Well that's unusual.

"It certainly is," Rowan Meredith murmured, staring down at the King in the courtyard below. With his one remaining eye, he squinted through the piercing glare of sunlight glancing off the garden's various metal statues and fountains and glorious golden men with capes and dramatic expressions. The guards and the prisoner they were previously accosting were all now gaping cluelessly at their liege and ruler. From this high up in the castle, he couldn't see the looks on their faces, but they weren't hard to imagine.

A gentle wind carried the sweet aroma of the flowers below up to the window ledge Rowan sat on. One foot propped against the opposite side of the window, and one hanging carelessly several dozen feet above the ground, he sat motionlessly as the breeze teased his long, dark-yet-graying hair and ruffled the fabric of his silk surcoat. He had been there for hours. A window in the winding halls of one of the east towers where no one ever wandered unless they were lost, curious, or looking for some hidden magical artifact the royal family had been stowing which might conveniently save or doom the world. Not that Rowan was aware of any such artifact, but there might have been one.

"I wonder what his name is," Rowan pondered to himself, rubbing his chin.

You mean, you don't know?

"Don't you?"

No reply.

"I knew his brother's name." Rowan's gray eye wandered away from the scene in the courtyard, gazing aimlessly at the trees and the sky and the village beyond the royal grounds. The landscape did not perform or entertain as it typically should have. Rowan didn't find himself inspired by its beauty or tempted by its mystery or frightened by its hidden threats. It was simply trees, buildings, and clouds slithering across the dull blue expanse. "Tom or Tim or Paul or Raul or Ganthorp or Thudrump or Hulluhoth or Gawain or something like that."

Really.

"No." Rowan tilted his head as a sheepish smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. "I never bothered to ask those sorts of questions. Didn't seem to have any bearing on me. Pretty embarrassing now that I live in the same building as the king of Gyrii. Never saw that coming."

That was pretty narrow minded of you.

Rowan responded with a breathy mix between a chuckle and a groan. "What do you know?"

I know you won't know how to address him once you meet him.

"Well that's easy. I'll call him my King or Your Highness or my Liege or something similarly horrid and trite." He dug into his lip with his thumbnail and clicked his tongue against his teeth. "Maybe, 'Your Great and Noble Oneness.' Or I could really pile it on. 'Your Complete and Indubitable Lordship of All Things'."

Your Highness and Worshipfulness. Your Total and Kingly Royaliness.

"Is that a word?"

No. Maybe you should be less traditional. Your Perfectly Formed and Handsomeness. Your Golden Brown Hairedness.

Rowan narrowed his gray eye, both eyebrows scrunching together. His left eyelid, though mostly obscured by the black tendrils of hair that deliberately covered it, hid only a black hole behind it. The eyelid wasn't completely closed, but it never completely opened.

As high up as he was from the ground, and from the amount of light flooding his ocular nerve, Rowan could not tell the color of the King's hair. "Your Perfectly Positioned Noseness."

Your Deep and Thoughtful Eyesness.

"Your Young and Energetic Vigor-ness."

Your Royally Overweight and Absolutely Stupidness.

Rowan threw his head back and released a loud, involuntary cackle. He hit his head against the window's stone archway he was leaned against, but the merriment that tickled his chest persuaded him not to care. He dabbed at his eye expecting to find tears, as after a minute and a half, Rowan finally managed to calm himself. "Oh that's not at all proper."

Since when have you cared about proper?

The gleeful expression the man had been wearing only a moment ago melted away. Clearing his throat, Rowan forcefully changed the subject. "Isn't the King due at a meeting?"

They're supposed to be updating him on the doom of Gyrii and your recent hire as one of his advisers.

"That's right." He frowned. Glancing away from scenery that lied beyond the window, he stared at the stone of the window's archway, particularly at the different colors of the various minerals that made up the slate gray surface. "They didn't call it an adviser. They used the term 'royal consult.'"

You barely paid attention. But yes, they did avoid making you sound like the king's lackey they've turned you into.

"Mhm. I did pick up that much." Rowan's left sleeve flickered and danced to the wispy song of the breeze. Just as his left eye was missing so was one arm. A man in his late forties, he somehow managed to not to look quite so crippled or dilapidated in the sun's lively gleam.

__________________
-Twelve hours prior.-

"So you're demoting me," Rowan sighed, glaring halfheartedly at the two rotund men in loud and colorful outfits that appeared to be designed by the same tailor who made motley for court jesters. As ridiculous as it looked, the cloth shimmered and flowed as extravagantly as any outfit paid for by the Meredith family's money.

"Don't be ridiculous, my Lord," the thinner man (emphasizing that the word "thinner" is being used as a very relative term) groaned. He used a melodic, arrogant tone as if he were speaking to a child. "This is not an occupation. You can't be 'demoted.' This is just... a shift in responsibility."

"Something better suited to your abilities." The fatter one nodded.

Rowan pushed his fingers across his forehead. He closed his eye and gritted his teeth. "I'm better to fit to tell a young inexperienced King what to do instead of manage the Meredith region? My region?"

The thinner man spoke up again not even a second after Rowan completed his last syllable. "Please don't take it personally, my Lord. It's simply that, in recent years, you seem to have become... less stable."

"Unstable." The fatter one agreed.

The aging Lord ran his fingers through his hair slowly, yet over and over again, as the two men explained how much better the region has been governed during Rowan's extended absence, and its supposed decline since his return. He was listening. Sort of. Not quite. But he got the picture.

"Technically, you will still be Lord Rowan Meredith," the fatter one said. "But we would prefer if you did not enter the Meredith region. Or tell anyone in your manor or in your lands about your displacement to the King's castle."

"We would also prefer you to stay within the castle walls." The thinner one's bulk shook as he gestured wildly with his thick arms how one would stay within a castle.

The meeting had lasted for four hours. Rowan at one point had fallen asleep. At other points he had outright laughed at the two men. But ultimately his fate had already been decided and was quite out of his control.