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White Iris Breeze
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Oh! I have one! This, my old mentor told me once, when he was quite inebriated. I'll try and do the voices.
Once there was a great king, and he had a magnificent gilded palace and inside of his palace, why, he had one of everything! He had a lion, and a suit of armor, and a dragon bone, and a woodpecker, and a knife, and a teapot, and-
“And?” I interrupt.
And just, one of everything! His subjects were a little lean in the pocket from funding his massive collection, but they loved their lord! They wanted him to be happy!
One day into this kingdom there came a funny little patchwork man with a large, golden-plumed hat, who prostrated himself before the king and said, “Milord! Have you really one of everything?”
And the king said, “Yes!”
And the man said, “Then I should like to see your kingdom's Tiss!”
And the king said, “My what?”
And the man said, “Have you no tiss?”
And the king said, “I suppose not! Where can I get one?”
And the man said, and he took off his funny hat as he said it, “From me! For I am a tissmaker!”
“Make me a tiss!” said the king, and the Tissmaker removed from his hat a long list, and handed it to the king's Court Mage Vizier.
And the Court Mage Vizier read the list and he said, “Unacceptable! You ask for all the wood in the kingdom forest! And all the iron stripped from the kingdom keep! And the entire kingdom reservoir!”
And the king said, “A small price to pay! Have I not a tree already in my grand palace, and no tiss?”
So the Court Mage Vizier sent the men of the kingdom with axes and saws and they felled the whole forest! He ordered the guards from the guardhouse with pliers and hammers to collect all the iron from the kingdom! He himself approached the lake, and cried out words of power only he and the Lord knew and, so they say, the resevoir drained itself dry as a bone and placed itself entire in a flask about his neck!
And they gave these treasured resources to the Tissmaker, who retired beneath a great tarpaulin in the town square, to work, all hoped, some wondrous weal!
That night, neither king nor townsman ate, for the animals had fled the forest and the fish had died in the lakes!
“Couldn't they just have eaten something else?” asks Astrea.
As I have just now found, Advocate Mage, non-meat food is disgusting! So they starved until the next day, when the Tissmaker gathered them before the tarpaulin and pulled it from his construction!
A great wooden scaffold, milord, atop which rested a great iron ball, heated red-hot in the Tissmaker's forge! A massive tub of iron, within which sat every drop of the reservoir's water! The Tissmaker roared with every fiber of his little body, “Now!!” and his assistants rolled the great iron ball off the scaffold and down, down it fell into the water below!
And it went Tissssss!
Spidrift laughs hard enough that he tilts over.
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