How many centuries deep is your wound?

I drink to our ruined house To all this wickedness, To you, our loneliness together, I raise my glass— To those dead-cold eyes, The lie that has betrayed us This course, brutal world, and the fact That god has not saved us.

A reflective depiction of the Nation of England & City of London as immortal embodiments.

Heavily influenced by history, culture, media & literature.

Selective / 21+

Eternally haunting Saltarii.

I'm including the Republic of Ireland in this as well, because it played a part for a long time, and I've found myself thinking about Ireland as a personification a lot lately. This is not to pigeonhole them, as ultimately this is only a small part of their individual characters—and they all have ways of bleeding into one another, as these are facets that exist within all of them—it’s simply because I enjoy the idea that, taken together, they each embody the major components or occupational spheres that are often identified as Britain’s historical sources of strength:

Arthur [England / United Kingdom]

Arthur oversees. His long lasting occupations include aristocratic landowner, diplomat, senior advisor of the central government, and high-ranking naval and air force commander, alongside broader military leadership and colonial/exploration-linked roles. This represents him as a figure who holds the inherited structure of the state and projects it outward to the wider world, playing a large role in coordinating continuity and relations.

Charles [London]

Charles supervises. His career revolves around law, business, finance, civil service, bureaucracy, and governance. This represents him as the internal operating system of the United Kingdom’s institutions. He structures rules, manages capital flow, works closely with the treasury, and maintains administrative order within the dense institutional core of the state.

Duncan [Scotland]

Duncan innovates. His primary occupations are that of a scientist, inventor, and researcher, developing practical inventions and systems used across civil and military contexts. Duncan’s own military experience evolved from clan warfare and Jacobite service into British Army regiments like The Black Watch, later moving into the technical corps as scientific and technological developments transformed warfare and defence. He’s also focused on energy research and, more recently, environmental science.

Taliesin [Wales]

Taliesin preserves. His most lasting careers are as medical practitioner (including service in the military medical corps as a physician and combat medic), conservation worker, and bardic/cultural worker (poet, performer, and preserver of language, story, and cultural memory). This represents him as the care and continuity function of the UK, dedicated to physical wellbeing, stewardship, and cultural preservation.

Victoria [Northern Ireland] - belonging to @inionnarequiem

Victoria maintains. Her primary occupations are those of the artisan, fabricator, and mechanic, particularly in naval shipbuilding and military engineering. She is the productive and material face of the United Kingdom: the capacity to make the abstract tangible. She represents a resilient endurance that persists through divided identity, traditions, and loyalties.

Ruadhán [Republic of Ireland]

Ruadhán sustains. His careers have included religious vocation, infantry soldier, farmer & manual labourer, smith, and publican. This represents him as deeply defined by lived physical work, where community life is anchored in shared informal spaces, and culture is preserved through everyday social gatherings. His infantry service reflects Ireland’s historical role as the disproportionate pillar of enlisted frontline manpower within British military structures.

Arthur could not govern without Charles. Charles could not fund anything without Victoria. Victoria could not build anything without Duncan. Duncan could not innovate without the social care, agricultural foundations and manpower provided by Taliesin and Ruadhán, and none function together smoothly without Arthur’s coordination.

New Providence Island, 1715.

At the edge of the harbour sat a bustling brothel, its balconies crowded with patrons and its shutters thrown open against the sweltering Caribbean heat, admitting the faint salt air and clamour of the docks. Since Arthur’s arrival, his rum glass had been replenished thrice over. In that time, the girl upon his lap had warmed to his charms and all but ceased her bawdy performance.

Emerald eyes regarded her in quiet amusement as she idly traced the buttons of his waistcoat. A young man of lean build rather than imposing stature, his fair hair sun-bleached by years at sea, sandy strands falling untidily across a face rendered handsome less by symmetry than by character. His weathered countenance and easy bearing, more suggestive of a sailor than a gentleman, had proved sufficient to earn her frankness—the faded scar across his cheekbone seeming only to deepen the roguish impression of hard-won experience—and before long she was yielding information, which was all the cunning Admiral Lord Winchester had wanted from the outset.

He listened as she leaned in close; his shrewd gaze slowly scanning the room in the process. He knew that in a lawless port like Nassau, a face such as his—unidentifiable yet somehow deeply familiar in impression—was wise to keep watch for anyone who might be watching him.

It was in the course of that watchfulness that he noticed the stranger’s eyes on him from the table across. A rough yet sharp-featured fellow, his dark wavy hair worn loose about his shoulders. Arthur knew him for English before a word had passed between them, knew it the way he knew his own coastline in the dark. Owing to his natural predelictions, the girl ceased to hold his attention once the man spoke. Arthur soon dismissed her with a murmured excuse and a coin pressed into her palm. The stranger asked his purpose in Nassau, clearly curious, wary, or both, and Arthur simply smiled, asking why one was necessary in such a place as this. 

“When a man loses purpose, that’s how he dies.”

A probing assertion, to be sure, carrying enough of a warning beneath its philosophical guise to discourage a careless answer, and perhaps as applicable to the man who uttered it as every second soul on this accursed island. They’d been knocking on death’s door ever since they’d lost their purpose, whether they knew it or not. Nassau’s current state was not liberty; it was merely a loud, defiant, drawn out way of dying. These wayward souls, these pirates who’ve denied their origin, in time would be brought to heel, of this England was certain, but that was not the difficulty. The difficulty lay in the recognition of his own hand in what these men had become, a subdued sorrow that no quantity of rum could ease, alongside the understanding that he was, sooner or later, obliged to restore order by whatever means necessary.

He looked at the other in silence for a moment. There was a great deal he could say to something like this, but none of it was simple. It was not wrong, except in that he was no mere man. Purpose was not some attribute he possessed. It was his entire state of being, as fundamental and inescapable as the timber that shaped the fleets upon which his reach depended. He was England, and his empire was purpose incarnate. He, unlike those he sat amongst, could not conceive of himself apart from it.

The blow struck him full in the face, his head instantly slamming back into the very tiles that would have shattered Charlie’s hand—but it could have been worse, if not for the sheer volume of blood that served as a grim lubricant, lessening the force of the otherwise brutal collision. It was the shards of glass embedded in Charlie’s knuckles, tearing into Arthur’s face, that made him hiss. He felt the sharpest of them drive deep into the tissue below his cheekbone, lodging there under the impact, his own blood soon mingling with the deep crimson smear left by his lover to trail down his face.

Yet it took but a moment for Arthur to reclaim his balance. Slowly, he raised his hand to his cheek and felt the wet heat of the wound against his fingers. He then pulled the glass free without delicacy, in a single, unhesitating motion that gave little regard to the pain it brought. A further gush of red followed, which he wiped away absently with the heel of his palm.

He held Charlie's panic stricken gaze without apology or reproach. Calm viridian against the violent red. Unwavering, like ivy holding fast to crumbling stone. If not for the gore, it might have appeared as though he hadn’t felt a thing, because he seemed far more concerned about what he himself was witnessing: the sheer collapse of Charlie’s rage into something defencelessly raw, horrified and exposed. In some way, Arthur felt relieved. He had been unable to empathise with Charlie’s frustration, nor calm the fury it gave rise to, but this—this open wound of shame—Arthur understood perfectly well. 

The deluge of apologies instantly pulled at Arthur’s heartstrings, piercing him somewhere just as heavily guilt-ridden. All he had wanted was to provide safety and stability, but instead the evening had deteriorated into a shouting match, blood everywhere, and both of them injured. He was the one who ought to be apologising, but Arthur was never very good at that. Anyway, that wasn’t what mattered right now. What mattered was tending to the aftermath. “Don’t,” he said, all sharpness in his voice having left him. Instead there was a reassurance in his tender tone that stemmed from having dealt with far worse situations than this in his unfathomably long lifetime. “Don’t apologise. I’m fine. It’s all right. Do you hear me? Everything will be all right, just let me tend to you.”

He reached to take the injured hand in both of his own, his gentle grip very still against Charlie's involuntary trembling. Without releasing him, Arthur took the towel from the rail and folded it carefully around his knuckles, loosely, so that it covered the wounds without disturbing the glass still embedded within. Clearly, Arthur took far greater care with Charlie than he did with his own person.

As the fabric met Charlie’s hand, it was not only his blood that stained it. A persistent trickle ran from Arthur’s face onto the makeshift compress, darkening the white cotton in a spreading stain that he did not remark upon, his focus fixed entirely on the hand he cradled.

“The first aid box is in the kitchen. Let’s get you sorted properly there.” Though his expression did not change, beneath the immediate act Arthur internally began to count down the hours before his rapid healing would come into play, and the necessity of concealment he would have to uphold. This remained a distant worry for the moment however, lingering in the background of his thoughts like thunder gathering beyond a darkening horizon. He rapidly yanked another towel and spread it across the floor, unwilling to risk Charlie slipping or cutting his feet on the scattered glass. God, what a mess. 

Repost & fill in the words you most associate with your character.

Animal: Lion

Colour: Crimson Red

Month: April

Songs: : Land of Hope and Glory

Number: +44

Day or Night: Early Evening

Plant: Roses (thorns and all)

Smell: Petrichor & Sage

Season: Spring

Food: Cream scones

Astrological Sign: Taurus

Element: Earth

Drink: Tea or Rum