Herbie Brennan - Ruler of the Realm

He wanted to escape. God knew he wanted to escape. But…

There was something wrong with him. He knew it for certain now. He wasn’t dreaming. This was too real to be dreaming. But at the same time it was exactly like a dream. Things happened. Now the thing that happened was he found himself exploring, not escaping.

The saucer was even larger on the inside than it looked from the outside, like a tardis. He was in a room with silver walls and a soft, squishy floor that seemed somehow… organic. There were no windows and he couldn’t find the light source. (Although there was light: a friendly rosy glow.) There was a door without a handle, but as he approached, it slid open automatically the way doors did in Star Trek . Or Tesco’s.

He was in a corridor that meandered like a stream. And little branches meandered off it – often only a few yards long – leading into other chambers. Some had doors, some hadn’t. Henry meandered with the corridor and discovered chambers with metallic pods, chambers with weapons racks (the weapons looked like laser rifles), a chamber stuffed with giant eggs. (At least he thought they might be giant eggs, since they were large and white and egg-shaped.) He seemed to wander for hours, peering into chamber after chamber. The funny thing was, he never found a kitchen or a bathroom.

He found a horrible, scary room.

Henry opened the door and was half blinded by a sudden glare. Then his eyes adjusted and he was looking at banks of huge transparent tubes, each one larger than he was. There was a maze of wires and piping running from the tubes to a control console in the middle of the room. Nearly half the tubes were lit by violet light so you could see there was a thick, gooey liquid inside, bubbling like a great, slow fish-tank. Floating in the liquid were scores of naked human babies, their eyes tight shut, their little hands opening and closing together in a ghastly rhythm.

Henry tried to break open the tubes to let the babies out, but the tubes were made from some sort of glass that wouldn’t break. He wondered if he could figure out how to open them using the console, but was afraid he might accidentally hurt the babies. After a while he left the chamber in an agony of frustration.

Behind him, the babies opened their hands and closed their hands… opened their hands and closed their hands… opened…

Henry found a porthole and looked out. He expected to see the road where he’d been walking, but instead he was looking into a blackness peppered by the brightest stars. He was looking into Space. The saucer had taken off. There was no possibility of escape any more.

A great sadness overcame Henry and he lay down beside the porthole to have a little sleep.

He woke surrounded by little green men staring at him with enormous black eyes. They were directed by a tall, fair-haired woman who looked completely human and was very, very beautiful.

‘ I want to show you something, Henry,’ said the woman, and he heard her quite distinctly even though she had not moved her lips.

The tall, beautiful woman looked at him sadly. ‘ I want to show you what will happen if humans do not learn to treat their planet with respect.’ She turned to gesture at a viewing screen built into the wall behind her.

The screen lit up with images of a devastated world. He watched cities razed by nuclear war. He saw oceans curdled with pollution. There were children starving as the Earth was over-populated. (White children, too, not just the familiar wide-eyed, pot-bellied kids from Africa.) There were people whose faces were a crawling mass of cancers as the ozone layer finally collapsed. There were hurricanes and earthquakes, tidal waves engulfing entire continents. There were radiation mutants, no longer really human, crawling across barren wastelands.

Henry tried to look away, but could not move his head. ‘ Will you tell them? ’ asked the woman. ‘ Will you warn them what will happen? ’

Other voices chorused in his head: ‘ Henry will be the Anointed! ’

Without warning, Henry was naked, lying on a gurney. He was surrounded by little green men, but now they were wearing white coats. To his embarrassment, the beautiful woman was there too. She was also wearing a white coat. Beside the gurney were trays of surgical instruments and some sort of machine with angled arms and drills and scalpels that looked as if it had been put together by a mad dentist.

The beautiful woman smiled benignly. ‘ You must be prepared,’ she said.

‘ Henry will be King,’ the voices chorused. ‘ Henry will be the Anointed King.’

Alien hands reached out to touch him. There was a flooding smell of antiseptic. A foam sprayed across his body, cool at first, then burning acid so he could hardly bear it until something else flowed over him and washed it off. The creatures probed his bottom and his genitals.

‘ Leave me alone! ’ thought Henry, but found he couldn’t speak.

‘ Prepare the implant,’ said a harsh voice in his mind, different to any of the voices he’d heard before.

The beautiful woman was leaning over him, still smiling broadly. In her hand was the dentist’s drill, which spun with a high-pitched whine. But she wasn’t bringing it towards his mouth: she was bringing it towards his eye.

Henry began to scream and couldn’t stop.

‘It makes sense,’ Blue said.

They were seated among the orchids in the conservatory behind the Throne Room. It was a strange place for a Council of War, but her father had protected it with so many spells it was the most private chamber in the palace.

Blue’s eyes moved from one to the other. Gatekeeper Fogarty still looked an old man, but the rejuvenation treatments were beginning to bite. There was an energy about him and he had better skin. Beside him, Madame Cardui was sitting with her eyes closed, but Blue knew she was very much awake. These two were her friends. The disapproving looks came from the three uniformed Generals: Creerful, Vanelke and Ovard. She wished Pyrgus would get here. She felt outnumbered.

Blue licked her lips. ‘Look at it the way they will,’ she said. ‘Everything’s been topsy-turvy for months. Uncle Hairstreak has tried to take over the throne twice and failed -’

‘Which is precisely the reason why he’s unlikely to try again, Majesty,’ General Ovard put in patiently.

He’d been her father’s closest military advisor. But she could not afford to show weakness. ‘Let me finish, General.’ Then, without waiting for a response, she turned to the others. ‘Hairstreak’s still ambitious. And even though he failed, the Faeries of the Night still back him.’

‘They won’t have much stomach for another failure,’ Ovard muttered.

This time Blue ignored him. ‘Now look at the other side of the picture. We came close to losing first time. What ha-’

‘Oh, come, Your Majesty, I’d hardly say we came close to losing.’ Not Ovard this time but General Creerful. They were old men. Senior military were always old men. Empress or not, they would never take her seriously. They looked at her and saw a little girl.

Blue glared at him. ‘My father, the Purple Emperor, was murdered, General. I’d say that brought us pretty close to losing.’

Creerful dropped his eyes and said nothing. After a moment, Blue went on, ‘What happened next was a clever plot that could have succeeded. In fact, it very nearly did. Don’t forget my brother was banished from the Purple Palace. We were very, very lucky to find the allies we did. We could never have turned the tide without them. We can’t count on that sort of luck a second time and my uncle knows it.’

Madame Cardui opened her eyes. ‘The Forest Faerie are our friends,’ she said gently. ‘I’m certain they might be persuaded to help us again.’