The Unremarkable Tale of a Knight

I write this account now as we travel north. I am in too much anguish to touch the hideous reality awaiting us, so instead I wish to turn my thoughts back. Put to words the life I came to love before it was so cruelly torn from me.

I suppose, as all accounts must, I shall begin at the beginning. 

I was young when I arrived at The Ocean Vale. No more than eleven, but even this number is a guess as my birth was never recorded. It was the downturn of the century, a great exhale after years of unceasing wars had savaged most of the lands. It was not a prosperous time, but neither was it precarious. It simply was.

My breading is unremarkable and barely worth noting. For the sake of this writing, I will make clear the relevant facts of my rearing. I am simply one in a string of pups born to a lineage unworthy of even a name. I had neither education, nor training of any kind. I am merely another human spat upon the earth for no reason other than the result of the whim of a man and a whore to indulge in a baseless sin. It was never a question that I would be sold, only a matter of when. Even still, my appointment was sudden -a series of hands trading my life for far more than it was worth- resulting in my station at the small kingdom upon the crescent of the sea.

The line who ascended to royalty in The Ocean Vale was as old as the earth their castle stood upon, but their place in the world was not. Power and prestige seemed to skim past the fair house of Solms. Alighting but never landing upon their shoulders. They neither held great station, nor fell below the notice of the ruling nobility.

It was in this muddled realm that my life truly began.

No, no, that’s not quite true.

It was in this muddled realm that I met her. 

I can still recall when my eyes first befell her: the gloss of her ivory mask, the delicate porcelain flowers that made a face where one would expect eyes, nose, lips, the resplendent coverings that hid beneath a being too enormous to be something as pedestrian as mortal. My heart had sped such that I thought surely I would die. Surely I could not survive a sight as spectacular as Lady Euphrosyne. Yet I did.

And that -that beautiful, wonderous moment- was when I became real.