Anonymous guildmember went on.

They were coming my way, so I went back to the interrogation rooms.

"It turns out that one of these ghosts actually, and ultimately," said the executioner, "isn't anyone pretending to be anyone. It's just an insane ghost, unrelated to any of the assassins, simply pretending to be the King!"

Then the guards found another ghost, grabbed it, beat it up, and put it in the interrogation rooms.

"Ah, this one is clearly Zelaxudin!"

"Gah! You got me!" he replied.

It was so complicated that, in the end, it doesn't matter who was who. Everyone had been trying to kill the King of Daenia, for misguided revenge, political reasons, or pure spite.

And then, the Assasins Anonymous guildmember realized who I was, and told the king.

"The false master assassin was the Stewart all along!" he'd said.

So then the King came to me.

"Stewart! It's really me. I swear," he said. "If the Queen's argument of the lack of guests has convinced you, don't let it. The chief scribe was going to bring the King of Worms, an avatar of Lorkhan and a sea serpent today, and it didn't seem like the best idea. The assassin I hired from Assassins Anonymous let me know about it, and also told me the scribe was an assassin sent to kill me, so I figured I would refrain from it today."

What?

"In any case," the King said. "They've hired me to kill you because they say you're an assassin sent to kill me who hasn't been doing his job. You know you're my best friend, and I don't believe what they're saying. They have, however, offered me a very large sum of money..."

They had hired the King to kill me?

"Yes, sorry," he said. "I always did want lunar cabbage, and never had the funds for it. But now, by killing you, I could."

But I didn't want to die.

"I wasn't going to kill you. You started being my friend," I told him.

"And you're my friend too. But lunar cabbage! You know how expensive that is?"

I just stared him in the eyes.

"Well. You can always break and forgive contracts for your friends, can't you?" he asked.

"Sure," I said.

"That's great. Because you actually are my best friend, or at least I imagine that you could be, someday," he told me. "I haven't known you for long, but you're a good man. Deep inside."

And he hugged me.

Through diplomacy, hostage taking, and torture, with the help of that Assassins Anonymous guildmember, the King actually managed to get all of the contracts on his head to be broken, within mere weeks. And it wasn't as hard as it sounds, because no one actually really had anything personal with him.

Well, except someone.

The King had taken the Queen to a room and they were talking.

"I had no idea that even you were an assassin sent to kill me!" the King said to her.

"I had to! You always... said I wasn't your type," she said, and started crying.

"Well, it's fine really. Even I was an assassin sent to kill myself," the King elucidated.

"What?"

"I went to a witches' coven, just out of curiosity. I wanted to see what kinds of quests adventurers get when they go to them nowadays. I used to be an adventurer once too. I was nostalgic. And guess what! They asked me to kill the King of Daenia! In exchange for endless treasure, given how they still remembered me from my adventuring days, and wanted to cut me a good deal."

But everyone forgave everyone in the end, and no one even died. And the King was so generous that he even paid the student loans, unpaid for so long, that assassins had been sent for after me as well.

And he was my King for a long, long time, and I served him faithfully from then on.

And no, as a Stewart, I never did take my clothes off and start claiming that I was a squid.

We were happy everafter. And I'm still a virgin too (despite my affair with the reverse werecrocodile lady).

THE END