The Switch

The Order of Radiance

The Switch

Chapter 14

The next morning, you awoke with a start, right at dawn and immediately reached for your pen and latest journal to write as fast your hand could move across the page as your new pen barely kept the ink flowing freely enough to keep up with you.

Because while you had tried to shrug off the "altercation" with your former King and Queen. It had still bugged you and you felt like you were missing an obvious solution to the problem and after sleeping on it and even dreaming about it, you awoke with a solution.

You barely had it written down before you got out of bed to quickly relieve yourself and keep writing as you did so and barely had the lights dimly lit so you could go to your desk and keep expounding on the idea and before you knew it, you were using up all the ink in this pen. You tried to use your second and spare pen to trade out while the other hand refilled the ink reservoir as the other hand just kept writing- like a woman possessed, trying to get it all out and all down as it was like the most beautiful flower blooming in your mind as suddenly everything came together and with just a quick look at the bank note from Solowards- and the sale of the land that Saffiro had left behind, you beamed when you did some quick math and calculations right there in your notebook and then- like finally placing the last pieces of a puzzle together. Suddenly with only a new page, using your now- refilled pen, you drafted the first The Order of Radiance Lease Agreement and when you had finished the contract you took a few shaky breaths but stared at it and your face suddenly bloomed in a smile of relieved victory.

This was it.

This was how you were going to deal with them, this was the perfect solution. And how you were going to practically own them and every other unsavory royal you had ever encountered and ever would encounter. And this was how you were going to protect yourself, the Contessina Order, which from now on would be known as The Order of Radiance- using your official Dorierran given honorific title, so that future generations wouldn't have to worry about distinguishing themselves from you on an individual level. And this would protect Salgria Shipping and every other person in the D.A. who would ever even think of landing on Solowardian Soil or even airspace for that matter.

And then like magic, once the flower seemed to fully bloom in your mind, another seemed to come into view and suddenly you were reaching for a stack of papers and suddenly you were writing as fast as you could, trying to get it all down and write with one hand and draft with the other, without really looking at what the other hand was drawing as you kept closing your eyes and seeing it in your mind and trying to write it all down. You were going to make each skyport a flower. A perfect- daisy like flower. A single, beautiful divinely simple, stately stem, but with a disk like face with each petal making up the face when it would need to bloom and show off it's pretty petals.

And no sooner had you done that before suddenly you were using up every flower you knew of to create more versions of what you could clearly now see in your mind as your imagination created it as fast as you could write it down as you were creating stacks and stacks of papers from both hands as you were so infinitely grateful you were ambidextrous to allow this feat as you were putting each stack of notes with each drawing into one big, rather messy pile in front of you, trying to criss cross them so that you could keep them all separate.

You had drained two whole bottles of ink and were on your third just as Kragan woke up a couple of hours later as you were so far down the rabbit hole, your eyes were traveling back and forth between the two stacks of paper to make sure that each thing you were working on with two separate hands doing two separate things were- somehow perfectly in sync. You didn't care if your fingers were going to permanently turn midnight blue from the ever precious indigo ink. This was pure genius. And it was like you were on some kind of super drug where time was no longer a concept your brain was accustomed to. You barely registered the sun rising, only that the room was getting lighter from the greater increase of light coming into the room through the windows helped you work.