Once again, the Woods had lured in another foolish group of bandits.
Perhaps all bandits were foolish around here. A Kingdom surrounded by woods was odd enough for a Human (and everyone knows Elves are mythical). The way the Kingdoms around it perpetually suffered frustrating if relatively small depredations was simply intolerable.
Whatever weirdness could it be?
Bandits.
Because there were always bandits in those woods. It mattered not what the Kingdom did. They could create a special, crack division of police, or soldiers, or woodsman, each of which they did, none of which worked, not for generations.
The Woods kept getting smaller as bandits planted more trees in a battle to create a bigger home, one someday big enough to support their…
….strange little stealing of chickens, or small objects, or sometimes what seemed almost like the pulling of a smaller tree from the outside into the outside, so strange were the tracks.
What else could it be?
The Royal family knew.
The Chief Alchemist knew.
You know, but you’re far from that World.
And be glad.
For that Kingdom ate other Kingdoms.
Was it a curse? A spell?
No. Something lived under the Kingdom, rising in the tiniest of tendrils over a thousand years until was also inside the Kingdom, and then it was the Kingdom, and the Kingdom was it.
It is smart enough to encourage the bandits. The Royal Family survives by serving well, fortunately for them. And part of their great advice and one of their great works is the perpetual encouragement of incompetent, doomed bandits who each somehow either think the last generation of bandits did well…or that they, yes, they and they alone will be the ones to succeed.
The outside kingdoms send in various forces to slaughter them once in a while, in addition to the hungry Kingdom’s very loud and visible excursions. But the bandits didn’t have a hard life; beef and mead and wives until the inevitable end.
And the Kingdom grew.
There once was a Kingdom which ate other Kingdoms.
But even if the other Kingdoms knew, who would believe? They’d known the enemy for a century or more; damn those lawbreakers!
Someday the Kingdom will not eat other Kingdoms.
Because over time, there will not be other Kingdoms.
Then whatever shall it do?
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