Guardians Inc.:Thundersword (Guardians Incorporated #2) by Julian Rosado-Machain

offer, there will be war.” He turned around. “This interview is over.”
          Thomas silently stood up from the table, feeling the full intensity of Elise’s glare on his face. He had screwed up.
          Badly.
          “Princess Erisham,” Idar said as they opened the door. “Would you remain a second please?”
          Elise pushed Thomas from the room and closed the door behind her. Thomas and Bolswaithe walked along the corridor for a short while before Bolswaithe commented in a nonchalant tone, “That could have gone better.”
          “You think?” Thomas said. “Dammit, Bolswaithe! I’m way over my head! Everyone thinks I’m this great savior or guide or something! Everyone expects me to change the world somehow…” he stammered. “I am not a hero. I just can read anything. That’s it. Scribble whatever you want, any way you want. I’ll read it,” he said, then mocked himself with a “whoooohoo.”
          “That’s not what we saw in Ormagra,” Bolswaithe said.
          “It wasn’t me who stopped the Wraith; it was the statue. I was just a conduit,” Thomas said. “It was a fluke.”
          “It’s funny that only you view it this way, Thomas. Everyone else was quite impressed, including King Seryaan.”
          “You know, I’m getting tired of that,” Thomas said angrily. “From the Guardians, to the King, and now the Fauns. I don’t know what the hell you expect from me.”
          “I’ll tell you.” Elise was standing behind him, and he didn’t know just how much she had overheard.
          “I’m sorry, Elise…” he began to apologize.
          “Shut up and follow me,” she snapped as she led him toward a stairway. “Minister Idar wanted me to make sure you saw this.” She led them through a circular corridor and stopped in front of a door. Thomas could hear a lot of muffled noise coming from the other side. “We still have a couple of minutes before today’s session begins,” Elise said as she opened the doors.
          They were standing on an inside balcony of a dome overlooking an assembly hall. From the top, the floor of the hall looked like a spider web. Large squares of seats and wide passages interconnected and divided the hall into smaller squares as it reached the center. Thomas could see a whole section of the hall filled with water where the seats should be, and large animals, whales, and dolphins were swimming. There was a circular table in the center that rotated slowly with a semicircle of chairs arranged like a pyramid, and in front of it stood an elevated podium.
    Thomas leaned on the guardrail. Thousands of different animal fauns were chattering down below them as they walked toward their seats.
    “The assembly hall,” Elise explained, pointing out at the hall below. “It is arranged in expanding lines from the center toward the outer ring. At the center is the presiding council; those Faun clans that have more contact with humans. Minister Idar sits in that ring. Individual Faun clans are affiliated in fourteen great tribes,” she pointed out the separating lines. “Three for America, North, South, and the Amazon league. There is one tribe for all of Europe, one for India, and Madagascar. There’s one for the Middle East all the way into the Himalayas that also covers China, Mongolia, the Steppes, and Siberia. There are three tribes for Africa, and there’s one tribe for the Indochina Peninsula that encompasses Australia and New Zealand. The whales and dolphins have their own tribe, as do raptors. All other birds belong to the different continental tribes. There used to be a tribe for each of the poles, but the polar tribes have banded together because of the climate change. The inner ring is made up of their tribal representatives, and the representatives of each clan sit behind that ring. That section...” Elise pointed out one composed of humans and Elves, “is for