There is a street in Authenrai whose pavement stones stretch from the steps of the royal palace to the edge of the wall. You can't tell unless you walk with your head down, counting, counting, watching for a curb or for concrete and stone to become gravel or dirt. If you look up, with your head held high, you can see only a mass of people and storefronts, wagons and caravans, gently sloping down an almost invisible hill - a colorful riot of mortality mixing the stink of their sweat with the guttering cling of a thousand torches.
When you reach the wall, you can finally look up, and you'll see where you are and what you've become. You're in the hiding places where rats and fleas and sewage all go, where the forgotten ones huddle hoping not for succor from their betters but instead to simply remain invisible and forgotten. You can turn around and gaze up, up, up the hill, and see it like a tunnel's exit - dirty black, faded grey, cobblestone brown, and finally the gleaming white towers and parapets of the most precious building at the heart of the center of the world. Where paladins and knights and adventurers go. Where you may not.
That's when you hear them - when I heard them - when I heard us, together. Coughing and sighing, whimpering in terror. Yes, terror, pure and primeval - they/we feared my fine raiment, cringed away from the scepter in our hands. We smiled at their mortal predicament. We acknowledged without pity or remorse our unflinching resolve, to above all other things live, here at the bottom of the world, in the shadow of glory. We spread our hands, and whispered a word, and together we all huddled close, against a shining blue and silver doublet, beneath a resplendent blue cloak.
If those at the very top will shun me, I will become like those at the very bottom. We will grow mighty - we - us. Me. I will take us all Home. Let them try to stop us.
