[right][sub]The Keizer’s Residence: Galgoria, Western Jodesia[/sub][/right]

There was a flicker of tension, and then an embrace. It was close. Agata gripped her brother tightly, with one arm over his shoulder and the other around his torso, as Kezier Maximor III did the same. They stood, bodies pressed together, for a few moments, their tall, well-built bodies, imposing in most contexts, dwarfed by the Keizer’s Residence at the heart of Galgoria. The Galgorian Channel, which exploded into an intricate network of smaller canals around the city itself, followed all the way to the palace’s entrance, if you were to trace it on a map. Needless to say, Krijgsguard-manned checkpoints prevented anybody from simply sailing up to the throne, but the symbolism was clear: the Keizer was the heart of the city, which was itself the heart of the Jodesian Rijkdom. The notion that all roads might lead to Rome had died long before a Jodesian could proudly scoff at it.

“How was your journey?” asked the Keizer, as the two made their way up the grand steps to the entrance hall.
“Wet,” Agata turned her palm up to the sky, and narrowed her eyes, “If it begins to rain, I will get back on that boat this instant.”
“Then we must hurry inside.”

The Keizer reached out an open, meaty hand to the top of her back and gently applied pressure. Out of spite, she stalled for a moment. The Keizer was her brother, and she loved the man as both, but she had not been off the canal sprinter for more than five minutes before she had been reminded of the other great reason that was happier in the Westerijk.

[hr]

The Keizer had had the kitchens lay on an informal dinner - just the two of them, and the practically invisible staff. By now, they had retired to the drawing room, where each puffed on heady, thick cigars, which Agata had brought with her as a souvenir. She had not bothered with formal gifts; the notion of bringing an emperor a gift from within his own dominion seemed superfluous at best and insulting at worst.

“And how is the Regentes?” asked the Keizer, casually.

The brother and sister each released a vast cloud of smoke through which they locked eyes. Agata reached into her breast pocket for the letter and handed it across the lounge to him. She had wondered how long it would take him to ask, and now carefully observed his fingers as he pried the rich envelope open and ruptured the waxy seal. For the next few minutes, he sat in the drawing room and read. Agata sipped her brandy as patiently as she could muster.

Jodesian names were tenacious. Agata was named for Agator II, her great uncle and former Keizer. The city in which she now found herself was named for the Keizer that founded it. When the siblings’ mother, one of the few female Keizers, had passed away, there came an influx of newborns called Marmora for her, or Maximor for her successor, as the namesakes took on a sudden popular relevance through absence and novelty respectively. And now, Keizer Maximor III, with a grand portrait of himself visible behind his wingback chair, was reading a letter from Regentes Maximor-Alfona, who had taken on his name in addition to her own following her appointment.

He finished reading, his face not betraying a hint of emotion, and returned the letter to its envelope - just as there came a knocking at the door.

“Come!”
“I apologise to interrupt, Your Highness,” a member of the Keizer’s personal staff entered the room, scrutinised from two angles by hard eyes through the haze, “The North American Union has been attacked.”

There was a pause, in which the Keizer and his sister looked at one another.

“Have you summoned the Rijksraad?”
“They are coming as we speak.”