amyselia

I was actually bragging just a few hours about how this conflict hasn't had much ooc toxicity? I'm not sure if you're speaking about the CRP as I wasn't there but I actually haven't caught a single instance of real vitriol. Lion has been stressing acceptance in the Oren discord as to not have any of that, and if there is any then it's snuffed by a lot of people who care about their community beyond this civil war (most). Individual reports of toxicity are sadly not able to be controlled, and as for the peterphile thing that's just something said by the immature bunch, it's not widespread.

I don't mean to psychoanalyze but being those on the Imperialist side and having been displaced from Providence city and original Oren discords, it can be very easy to get overwhelmed. You have to try to focus on seeing this as a consequence of the roleplay rather than OOC.

POEMS OF WAR & WHIMSY

By Anna Ulyssa

((Art by Edwin Austin Abbey))

These poems are published on behalf of The Imperial Princess Anna Ulyssa of the Holy Orenian Empire, now an Acolyte of the Canon Church, who contemporarily suffers from mild hysteria due to the loss of her parents. These are writings of several years of reflection upon the state of humanity and man’s will, beginning from age 14 and ending at age 21. 

1

Musings of a Beard, 1859

The dead God hath forsworn Horen,

Tempt by the widower mistress: power,

kiss her honey hair.

Kill their young, let not men recover,

their unity shall mean our perish. Thus,

let us bathe in the blood of sterility,

and slumber in dreams of genocide.

Urguan, thy glory shall prevail.

2

Crumbling Humanity, 1859

Red Pontiff ‘pon his glory schism, allegiance corrupts canonism.

The canine scent of Vargentgotz: slaughter kin, forsake thyne cross.

The Black King’s Moot, when men lick tongue on heathen boot.

Woe to ye who praise the sun, your folly is the meekest son.

Goats dine from Petrine broth, and bleet when Oren bids no troth.

3

Wigged Brothers, 1860

Haiku

Here lies peacefulness

dovetailing with apathy

To create frailty.

4

Devise of Kinslayers, 1860

In the night

will blade in crimson bite

the deadened flesh of prince and wife.

Venomed bread

will fell the King to bed,

be righteous men beseeched to tread

O’er the corpse

of hacked and sewn up dwarves

that the day will see a crown in court

Of the Real

heir-Prince that’s been concealed

and lords shall crumble ‘till they kneel.

On the page

will stand victor of age,

a fleshling prince upon old stage.

5

Southbridge, 1861

Bled their tongue

with the taste of carrion

black

to abstain from death’s permanence.

Ble’ssed the jaunt

of heartland soldiers in

silver

to regale the ruination of armistice.

Bridge of Humanity,

contest the North

And the mini-men.

Bridge of Dwarves,

contest the Wigged

And the mercenary.

6

Consort Curse, 1864

A magnanimous lady

falters not before monarchs,

she protests in silent loathing.

A revered lady glitters,

yet she embitters.

A lady of great distinction

commands courtiers’ passion,

but is never a court quaintrelle.

She is prized on highest podiums

as the most charismatic socialite

yet the most exceptional warrior.

She must be relegated to shrew

because she is most shrewd

(and equal parts imbecile).

A perfect lady: she is male,

better than halfwitted girl.

7

The Duel at Arichsdorf, 1866

Honor tilts the sword to dirt

and buries it in ancestral catacombs,

where it waits beside the husks of soldiers

of the 18 years war, 

not Urguani.

Honor is besmirched,

a graverobber comes to dig it out with

a shovel in-hand used to crush the bones of

slumbering corpses as they wake

from the disturbance.

A pavane of skeletons begins,

the dead take up arms against men

with the steel of legacy and faith once

enshrouded beneath centuries-old coffins.

Scrags wither,

for they cannot battle what denies they exist,

And honor sinks once more into pits.

Anna crossed the Lorraine over her chest, noting the necessity to pray for the elves of Ebonwood after the attempt on the Princeps' life. 

Claude remembers the battle against Azdromoth in which several of the heresy's dragons appeared before the city of Elvenesse and torched it in blasphemous flames; so too does she remember the burning of dragon statues in the city of Providence by many of the belligerents now in-support of her friend Anastasia's vile son who takes up arms against his mother's will. Once more, she remembers how the magical destruction of Dobrov was deemed a 'miracle' by those who opposed Oren.

Claude peers down towards the chalice within her hand, pondering on the subjectivity of events in human existence. "God and the Exalted will shower their blessings upon their men by granting them long standing glory and victory. Naught else."

"He called down my grandson's banners and labelled us 'incompetent' and yet my imbecile of a husband fell to his feet and kissed his toes in idolization, all to contend against a man who granted us ready land and sought our betterment. I wish I believed in divorce this day." Spoke Claude with a hand bunched in anger.

Acolyte Anna stood by her brother's side as court continued on for hours, eyelids beating down upon her pupils like a hammer to an anvil. In the inner realm, her heart was broken and twisted into pieces of blackened coal. How could her parents defy their own succession? How could her brother defy his parents' will? How could her brothers seek to see the other murdered by their own sword?

The questions fried her into exhaustion. Only through prayer did her nerves calm.

This was the anathema's final repentance, and the punishment of God.

Claude's eyebrows rose up in utter shock, her youngest daughter being a stranger to her ever since her abscond from the family, "A coup, Luci? And one so brazenly executed against your family's word? It seems as if I cannot escape betrayal, not from the de Savoies and not from the Pruvias."

Claude spits onto her husband's side of the bed, removing herself from the Castle of Provins donning armor and arms in support of her grandson, the Count of Provins.

"This is mother's will." Spoke Anna, her chin supported against the window of her palace bedroom by an elbow's structure. 

"This is mother's will." The once stalwart and steady Novellen repeated towards the wind, the tears that began to flood her eyes catching nothing but the smog of the city proper as they cocooned her in a waterfall of humanity's demise.

"Where is Peter?" She howled as the tears began to consume her for the umpteenth time that day, horror-stricken ladies in wait rushing to swathe the Princess in her traumatic tumult.

"Get me Peter, I-I cannot go on, I cannot," her shoulders began to cradle in the arms of her ladies, palms seizing upon the closest comfort, "They are both dead, dead, dead, dead..."

Wisdom as always.

Princess Anna Ulyssa received tale of the war's end from the eerie castle of Mardon, the peace being read to her preceding the emergence of a light chuckle forth her lip. "For all that Haense lost and all it won for the half-beings, its men receive nothing but a warranty of safety for the crown 'pon their King's head. What is more, the Empire gains no penalty that it could not have paid with mollified ease - dispossessed of nothing that it cared for."  The stalwart Princess paused, various drafts of ruminations laid out before her in a pavane of neurotic energy. "Before the age of prophets, the Dwarves had readily assisted Hanseti's destruction of their brothers in Renatus, only to wage war upon them within the century's end, for the half-men had grown jealous that The True Faith had harmonized humanity and left them marooned in nothingness."

Her eyes were bruised with exhaustion and still she lifted them towards the seven skies: "He shall see to his children's folly soon enough, when the bell tolls on time and men are made to test their faith in the final hour. May he reap his vengeance on us all. May he reap his vengeance on humanity."

Name: Anna Ulyssa

Age: 23

Race: Human

Service: (nun, monk, priest, militant, etc.) Priest

Where do you wish to serve?: Providence or Mardon

OUT-OF-CHARACTER

Username: amyselia

Discord: amyselia#0001

Princess Anna Ulyssa receives the news of her greatest friend's death via a courier's letter while awaiting her brother's presence in Mardon, the stalwart woman's heart decapitated with the single beat of a breath. Her fingers let the paper slip with nay an ounce of care, eyes raising from the ground to peer upwards towards the seven skies.

"My dearest Nikolai, friend of my heart and mind. I had only just returned. How could time have been so envious?"

Her tears did not flow, nor did her heart sink; she was empty, standing with nothing but denial.

Claude of Savoy, from the cloisters of Aster Hall's hay-stacked dungeons for the mentally ill and ascetic zealots, uttered another ill-begotten sigh on behalf of her family's neverending dramatics. "If there is not already a play in the drafts about our demented family, I would be disappointed if playwrights across the globe did not take advantage of such a paradoxical series of events as that which seems to curse the name of 'Savoie' in the lands of Almaris. Betrayal, heartbreak and murder aplenty." 

She thus resumed scouring through hundreds of books brimmed with centuries of research.

Princess Anna Ulyssa stands before her brother and his wife, ax swung over bicep after a tedius day of laboring over the town of Vienne. Her smile, though imbued with lethargy, was everlasting.

A princess, disavowed of public life, drums with knit gloves against the battered build of a training dummy, her thoughts compounding a recent assault on her family. Mounting anger was beat with every bust against torn leather.

8 hours ago, GMRO said:

Karl Sigmar found himself scanning over the missive with some curiosity. The boy had been raised in a war, had watched from the battlements the wars in Karosgrad, and even the death of an Orenian knight in the square that day yet other memories continued to parade his conscious. Times before war in which he walked about the ballroom of Providence as a  youth, and the friendly faces that which he found inside. "I don't think my father would wish to kill any if it did not seem as though some wished to extinguish our own kingdom or foam at the mouth at its mention."

Anna Ulyssa mutters the sentiment in exact words from across the continent where she stood in prayer at the altar, though exchanging ‘kingdom’ for ‘empire’. 
 

She adds thereafter: “The haeseni have never given us peace since their departure. It is a folly of revenge that consumes them. I pray for the souls of those whose life hinges on our destruction, who now cry wolf when their malevolence makes them a target, as all malevolence should. Amen.”

Anna Ulyssa waltzed towards her daily lessons with a heavy head that day; she did not disapprove of the bride (in fact, she found her annoyingly un-disapprovable), but she realized that her brother's betrothal meant her mother's time was closing in on her, and the thought tickled her throat with nausea.

 It had been a year or so since Anna's temper had been subdued by the unruly teachings of the court's Master of Swords, yet still her heart clung to the nostalgic glory of her youth, when her rage was the monsoon of the courts, and her mother the herald of it. She could but smile at the chaos of the memory.

Arriving, the Princess went forth into the sand pit, palms wrapped in dirtied bandages gripping into themselves as she readied for the day. She would take this new future one day at a time.

"Pah!" A dummy was struck.

"Ultimately, men choose the righteous!" Rejoices Anna Ulyssa as she passes cloth and bandages to the wounded soldiers, of which none were the untouchable Ferrymen band.

Princess Anna Ulyssa rode across the formidable remains of the trodden Tripartite men alongside her youngest brother (@Lionhz), their bloodied Aster chain chanting a song of victory throughout the now-desolate battle field. "Look down, Freddie. Don't tire of the sight, for we shall see this again soon." She proclaimed over the sound of her horse's hoofs battering down upon the head of a fallen heathen.

Claude remains oblivious as she stood amidst the ongoing slaughter of the battle of Lower Petra, sinking sword into blood-stained dirt. Exhaustion poured into her, and the woman fell chest-first against the earth, breaths heaving below her lips as she neared death's slumber. She lay surrounded by thousands of those who had been stripped of their mortal coil, her soul finding itself depleted. It was but an insignificant end, an end which she longed for many times on this brutal day, yet her breaths continued until she awoke to find that the day had been won.

For a moment, her family flashed before her eyes. She thought of her father, gone to ash. Her children, her husband, her sisters, her brothers and... her mother. What of her mother?

Lady Claude smiles the sun's smile, taking her bundled grandchild into her arms after a long day of worry and angst, the premature birth gripping the Chateau d'Aubepine on that day, "You will do great things, little Fernand." She whispered, placing a smooch against the baby's head with endless love.

"Nice try - use more cannon fodder next time!" Anna loured at the Haeseni, returning to the preparation of her armor set.

"We can't stop winning!" Anna beamed over a hot chocolate upon hearing of the news, knuckles dipped into ice cold waters to relax the nerves after a hard punch to a certain Falcone's face.