Amal Aithanarid

Amal Aithanarid was not just one of the first chancellors to the Arcan Queen; he was the prototype for what the role should be. His was a wisdom that ran deep and quiet, like the foundations of the ancient, crystalline city he hailed from. To look at him was to see the passage of centuries—not in a withered, frail way, but in the manner of a great, gnarled oak or a mountain that has weathered countless storms. His eyes, a pale, luminous grey, held the patience of stone and the sharp perception of a master strategist who had seen empires rise and fall. He moved with a deliberate, unhurried grace, and his voice was a low, resonant rumble that seemed to calm the very air around him, a voice accustomed to being listened to.

His relationship with the Arcan Queen, Syleria, was the defining partnership of his long life. While the other early counselors and chancellors advised her on matters of law, trade, and diplomacy, Amal understood the language of her soul. Syleria was a being of celestial power, her mind attuned to the music of the spheres, which often left her isolated and adrift in her own court. Amal, however, possessed a profound and almost preternatural empathy. He could read the subtle dimming of the light around her, the slight tremor in her voice that others mistook for royal detachment. He knew her heart, and he comprehended her feelings as no one else could. He was her anchor, the steady earth to her boundless sky, translating the silent, profound loneliness in her starlit eyes into words she herself could not form.

So, when the truth of her deep, cosmic loneliness and inner pain finally became undeniable to the court, it was Amal who had already foreseen the necessity of her departure. He was the first to understand, with a heart both heavy and resolute, that she needed to flee her gilded cage. He knew she had to depart her own kingdom, to walk the dusty roads and bustling cities of the greater-known world as a commoner, to find what was missing in her life—be it purpose, connection, or simply her own humanity. He did not know what or who she would find, but his belief in this path was absolute. He believed it would be for the best, even as the decision carved a hollow ache in his own chest, even as he knew with a grim certainty that it might be one of the last times he would look upon her face, alive and whole.

His counsel was not born solely of compassion. Amal’s senses, honed by a lifetime of listening to the subtle harmonics of politics and power, had detected a darker, rising frequency beneath the kingdom's serene surface. A rebellion was festering, led by those who saw the Queen's ethereal nature as a weakness to be exploited. He knew this growing threat was a secondary, yet equally urgent, reason for his decision to have her depart as soon as possible. The palace was becoming a trap, and her presence was the spark that would soon ignite a civil war. He calculated that away from the viper's nest of her court, she would be safer. He knew, with every fibre of his being, that she would be kept alive and healthy out in the vast, anonymous world, where she could find her own answers and future purpose far from the blades and poisons of her enemies.

In the long, tense years of her absence, Amal became the sole regent, a master of deception and political theater. He held the fracturing kingdom together with sheer will, cunning, and the unshakable hope that the Queen he had sent into the wilderness would return not just saved, but transformed. He was the steadfast guardian, the keeper of a desperate secret, the ancient foundation upon which the fate of an entire realm precariously rested.