The Chronicles of the Releasable Kingdom
The Minister
Some people believed the future was uncertain.
The Minister considered this primarily a failure of preparation.
The Minister was a conscientious man.
He believed journeys should have destinations, destinations should have routes, and routes should have plans.
Plans should have milestones.
Milestones should have dates.
And dates should have someone responsible for explaining why they had been missed.
He had never considered any of this controversial.
The Minister did not dislike change.
This was frequently misunderstood.
Change was perfectly acceptable, provided it was identified early, described precisely, assessed for its consequences, approved by the appropriate people, and incorporated into the plan before it occurred. Unplanned change was different. Unplanned change suggested that something had not been planned.
The Minister found this troubling.
He had spent much of his career improving prediction.
Whenever an undertaking exceeded its estimate, he requested more detailed estimates.
Whenever dependencies surprised him, he requested more comprehensive dependency analysis.
Whenever reality deviated from the plan, he commissioned an investigation into the deviation.
These investigations were thorough.
They frequently established that reality had deviated from the plan.
The Minister particularly valued completeness.
An unanswered question was a risk.
A risk required mitigation.
A mitigation required an action.
An action required an owner.
An owner required a date.
And once everything had a date, the Minister felt considerably better. Whether the uncertainty itself had changed was a question that rarely appeared on the form.
He was also a great believer in progress.
Progress could be measured.
Plans completed.
Documents approved.
Milestones reached.
Work packages closed.
Resources utilized.
The Minister preferred numbers because numbers did not interrupt meetings with inconvenient stories.
This did not make him unreasonable.
Quite the opposite.
The Minister listened carefully.
He asked sensible questions.
He took responsibility seriously.
He genuinely wanted expeditions to arrive safely and projects to succeed.
He simply believed that the best protection against an uncertain future was to decide as much of it as possible in advance.
The Witch had known the Minister for many years.
She rather liked him.
This annoyed him considerably.
He suspected that she regarded prediction as superstition.
The Witch denied this.
„Superstition,“ she once explained, „occasionally turns out to be right.“
The Minister regarded the Witch’s preference for observation with suspicion.
„One cannot simply wait for things to happen.“
„No,“ said the Witch.
„One can make something happen and observe what happens next.“
The Minister considered this insufficiently ambitious.
Of all the things in the Indifferent Realms, the Grey Mountains troubled him most.
They moved.
Not frequently enough to make maps useless.
Just frequently enough to make them unreliable.
This was considerably worse.
The Minister therefore commissioned better maps.
More detailed maps.
Maps containing alternative routes.
Maps showing predicted movements of the mountains.
Eventually, maps describing what other maps should be used if the original maps became inaccurate.
The Royal Cartographers considered this a golden age.
The Minister’s greatest achievement was the Royal Warehouse.
There, expeditions could be analyzed, planned, provisioned, approved and packed long before anyone had to leave.
It was orderly.
Predictable.
Efficient.
And extraordinarily expensive.
The Minister was proud of it.
Until he encountered the Kitchen Beyond the Grey Mountains.
The Minister was not a foolish man.
That was precisely why what happened there bothered him so much.
The Kitchen had fewer plans.
Fewer prepared expeditions.
Fewer estimates.
Fewer approvals.
And considerably less certainty.
Yet somehow its travelers kept leaving with what they needed.
The Minister initially suspected improvisation.
Later he suspected luck.
Eventually he began to suspect something considerably more disturbing.
Perhaps they were not succeeding despite deciding late.
Perhaps they were succeeding because they could.