Days are peaceful here in the Kingdom of Mauritania. Everybody usually keeps to themselves until dinnertime. The only real ruckus you'd find would be at lunchtime when Claire D'Entre, the castle cook tries to get people to come eat something for lunch. Today began such as all the others, a nice, quiet day. I suppose now, you'd have a hard time believing me.

It probably would be best for me to start at the beginning. The sun came up. It generally does that, and at this specific time of year, it does that at precise 6:37 in the morning. Why is this so important? I'll tell you why, because at 6:37 AM, nobody was awake; therefore the day was nice and quiet.

Maura, known for her late night escapades, was soundly asleep in her bed, having gone to bed extra early the night before. She planned to get up early at 8:00. Jseter Kyle was sound asleep in his tree house by the river. Tiel D'Bre and Magi Alex had both turned in really early (at midnight) because they were planning to do a project the next day. Claire D'Entre was most assuredly asleep, seeing as it was pointless to get up and make breakfast when the entire kingdom generally slept through it anyway.

Sir Chris was asleep in his observatory and Grounds Keeper Jill and Sirina Jesi were sound asleep in their tower. There had been no early morning ghostie crisis for Jesi to attend to. The dragon was in the middle of her annual monthly hibernation period and Jaana the Barbarian was off visiting relatives. Even the ghosts had gone to bed a few minutes before the sun came up. It was definitely quiet at 6:37 that morning. But by lunchtime, it was a whole other story.

Right off the bat, I should say that it wasn't exactly his fault. I mean, how was he supposed to know that you can't cast that particular spell on a cloudy day? I was right there next to him the entire time and I can assure you that the end note mentioning such a restriction was at the end of the book and neither of us noticed it.

But anyway, we blew up Maura's library. Or, rather, Magi Alex did. I was just standing beside to make sure he didn't hurt himself or something. Well, I suppose that's not the complete truth... it was really still intact... somewhere. We only thought we blew it up at the time, since it vanished with dramatic explosions and bursts of light. I was told by Jill, who was out in her gardens at the time, that it was quite spectacular.

The minute that Alex and I figured out what we had done, I think we both almost had a heart attack. Maura's library is her pride and joy. It has every book in there that she'd ever want to read. And that is what she does day in, and day out. With the library gone, she would quickly run out of books in her room. This would be disastrous, at least for our sake. Because she, in the loving, warm hearted and tender manner that she does everything, would, most assuredly, have our heads.

Our conversation, when we looked out the window, following the sound of the explosions went something like this:

Me: "Oh my God!"
Alex: "Oh SH*****T!"

I think we definitely could foresee in advance the events that were to come. The first course of action, we decided (a wise decision, in my opinion, but sadly we shall never find out), was to try to stall Maura from finding out about the mishap. The second was to call a Super Emergency Meeting (SEM) of the people of the kingdom to discuss plans about how to execute the first.

Regular emergency meetings are gatherings in the secret tower of everyone in the kingdom, except the Queen, who can come and are called more often than you would expect. There was one just two nights ago to discuss plans for the Queen's birthday. SEMs are pretty much the same thing except they are only called if there is a dire emergency and when the signal goes out (in the form of the Magi's messenger pigeons) everyone better drop what they are doing and high tail it the the secret tower.

Well, we called our SEM and raced to the secret tower. Claire was already there. She had been in her rooms when the pigeon had flown in the window and whispered the message in her ear. All she had to do was step through the secret door in her room, go through the secret room connected to it, and there she was in the secret tower. The rest of us, on the other hand, live a little farther away.

Kyle arrived just before us, seeing as he was in the kitchen fixing a snack. The rest of the court arrived shortly afterwards with the exception of Chris. We assumed he was either in his dungeons somewhere, where the pigeon couldn't find him too easily or with Maura (which would mean that he couldn't get away without her getting suspicious). After waiting a bit for him, I began the meeting...

"Hear ye, hear ye. This Super Emergency Meeting will now come to order."

"Enough of the small talk, we need to get to the point ASAP," Alex said hurriedly.

"Yeah, I have to get back to cooking my snack. It needs to come out of the oven any minute." said Kyle.

"What are you doing in my kitchens?" Claire asked aside to Kyle.

"Fine, fine. You explain it then Alex." I said.

"Ummm, well, alright... Well, you see... It goes something sort of like this..." he stumbled.

"Hurry up already, it can't be that bad." Claire muttered impatiently.

"I sorta blewupmauraslibrary." he slurred, all in one breath.

"WHAT!!" exclaimed Jill, (She was ever so much better at understanding what people said than the rest of us), "You blew up Maura's library!" And she promptly fainted away.

It is not at all like Jill to faint and she gets very embarrassed when I mention this incident, but at the time she had nothing to worry about. Nobody even noticed her fall back into her chair because this was when the hubbub started. Hubbub, I suppose is not quite the right word for it. Mayhem perhaps. Attempted murder, prayer, cries of woe and of terror, and a general sense of disaster are all things that could sum up the next few minutes of the meeting. Kyle promptly sprung from his seat and pinned Alex to the wall by his neck (hence the attempted murder).

"What have you done!" he cried.

I'm sure that he wasn't really intent on killing Alex, actually I'm darn right certain. (He is Kyle after all, who wouldn't hurt a fly.)

"This will be the end of life as we know it!"

"I agree," chimed in Claire, "I can't believe it. How could you have done such a thing, Alex? Jesi, come, let's help Kyle."

Jesi, at this point, was kneeling in the floor, hands clasped together. Her eyes were lifted upward. "Please tell me it isn't so," she was repeating over and over.

I think that it was at this point that I tried to intercede. For Kyle to be strangling Alex was nothing to be worried about, but Claire has been known to carry out more than one threat in regards to Alex.

"Wait!!" I yelled, "The real priority here is not to kill Alex, but to prevent Maura from finding out that her library is gone."

"If she doesn't notice that it's gone, at least for a few days, then I may be able to figure out a way to bring it back." replied Alex, a bit out of breath.

But alas, it was not to be. For at that exact moment in time, Queen Maura was standing in a doorway that had, at every other day of her life, led into her library. Today, however, there was a two story drop straight down to the grounds outside. Her mouth had dropped open, and she was holding a stack of books that she was hoping to return to the shelves. She stood there for a moment, racking her brain for an explanation, other than the obvious one that the library was now gone, as to why the door now led out into nothing but air. As she stood there in shock, a leaf slowly and silently fluttered through the air to land upon her shoulder. She couldn't deny it any longer.

Some say the scream could be heard all the way out at the royal farm. I'm not so sure, but I can tell you this; we didn't hear it through the solid stone walls of the secret tower. I think if she had screamed in the next room over we still wouldn't have heard her. Everyone was yelling and screaming, mostly at Alex, trying to get their point across. Not that I blame them for this was very serious business.

The only way we did learn about the scream was the fact that Chris had heard it as he was making his way through the courtyard. He had been down in his dungeons when the call for the SEM went out and had just come up for a mid morning snack in the stables when one of the messenger pigeons found him. Midway through the courtyard he had heard the blood-curdling scream. Not knowing what to make of it, he raced up to the meeting to see if we could shed any light on what he had just heard.

"Alright, you guys can let go of Alex's neck now," was the first thing Chris heard as he entered the room. I was still struggling to pull Claire and Kyle off of Alex.

"Yikes!" he exclaimed after surveying the scene before him.

"Chris, glad you could join the party," said Jill. By this time, she had recovered from her fainting spell. "Do pull up a chair and join the fun. Right now, half of us are trying to kill Alex while the other half are attempting to think of ways to keep Maura away from her library, or should I say what used to be her library."

"Why, is it our annual attempt to keep Maura away from books for a day so soon? I thought we had just attempted that a few months ago?" he asked, puzzled.

"In a sense, Alex just blew up her library," Jesi replied.

"What?" he asked incredulously.

"It's true," I piped in, "Alex and I blew up the library by accident and if we don't think of something soon, Maura is going to find out about it and then we'll be doomed!"

"Hmmm..." Chris said as he scratched his head, "I think... yes, I think she already has."

"Oh, tell me it isn't so," Alex groaned from the corner where Claire had dropped him.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Well, as I was walking through the courtyard on my way here, I heard a scream coming from the Queen's wing of the castle. It sounded like Maura, not that she ever really screams, but what she might sound like if she were to scream."

"It's all over!" moaned Alex.

"Sheesh, Alex, get a grip!" exclaimed Claire and she rolled her eyes.

"Alex, perhaps if you were to go to your spell room and at least start looking for a way to reverse this spell we cast, then maybe I can give the Queen some good news. Any more comments before I close this meeting?" I asked.

"Yeah," said Kyle, "What should we do?"

"I don't know," I replied, "I guess everyone should go back to what you were doing before."

Chris grinned. "See you guys at dinnertime then, I'm off to my dungeons."

"How can he act as if nothing is wrong?" Jill muttered under her breath to Jesi as we filed out the door.

Continue on to Chapter 2