The Phoenix Chronicles

O'khasis was the city in which Irene changed the world and defeated the Shadow Lord, abolishing the monarchy once and for all. There's more to this story that I wanna analyze for myself and fix up, but essentially, O'khasis is remembered for being the location of the final battle that ended things. When Irene passed the concordat that protected her treaty it lasted for a while. It was almost a thousand years before the Ro'maeves showed up in O'Khasis.

The Ro'maeves in O'khasis

The Ro'maeve family wasn't native to O'khasis. When they first arrived there, they were a insignificant family, aside from the fact they are descended from Esmund, from the north. Then several generations later, a promising young Ro'maeve man was elected as its count. He was remembered as stoic and strategic, but it was him who rewrote the concordat to abolish the democratic system of O'khasis and protect his place as its leader, so that instead of a new count being elected, the position would be passed down to his son and stay in the Ro'maeve family. He also established the O'khassian council. You're already familiar with Jury of Nine, a group of skilled paladins who all together took up one singular slot on the Council of O'Khasis. Alongside them were politicians, advisors, other members of secular and spiritual authorities (including the high priest) and the leaders- the king and queen, and the Vicar. The Vicar was already a spiritual leading figure in O'khasis before, but according to the rewritten concordat, the Vicar is now one of several members of the council, as opposed to simply leading alongside the count. The Ro'maeve family's goal in abolishing the democratic system was to one day reinstate the monarchy and rule over the Ru'aun region so that in the very far future, O'khasis would become an empire.

But by the end of his life, the quiet impassive man who rewrote Irene's concordat had gone mad. Mad with power, but also in general. He became a hot head, he was insane, he was delirious, and he was terrifying. The intense change in attitude from his youth to his final years was drastic and surprised people who knew him. This would be recorded in History.

What people didn't know at the time was the fact that this was only the beginning of fate's consequences for overwriting what The Matron had decided.

The Ro'maeve Family Curse

Though it wasn't really a curse- no magic was put upon their bloodline that made things the way they were, but from then on, each generation of Ro'maeve family members would go mad and lose their minds faster and more drastically than the last. The firstborns who inherited the power would be the biggest examples of the most extremely mad men. By the time Garte Ro'maeve was coming into power, and O'khasis was getting closer and closer to becoming a monarchy, eight generations after the concordat was rewritten, it was known:

Each person born with Ro'maeve blood was fated to madness and dementia, but each person who came into taking the Ro'maeve name in some other way, such as marriage or, hypothetically, a Ro'maeve man's wife's infidelity with another man resulting in a child born of adultery, then the person with the Ro'maeve name but not its flesh and blood is fated to eternal misery and sadness.

And it was known by then that in the history of the Ro'maeve dynasty, there has not been a single Lady of O'khasis that wasn't absolutely miserable. To be married to a Ro'maeve is to be condemned to a dejected and sorrowful life.

And thus is the fate of Garte and Zianna, him mad with power and her miserable in its shadow.

Laurance should have stayed blind. No Irene statue, no gaining his sight back, and I won’t intentionally be giving him any crutches to lean on to make the fact that he’s blind hinder him any less. And that’s not tragic just because he can no longer see, it’s tragic because Laurance is the kind of person who looks at the world as a sculpted masterpiece of art, that whatever higher being created it is an artist. His entire experience with the world is through its beauty. Among everyone who’s familiar with him, he’d been known for always stopping in his tracks to admire a glorious landscape or some pretty foliage or a nicely structured building. Laurance fell in love with traveling when his father, who used to be a merchant before he became lord of Meteli, would take him to all sorts of places, and Laurance relished in the beauty of the architecture or a landscape that was beyond imagination. He loved the fact that no two places looked the same. The world to him was an endless source of new art everywhere he went. For this reason, he got used to the streets of Meteli, so he grew bored, but Cadenza grew to love taking walks around its outskirts to admire foliage and pick flowers because when she was a child and her brother was a teenager, he was the one who loved those walks, and he used to take her with him whenever he went. This is what inspired him to adore literal art. He painted, he read and wrote poetry, he’d always look out for paintings or mosaics or sculptures… We also know how much he loves beautiful people, which is what earned him the nickname “Casanova of Meteli.”

When he became a guard, it was because he wanted to do something practical for work, but art was always his passion and something personal to him that stayed in his heart. Moreover, Laurance was a visual learner. He learned everything he knows by watching, including fighting, which to him was like dancing with a weapon and an enemy. What I’m getting at is his vision wasn’t just one of his senses that he used the most, it was an integral part of his character. It was part of his personality.

When Laurance became a shadow knight, he lost a great deal of himself and who he was, but whatever parts of him remained weren’t lost until he became blind. -Though, part of him wonders if he would’ve lost his artistry anyway. Like how food became tasteless when you contracted covid, beauty would start mean nothing to him, but he never gets to find out. His connection to the world, to people, his ability to paint, read, write… he had to learn how to fight again but not the way he used to that was so natural for him. And he had to learn how to live without vision and how to fight without his learning advantage- As I said, he’s a visual learner. He had to relearn how to learn. And he never gets it back. He just continues figuring out how to persevere as a guard without knowing where to aim his sword, and as a shadow knight who’s slowly losing control over himself. And both these new parts of him, the monster he’s becoming and the guard without eyesight, slowly overwrite everything he’s ever been. He’s slowly losing his grip of himself and his identity.