Xarkly 12618 Popular Post Share Posted March 6, 2021 MEMOIRS OF A SILENT KNIGHT VOLUME II: I DID NOT LOVE HER Ser Aleksandr Hieromar, the Whisper Knight, and his elder sister Nataliya. These are the memoirs of Ser Aleksandr, a Knight of Haense sworn under a Vow of Silence. They are not published. Characters mentioned are @MotherLay @ColdestPepsi @Flapman @Zaerie @Gusano@doreebear@CaptainHaense Read Volume I, on why Aleksandr took his Vow, here. Music: Spoiler I never had much mind for love. Not like my siblings, at least. Sometimes I think my little brother Franz may have been born just to love and marry; he always had that social disposition, his odd charm, and not to mention the cohort of damsels he surrounded himself with growing up. I always teased him about that, but I suppose he took it for jealousy. It would be a reasonable conclusion, though ultimately inaccurate. I'm quite sure what it is that makes Franz and I different in that regard; often, when I would sulk in the corners at feasts and balls, he would try to coerce me into dancing with someone, or try to figure out which maiden I had taken a liking to. There never was any maiden, though. I never seemed to share the feelings Franz had. My other siblings didn't share my lack of concern for love - as far as I know, anyway. Josef wed that Baruch girl at a young age, and while I'm not really sure if he ever had feelings for anything besides food, their marriage at least seemed amicable. It was political, of course, brokered by my mother and Konstantin Wick when we were just children, but I can't help but wonder if they grew affectionate towards each other despite that. I wish I had gotten a chance to ask him - ask him that, and so much more. Then Nataliya, of course, sealed her fate in her pursuit of love - she got herself disowned, stripped of her title as Prinzenas Royale - for wanting to marry the Queen's brother. She made that sacrifice, though, and I think she made it happily. To accept that ... it leaves me feeling bittersweet. She left her family name behind and moved far away to have a family with the man she loved. I am, of course, happy that she has found happiness and overcome her curse, but a small part of me cannot help but wish she still lived here in Haense with me. I miss her so. Then there is Juliya. Like Josef, she had a more formal marriage, and was betrothed and wed to the Lord Fiske Vanir. She seems happy, though I find it hard to tell. When we meet, she often drops idle complaints about where her husband has gotten off to, or why he was not around to dance when the music started They're so minor that I dismissed them as jokes at first, but I've begun to wonder if she is not so happy after all. She smiles all the time, of course, but I think Juliya would smile in the face of Iblees. Then she lost her firstborn child. Even if I could speak to ask her about, I am not sure if I would. Would she take offense? Would it be too sorrowful to speak of? The last thing I would want to do would be to offend her. She has a child now, happy and healthy. Still, I think I must one day ask her whether she is happy in her marriage. Lastly, there is my twin Stefan. I wonder if he found love on his travels. I wish he would return home, or even write to tell us he is not dead. Of course, we are children of royalty, and marriage is no simple affair. My father King Sigismund allowed his sisters to marry freely out of love in his time, but my mother and Josef regressed to traditional political marriages. That makes sense, of course. That is how favor is maintained and loyalty built. Most of us were betrothed from a young age -- even me. It was some Helvets girl, though her name escapes me all these years later. I do, however, distinctly remember that Franz, Stefan and I called her Rat Girl because she kept a rodent as a pet. My mother called off the betrothal when I was nine, though, and had only met her once. To this day, I'm not quite sure why she ended it - at the time, I think I was just grateful I would not have to marry a girl with a pet rat. I wonder where she is now. From that point, neither love nor marriage were a feature of my life. My mother retired from public life, and Josef became the King of Haense proper when he turned fourteen. Those years feel like a grim blur, when I was hardly worth remark. I was just a gaunt, stuttering Prince with nothing to offer and nothing to do. It was as I came into my later teenage years that the notion of knighthood cemented itself in my head, and I pursued it vigorously for the years that followed, so much so that I did practically nothing else. I have no friends to show for my time, and most certainly, no love. I do have my knightly title, though - I succeeded, and became Ser Aleksandr the Whisper after I swore my Vow of Silence. However, then came Marcella Barclay. We had met a few times before, when we were both much younger. It shames me to say that I mocked her at our first meeting - during our Oath Hunt to join the H.R.A. - but she had her revenge when she trounced me in a tournament in the tavern. After that, our sole interaction was in the form of sneers and begrudging looks. I did not see her many years after that, and I soon forgot about her as I dedicated myself wholly to becoming a Knight. Then, not long after my dubbing, Duke Friedrich Barclay - the Lord Marshal of the H.R.A. - approached me. Supposedly, he had been struggling to arrange a marriage for his sister, owing to both the fact that there were not many bachelors of age in Haense at the time, and because she herself supposedly refused most matches. Lo and behold, his sister was Marcella Barclay, and she had reluctantly agreed to consider me for courting. I was, needless to say, rather stunned at first. Why on earth would she agree to that? I was, however, a grown man now. I considered it from a wholly political point of view; it was my duty as a Prince to continue the lineage of my House, and the House of Barclay was a very good match indeed who had long been overdue a royal match. I accepted the Duke's offer. Marcella and I began to meet after that, and we reacquainted ourselves. She was no longer the arrogant, reckless young girl who had charged a bear during our Oath Hunt over ten years ago. No, she was a grown woman herself now. She was as sharp as a blade and worked under my uncle Konstantin as Deputy Palatine, and though I was never attracted to the appearance of others, she was ... pleasant to behold. I was tense, at first, while she was blissfully carefree. She laughed at me when I asked about dowries and the formalities of betrothal, and when I brought up such with her brother Duke Friedrich, Marcella took off swimming into the lake to avoid it. She could not have cared less about it. We spoke - well, she spoke, I waved my hands - of the world, and places we would like to visit - we agreed to one day visit the Halflings together. She told me of 'beach parties' that were held at Reinmar, where they wore bizarre flowery shirts. She promised to make me one, even, and invited me to one of these parties. Of course, I would never attend one. Marcella is gone, now. Shortly after she succeeded my uncle as Palatine, she abruptly resigned. There was no official missive from the government, no statement on her departure. Word from House Barclay was that she had decided she was too young to be Palatine, and went travelling. No one seemed to know the truth of it. She left me a letter, though, slid under my door when I returned from sparring one day. Aleksandr - I'm afraid that our adventure to the Halflings will have to wait. I've come to realize a few things about the world, and would like to see more of it, and more of myself. Recently, I noticed that I was unhappy," she wrote, "I felt quite hollow. I've never taken a moment to think about myself as a person, only my future projects or what work I was going to do. Never stopping like that only results in wrinkly old women that have nothing to show for their lives but some empty accomplishments that go in history books. History books don't write what you enjoyed or what type of person you actually were; they don't write if you stargazed, or taught your niece to swim; they don't show anything beneath the surface, and I don't want to live my life as a person in a history book." It was of no concern to me. Or, at least, that was what I told myself. Why should it matter? I had agreed to the betrothal based on pure politics, on my duty to the House of Barbanov-Bihar and as a courtesy to the House of Barclay. Her letter ended with these final lines: "I'm sorry that I kept my judgment from when we were younger. I should've seen the growth and noticed that perhaps you weren't the same anymore. That'll forever be my fault and I regret that I waited so long to see it. I'll avoid the Halfling village on my travels -- I'd still like to go there with you when I get back." I did not love her. If there was one thing young Aleksandr knew back when he sulked and spoke to no one but his brother, it was that he - that I - had no need for love. The same is true to this day; my goal is become a true Knight with the power to root out dishonor, cruelty, and malice within Haense, and I have no need of a marriage, and I most certainly had no need of love. At least, that was what I told myself. I realized that night it was a lie when I sat hunched over my desk and - to my great surprise - found tears welling in my eyes. For the life of me, I do not know why. Still, I know I did not love her, and I am resolute in knowing that my duty and my destiny has need of neither love nor marriage. Even so, a small part of me could not help but long for the kind of companionship I had started to believe she would bring. I swore a Vow of Silence to never speak again, and I have precious few I consider friends besides Franz, Nataliya, and Juliya. But I cannot speak to them, and they have their own lives to lead: Franz is married now, with a horde of children, and besides from that he is a Knight himself and is running for his fourth term as Maer of Karosgrad; Nataliya, too, is married with children of her own, and she lives all the way in Providence; and Juliya is no different, and has her own family to attend to. I think, deep down, I wanted someone who could perhaps understand me despite my silence, and someone who could be there for me in those dark nights when my apartments of the Nikirala Palace are so very silent. I did not love her, but I cannot help but wonder if I might have grown to. My mind keeps asking that question, but there is no point in dwelling on it. She is gone, and I have my own destiny to follow. I know that, yet I find myself lying awake these nights, staring at the ceiling. I suppose this feeling is loneliness. I do not think, though, that I have suddenly become lonely now that Marcella has gone. Rather, I think I was always lonely, and she merely reminded me of that fact. She taunted me with a possible cure to that loneliness, and when that cure vanished I was left all too aware of the loneliness I had become numb to. It is like a cripple who had lived his life without the use of his legs since birth - by the time he is a grown man, he has no idea what it is like to have functioning legs, and his entire reality is based off the use of his broken ones. But then, one day, a doctor tells him an exciting new development in medicine might restore use of his legs. He grows excited, and his minds rushes with all the possibilities, only to find out that the medicine will not work. He loses nothing, for he has long since learned to live without legs, but he feels their loss ever so painfully. I did not love her. That is what I must believe if I am to numben myself once again. 34 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoanOfArc 4586 Share Posted March 6, 2021 Father Dima watched from the heavens and found a man lonely beyond belief. While the priest had never felt lonely on terra, he felt sympathy upon the man and offered his prays to God for him. "In the church, we all are together.." a murmur from the Seven Skies was said, "The Aenguls, the Prophets, the Saints, the Blessed, your beloved... they all smile upon you, love you and pray for you. " Perhaps his prayer never reached the ears of the man, but he hoped God would soothe the pain of his soul at the very least. 4 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaerie 3414 Share Posted March 6, 2021 Marcella had only been out of Karosgrad for about a week, she had wandered down the side of Lake Viktoria from Reinmar, and followed along the banks of the Augusta River. The camp she set up there on the edge of the forest and river bank was small. It contained a small fire, a hammock, a cooking pot, and a little log she sat on. She had avoided the roads to this point, she had a goal for the first part of her adventure. To be alone. Why did she want to be alone on an adventure? Well, Marcella had something she wanted to experience that wasn’t quite for herself yet. She wanted to see what appealed to Aleksandr, about being alone and quiet. She wished to see the world a little more from his perspective and maybe see where the silence came from. The life of silence wasn’t for Marcella, however. Not to say that his silence wasn’t for her, but her own silence wasn’t fitting. She had only agreed to her brother talking to Aleksandr about marriage because her last experience she had remembered with him, she had hated him. She had thought that it'd go terribly, and she could tell Friedrich to drop the subject forever so that she could go back to her work. What Marcella wasn't prepared to be faced with though, was a silent, respectable, and soft man. He wasn't like her, he wasn't bubbly, he didn't grin easily, and he didn't have certain strange manic habits like her actions may be classified as. Him not being like her though, wasn't a problem. If anything, it became something that she might be able to share with him. They were differences that perhaps they could come to respect and enjoy about one another, unlike how she had first thought of him, unbearable. He wasn't unbearable, and that scared her more than she had ever expected. Marcella had met a person that made her think. Standing up in the forest a bit further from the river, she found herself looking around. There was no sound, no talking, no music, no bustling. The absence of talking and noise wasn’t what was missing though. What was missing from this specific silence was his silence. How do you miss silence when there is no noise? she wondered. The silence was too loud, too empty of a silence she might be looking for. Marcella went back down to the bank, where she felt relieved at the sound of the Augusta River flowing peacefully. She looked up stream, where it wasn’t really that far of a walk back yet, but instead of walking up the river, she pulled off her boots and stood in the shallows. Marcella would make the walk back to Karosgrad one day, but today was not the day. She listened to the silence she had thought was the right type, but grew frustrated when she realized that not all silence is the same. Perhaps what she had wanted to seek wasn’t the absence of sound, but the presence of someone specifically. She would continue on, thinking, but not yet returning. 6 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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