The Evil Emperor's Fragile Heart

Thus the last banquet of the Sapphire Kingdom ended with great fanfare and a new little dragon royal member of the family for the Sapphire Kingdom as well as the Emerald Kingdom, and the relationship between the two countries became even better than ever before.

However, as it always is, the success of one is the failure of another – and King Orion and most people from the Amber Kingdom were having the same feeling. While Crown Prince Mars was too busy mooning over the pretty Princess Astra of the Emerald Kingdom, most of the eminent leaders of the contingent that had travelled from the Amber Kingdom gathered in front of their King Orion.

"Your Majesty, would Princess Astra also be able to receive a dragon child when we have the engagement banquets back home in the Amber Kingdom?" one of the minions of King Orion asked excitedly. "Would it be a royal red dragon child for us?"

King Orion rubbed his temples. His gut feeling was that Princess Astra would never be able to gain a dragon child for herself – otherwise, how could she not have gotten one until now? How long had Mars and Astra been together? While the others – Crown Prince Jules of the Emerald Kingdom and Crown Princess Bella of the Sapphire Kingdom, as well as Prince Raven of the Obsidian Kingdom and Princess Mana of the Emerald Kingdom – these two couples had barely been together for a few months – and yet they had gotten themselves two dragons already!

It would be nice if Princess Astra could get a dragon baby for herself and Mars – then King Orion would be quite satisfied with her. Dragons were powerful creatures of legend, after all, and when the first dragon – that little black thing that hung on King Jaren's shoulder like a toy all the time – had turned up in this world, King Orion had started researching dragons, and he was shocked by what he found. There wasn't enough literature available, but from whatever little he had actually found, it seemed that dragons were extremely powerful creatures!

Could it be that the presence of the dragon was the factor that had led to the outstanding achievements of the young couple of Prince Raven and Princess Mana? After all, until recently, one was the useless abandoned royal child with incomplete magic in the Obsidian Kingdom while the other was a sickly and fatally ill and fragile princess of the Emerald Kingdom who was not expected to live past the age of ten – and now, both had become not only healthy and happy, but probably also the most powerful children of their age across the five kingdoms. After all, other than Prince Raven, Princess Mana and Crown Prince Jules – there were no other children with multiple magical elements in the world!

And one just had to look at their achievements to gauge how powerful they were going to be in the future, when they were already at this level now!

And it gave King Orion a headache. He had nurtured that snake woman Sora and this pretty but air headed Princess Astra and helped them to achieve their power and status in the Emerald Kingdom for so many years because he had always had his eyes fixed on the throne of the Emerald Kingdom. King Orion wanted the Amber Kingdom to rule the whole world – well, at the least the entirety of the mainland. He didn't particularly care about the Obsidian Kingdom or the wild lands beyond the seven seas that no one knew about even now. But the Emerald Kingdom was going to be the jewel in his crown – and once the Emerald Kingdom was his, King Orion knew that he would have no trouble taking over the Sapphire Kingdom and the Pearl Kingdom. In fact, the Pearl Kingdom was a sitting duck – or a low hanging ripe fruit that was all his for the taking any time he wanted. Those fools didn't even know how much control the Amber Kingdom had already gained over the Pearl kingdom!

Meanwhile, his precious son – the one that he had always been very proud of – Crown Prince Mars of the Amber Kingdom, seemed to have lost his wits completely and did nothing other than hovering around his fiancée. While King Orion would definitely not refute that Princess Astra was easy on the eyes, having inherited her facial features from her father King Jaren – she seemed to have inherited the inept brains and scheming nature of her mother, the former Queen Sora, who was now under house arrest, and probably would remain so for the rest of her life. It was already a mercy that King Jaren had not carried out a public execution for the wife that betrayed him and did not disinherit the daughter that betrayed him. King Orion actually felt a reluctant flare of admiration for the other man. If he had been in the place of King Jaren, he would have definitely executed both Queen Sora and Princess Astra, and every single servant that had ever served them. King Orion was quire paranoid about his own safety – he definitely would never leave any person who could pose a threat to him alive at all.

But these days, King Orion was starting to get worried. His other son, Prince Liam, had already been reduced to a waste, and while they had tried more or less everything they could to help the boy – there didn't seem to be any scope of improvement there. So, King Orion had stopped expecting anything from Prince Liam anyway – in fact, seeing the bad tempered boy, King Orion often found himself wondering if it would have been better for the boy to have lost his life instead of his magic. He had become quite unbearable. However, he was still a prince of the Amber Kingdom, and that counted for something. King Orion had initially planned to marry off Prince Liam to Princess Mana – and then the throne of the Emerald Kingdom would have firmly been in his hands.

Instead, all his plans had been foiled by the appearance of Prince Raven of the Obsidian Kingdom and the late Queen Dora's son, who had been supposed to be a stillborn child fifteen or sixteen years ago – and had suddenly turned up from heaven knows where. And this strapping young lad was quite powerful to boot, and there could be no doubt about his ancestry at all. He was the splitting image of King Jaren, except that he had his mother's hair and one of his eyes was the exact same shade as the late Queen Dora.

It really was a pity about the late Queen Dora, King Orion thought. She had been an excellent young lady, and he himself had been quite interested in her – however, she had the galls to reject him and choose King Jaren instead – and look what had happened to her. Her own sister had betrayed her in the worst way possible, and she herself had been poisoned to death because she chose to give birth to the sickly Princess Mana back then instead of forcing the Shadow Poison into the child and saving her own life. Some people were just to stupid, no matter how talented or powerful or intellectual they were! Wasn't the late Queen Dora a perfect example of this? And look at her younger sister who had snatched everything from her – her husband, her kingdom and even her children and her very life – Sora had never been as outstanding as Dora, but Sora knew that when she couldn't get what she wanted on the straight and narrow path, she could always resort to nefarious schemes and in the end, get what she wanted – and she did manage to get everything – it was just a pity that she was unable to hold on to all that she had managed to gain.

Still, King Orion didn't have too many complaints about the former Queen Sora of the Emerald Kingdom – he had gained plenty of benefits from her over the years, and she had provided him with a lot of very useful information until her face was exposed and her ugly traitorous face was revealed.

And these children really were quite formidable. Even the deep seated spies who King Orion had sent years ago and whom the former Queen Sora had helped settle into the Emerald Kingdom in various positions – almost all of them had been either rooted out, or had changed sides already. It was quite a pity, and King Orion had lost count of how many times he had cursed Crown Prince Jules, Crown Princess Bella, Prince Raven and Princess Mana for being the root cause of this clean up. A few spies still remained though, thankfully.. They were children, after all – they had not seen enough of the world to be able to conduct a complete purge, and King Jaren himself was a trusting idiot who only knew how to make money and keep his Emerald Kingdom at the peak of prosperity.