Turning a Blind Eye; A Petition to His Holiness

[bickando 3967]

Your Holiness,

 

Just as mine burgundy blood has afflicted the daughters of Aaun with the Curse of Klarov, this blindness to remind of our blindness to the past - the ways of the Aaunishmen, this strife that is the only constant in its history, has brought ruin time and again to the heartlands. This petty intercession of the church and its princes, the creation of a regency and the exile of my eldest, cannot be enough.

 

My late husband sought to unite these Heartlands of ours; he dreamt of times long past when he drew the plans for peace upon the banks of the Constance, of an age in which peasants were born and died without fear of the flames of war. Finding him little wanting as a ruler and diplomat, the strife of our children took the world as a storm. Their infighting did not begin this year, or last; it is inherent to the Aaunishmen, to the House of Alstion.

 

A child deserves the love of their parents; mine I hope to say I gave in full. Yet so too must those destined to rule require a proper education, one of politic and piety and warfare, and that duty was made to fall to Jean de Rennes and the lords of Aaun. We as a royal couple knowing that a Veletzian education would never be accepted, and John believing with charming naivete his friend a servant of GOD; it was through their tutelage that hatred was bred into their cores. Jean taught of Aaunish primacy at the cost of all else, of intrigues and theft. This education was given to all our sons save James, whom we hoped would one day enter the priesthood; though it broke John’s heart when James left, ‘twould little compare to that of our children.

 

What I mean is that a regency alone could not hope to quell the chaos in the heart of Whitespire. It is a problem pervasive throughout the Apostolic Kingdom, from its pettiest lords to the Throne of Paradisus. It infects its sons, its daughters. The history of Aaun is one of assassinations and plots and forgotten pledges. As surely as it infected Charles it shall infect little Godwin.

 

I petition that the Throne of St. Daniel take true primacy throughout, and a greater papal state be formed of the Apostolic Kingdom to cleanse these sins.

 

The Holy Mother Church need not accept the lip service of lords so tainted - instead teach and enforce piety truly in my adoptive home, the kingdom so named for the realms of Exalted and Saints. Pull it from its roots and remind Horen's sons of the lord most high. Return the heartlands of Man to His light, and let us laity honor truly the names in whose shadows we wallow. Let this discord not continue on into the future ever after.

 

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GOD Guides,

HRAM Amelya of Middelan,

Dowager Queen of Aaun

 

[Caranthir_ 2533]

 

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F/W to: HRH Queen Dowager 23rd Sigismund’s End, 1989

Tristan de Rennes Tremazan, The Marshlands

 

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Your Royal Highness, 

 

It is to my great sadness that I learned of your letter to the Pontiff this past Saint’s Day. Your family matters are your own, and I will not begrudge a mother so clearly in a state of lamentation on the fate of her family, one she was so deeply involved in and had such a great hand in creating. 

 

I write simply to ask you to keep my late brother's name out of your mouth and away from your pen. I will remind you that my brother died a Cardinal, so the fitting address in the future is ‘His Eminence’. I will now move to your specific accusations on my late brother. Firstly, he was as Aaunish as I am, which is to say not at all. Our settlement in the country is only due to the intercession of your late husband His Majesty of beloved memory. If you would accuse my brother of fanaticism of any kind, it is to His late Majesty as the man who had him freed from the prisons of Gwynon. I need not address the claims of thievery and intrigue, as I believe you may have confused him with your own kinsmen.

 

Secondly, you highlight that only James ‘Whitespire’ was not taught by my brother. That seems to me to be quite unlikely indeed. If you had hopes of him taking the cloth of priesthood, then why would you not have him taught by a priest, as my late brother Jean was? It strikes me either as a poor recollection of the past — a certain curse of your ilk as you yourself recognise —  or an attempt to confuse the reader of your public petition, the Pontiff. I cannot guess at the content of your heart or the motivation of your pen, but it strikes me to be more likely that you attempt to conceal that all of your children were treated equally and taught equally by the same man or group of individuals. Their sins are their own, and any crimes are firmly on their own shoulders. I say respectfully now what I have alluded to above, Your Highness, that you have no right to speak of my late brother in the way that you do. 

 

Yet, I believe the thrust of your letter is something of far more consequence than your rather circumstantial examples imply. You have taken a quarrel between kin, indeed your quarrel with your firstborn son and your grandson, and have made it into an excuse for the disenfranchisement, displacement, or even death of an entire race of peoples. As I have made clear to you above, I am not Aaunish, not by birth, but I will zealously defend the right of any peoples to exist. For the sake of the love that you bore the young Edmund as your playmate, that of your late husband, and indeed that which you must still feel for your estranged family, I implore Your Highness to think past the acrimonious noise and the conflicts of the young and to see more objectively in the future.

 

Yours sincerely,

Tristan de Rennes

 

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