A Dowager's Lament

[MunaZaldrizoti 8037]

Spoiler

 

 

 

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Black. The color the world seemed to have enveloped itself in. For the dowager of Dobrov and imperial princess, life seemed to have lost a certain excitement it so strongly displayed in her youth. How naïve Charlotte Augusta had been, with her many dresses and parties and charitable ventures. Now, all of that sheltering that fostered her had melted away in the last decade of her life, leaving her feeling hollow...alone.

 

The late Count had, as expected, left not much else besides an assurance of continued residence in Dobrov for her and their two daughters, his title and fortunes passing to a grand-niece he had doted on in the last years of his life. This news was soured, of course, by the knowledge that only one child would benefit from this arrangement at all. Their eldest, Anna, had been kidnapped from her nursery mere months after her birth. For all of her imperial connections, they could never find any trace of those who had taken her. Her protests and tears had gotten her little else besides a sympathetic word or reassurance that she might one day see her daughter again. All the Princess had recalled, at the time, was her baby's gaze. Two silvery pupils that matched her own, the only thing to remind those around who the girl might descend from. She wondered, every day, if she was happy...or even alive. But now, more than ever, she found herself brooding upon her failure to protect her child. Did those little eyes ever stare up at the stars, wondering who she was? Why she had let her go?

 

Her elderly father, having grown senile, seemed to no longer write to her as he did. Her little brother was now married to a young Basrid beauty whom Charlotte was confident would guide the future of Aldersberg. What reason did she have, to linger in a county that she had never considered home? Her youngest daughter, frail and sickly, would be cared for by close kin and raised to be a proper lady someday. But the Princess, now nearing her middling age, felt a certain freedom after her husband's death that she had never felt previously.

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At dusk, a shrouded figure seemed to make their way from the province of Dobrov, bedecked in widow's weeds and a heavy cowl. Their booted steps seemed to carry them with a determination, not a glance cast back at the looming fortresss she had called her matrimonial home...and prison. This was now a mother, steeled by years of grief and neglect, to find the one thing that might save her. That child she had lost, all those years ago. To the night air, the figure uttered a promise.

 

"My little Anna...wherever you have gone...I will find you."

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Spoiler

Just a little something to start the next arc in my character's story! Trying to beat the stigma of Orenian women pking after 40 lol

 

[winterblood 11181]

"There had been approximately 412 windows in the Summerhall Keep, nearly a thousand steps, and-. . . It seems like the Bishop even marked down his bowel move-" The young woman's mindless paging of a dusty tome was interrupted; she had always spent the mornings in the grand archives to help in sorting through the donations to the collection.  She had been doing this sort of work ever since she was six years old.  This particular book could have easily been mistook for one's garbage, for the book was in a ghastly and near-ruined state.  Half of it seemed waterlogged, the pages were rotting, and the leather binding was cracked; not to meant its particularly dull subject, fretting over the most miniscule of details in history.  But it still wasn't poetry; she could be thankful for that.  Icy grey-blue eyes shifted up from the pages as a figure approached the desk she was positioned at.  "Ah- Welcome to the Grand Archives.  How may I help you?"

[Nectorist 12869]

Dima wanders around the north, a certain woman appearing quite frequently is his increasingly-hazy memory. Or was it just a girl? At times, he can almost make out what appears to be a second woman, but she vanishes from sight before he can call out a name he doesn't know.