The riot

"What are we gonna do next?.. Should we assassinate the lord when he's arrived..?"

"You fool... he will come here surrounded by guards with more people than us. Direct confrontation is never an option."

"What should we do then? Surely you might have planned this ahead..."

The leader of spies tore a piece out of the dark clothes. He then threw it at one of his men.

"All of you... give him the black coverings we used for disguise. And you... you go hide those clothes somewhere else."

"Should we hide the necklace too?"

"Before that, is the king coming from that way, right?"

"Yes, that is the only path from the city to the woods."

The leader threw me to the man that answered.

"You go bury that artifact in that way."

"But sir, that is stupid..."

"Indeed it is... you're gonna bury it there so that none of the king and his men would even suspect it. Just make it hurry. Since he will be arriving here in less than 30 minutes. I will give you five minute. That amount of distance should be enough. Don't forget to mark it."

"And the piece of clothing for?"

"Geez... do you want me to tell all my plan at your face?"

"We'd appreciate it..."

"Well since I'm gonna lose if I fight all you at once anyway, here's a brief plan."

"This piece of clothing is for the fact that the king himself doesn't know that we used this tactic to disguise ourself as men of Samuth. And the direction I shot that guy with my arrow is headed toward Samuth's territory. So if we were to show this piece, he would have thought it was Samuth's men who did it. 

There, we can tell him it was them who stole the necklace. He will also be hiding somewhere here in the woods so it's unlikely for him to go back to his city. There we can make an excuse of wanting to be left in the city to defend it, he would let us go to the same path where the artifact would be hidden."

"That's brilliant plan! You're a genius sir!"

"Obviously duh... now hurry up, we don't have time anymore..."

As the leader told them, each of them went into the woods as plan. The person with duty to bury me rushed along the path. The leader said this was the only path to the city. But midway through, I saw two left and right. Without hesistation, he chose the right one. He was going longer than 5 minutes. It had been more than half an hour since he was running. Was he lost? Could he not find the right spot to dig?

Suddenly, in a shocking encounter, he met with a group of man wearing white uniform.

Were they the men of Sagier. He met them face to face with me in his hand. 

"This was earlier than I thought it would be."

A voice among the crowd. If I remembered correctly, he voice is no other than king Sagier's.

"Yes your majesty, the corruption of Kashin's men just make it easier for the operation."

The voice was coming from the man holding me. He then took of his yellow clothings to reveal the white uniform inside.

"Did you hear anything else about their plan?"

"They want us to actively invade them."

"So as long as we don't attack them, we are safe from it right? Since they don't even know it was us who possess the nameless necklace."

"That is true your majesty... The blue and yellow region will be fighting with grey and the only thing we need to watch out for is green and brown. "

"Well then, all we have to do is to sit back and relax while they fight in ignorant bloodbath. Green and brown will probably just focus on the grey region since it is the biggest suspect right now."

"But wait your majesty... what if someone like us leaked the information about our possesion of thr artifact."

"Do not worry about that... everything is under control for that matter. We have enough food in our region to sustain us till next year's winter. And we have made citizen registration to confirm if they were ours or not. This morning will be the last time we will be outside of the main city"

"What does that mean your majesty?"

"We will be quarantining our whole damn region!"

At the city...

"Citizens of the great white region... As you all know, you've all been confined within the city walls. But I, Sagier the 3rd, have no malicious intentions to all of you. This is a necessity to protect the people of one true peaceful nation. A crisis was about to hit us. The other kings of the 5 regions has gone mad and they will soon be slaughtering each other mercilessly. 

Soon, the outside world would be looking no different than a hellish wasteland. The only flourishing and harmless place that will be left after the great and violent war would be our city. So until then, endure. Endure till the new age has dawned!"

King Sagier roared his speech from the highest place of his castle to the people below while wearing me at his neck. I could see the civilians arguing and talking each other vaguely with their voices combined resembling waves in the sea from above. The king whisphered to one of his high ranking man...

"Don't let even a single one of them escape. Execute them quietly if you see one."

The white king quietly sent his most loyal assassins to surround the outer walls. Even the assassins themselves were checked regularly to find the absence among them. Days had passed. Months had passed. It had almost been the winter where limit of food supplies reached. The castle storage had enough food. But far away from farmlands, the commoners had already ran out of their sustenance.

The king had not yet opened the city doors. The winter was almost passing and the next spring was waiting to burst the city doors. On morning, the king woke up to the noises outside his castle. From the balcony, I saw large crowd of people trying to slamming the door loudly with forces. Sagier panicked and asked his men to hold off the crowd. But the strength of king's men were nothing but insects in the flame of the hungry and angry people.

After the guards opened the door to fight the civilians, they accidently let them stormed into the castle like the dam breaching. Every furniture there was were smashed, obliterated and grinded in their wrath just like termites quickly eating woods. The thunderous sounds of thousand footsteps got closer and closer to the balcony. The king had nowhere to run but jump and fall to his death. So he did the latter much more easier option with quicker death.

One the ground, I lied with the corpse of the paranoid king. The civilians came down and took me as their victory trophy. They ran to the gates in hopes. But as their king had warned them, at outside, there were nothing to satisfy their starvations. The war had ended, but the lands were now dead.