Today’s snippet, titled “History Lesson”, is a piece I wrote about an NPC in my Pathfinder Campaign. This one in particular is about the “history” of the up-coming civil war. My group’s story is customized and all that – so none of this is Pathfinder canon. Just Josie-cannon. Hah!
Be forewarned, there are mature themes and naughty language below.
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The following was recorded in the diary of Illinae Morwenilliae, the wizened grandmother of Mistress Willowyn Morwenilliae, Magister of Phoenixa. It was entered into the official archives of the state as a recording of history, a primary source for future generations.
Winter came hard to Brevoy in 4713.
The snows swallowed entire villages, promised endless flooding come spring, and the cold – which began early and seemed as if it would last late into the season – froze entire herds of cattle and other farm animals where they lay.
It also prevented civil war.
For a time, at least, but that is a tale for another day.
The Surtova clan had been in power for several years now, but it was not until Fall of 4713 that the usurper, Regent Noleski Surtova, finally ignored the warnings of his advisors and obeyed the urgings of his family. On the Thirtieth day of Rova, Noleski married Elanna Lebeda in a ceremony that was as surprising as it was elaborate.
The wedding culminated in a coronation that only a handful of people anticipated. A contingent of House Guards from Surtova filed into the cathedral with naked weapons, stirring the guests almost to panic. With a silent gesture from the Regent, the dwarven adoptive heir of House Garess, Toval, rose from his seat in the front pew and swept aside his cloak in a most dramatic fashion. Moments later, Toval set the Rogvarian crown upon a Surtovan brow and the assembled notables burst out in a most raucous explosion of noise.
The loudest wail came from the beautiful, horrified lips of Natala Surtova; she who had been acting as Queen since her majority, and who, as evidenced by her reaction, had not been made aware of the events beforehand.
The presence of armed men quelled the most outspoken opponents, but their acquiescence would not last. This sudden marriage had brought two powerful duchies into alignment. Bolstered by a guarantee of inheritance for Toval, which brings House Garess into the fold, and the betrothal of Natala Surtova to the elderly patriarch of House Lodvoka (Note: this neatly ties up a fourth House, securing majority, as well as binding Natala away from New Stetven, and potentially preventing her children from opposing Noleski’s heirs for primacy).
By the end of the first week of Lamashan, Brevoy teetered on the brink of civil war. House Orlovsky and House Medvyed had already begun calling up their militias and ordering fresh men and supplies from abroad. Though Lords Poul and Gurev, united through their loyalty to the long-missing House Rogvaria and Choral the Conqueror’s descendants as well as through the marriage of their kin, the Duke and Duchess of Phoenixa, remain powerful men and valiant warriors in their age; neither was immediately prepared to strike. The delay as their strategists quibbled over minutiae could have proved their undoing.
Were it not for the fickle, fiercely angry sister-to-the-King, it would likely have been.
Instead, as the second week of Lamashan wound to a close, the young woman who had been forced into a marriage to a man three times her age and exiled to a frozen court in Winterbreak Bay, showed up at the gates of Skywatch, begging sanctuary.
Lord Poul invited her into his home and vowed his protection from her brother’s ire. Lord Gurev, it is said, was not to be outdone, and offered to put aside his foreign bride (Note: his bride, Alani Ful-Qatina, who had provided him with no additional heirs and ever-increasing expenses to maintain her preferred style of living and comfort, is said to have raged for days, smashing every breakable objet d’art in Stoneclimb).
The newly crowned King vowed before the entire court at New Stetven that he would bring his wayward sibling to heel – and her protectors – and began summoning troops in earnest. The people cowered, hiding their sons in dresses and praying to all the peaceful Gods that civil war would not come to Brevoy. For when the nobles play their games of war and power, it is the smallfolk who pay in blood.
The first hard frost of the season arrived on Lamashan 16th and by the 24th, all the northern provinces were buried beneath ten feet of snow with no hope for a thaw until Spring.
With the temperature cooling, so too did the tempers of the great Houses of Brevoy.
Some scholars believed the danger passed, the hot blood gone to ice with the killing snows. I write with the authority of age and experience when I declare emphatically: They were wrong.
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Note: Image is “Map of Brevoy” by (Pathfinder/Paizo)