King Aldric III woke from a dream he could not remember and knew, with the absolute certainty of a man who had experienced this before, that the day ahead had been planned for him by someone other than himself.
He did not know this consciously. The binding that Archbishop Theron had woven into his psyche over twelve years of careful, incremental manipulation did not operate at the level of conscious awareness. It worked deeper, in the substrate of thought where desires formed before they became intentions, where decisions crystallized before they reached the surface of the mind. Aldric believed he woke with his own thoughts, his own priorities, his own agenda for the day's governance. The fact that those thoughts, priorities, and agendas consistently aligned with the interests of entities he could not imagine was, to him, simply evidence that he was a wise and capable ruler.
