before the time of the RP, a slight peek into where Ivan and Eudoxia began.
❀ For my muse to ask yours to become their mistress
Eudoxia had arrived at court with her father when she had turned all but five years old, such a procession occurred only days after the death of her cousins who passed the riches of House Glinski onto her father. Such an act was tremendous and perhaps even scandalous; alas, her father, who had always fought for his daughter’s future and pushed for her to take her place by the Tsar’s eventual side.
She was reintroduced at the Kremlin, however, aged only fifteen. Younger than the other women who were all born into noble blood, Eudoxia always pushed for respect and Russia’s status first. She would wax lyrical folklore about her birth, and how when conceived beneath the full moon a druid had hailed as a Russian Prophet, leaving almost everyone’s eyes to loiter upon her as if she were some celestial being.
It was only after the unfortunate death of her mother, did she see Ivan for the first time. Pure (perhaps) at sixteen, their eyes met over the grand hall of the Kremlin — leaving time to slow and splinter into what seemed like an infinite divide. No one else caught his eye like that, and no one else kept it. Their eyes would meet throughout the year, yearning and starved gazes stolen at celebrations, banquets and simple processions of Russia’s greatness.
And though he may have taken many a mistress of all shape and size, with a wife who found Russia a difficult climate to take control of, Eudoxia remained — loitering in the shadows, as her betrothal to the Tsesarevich was put in order. She, who had grown up under the pretence that she was to one day marry the Tsar, remained silent in public but wrathful under the roof of her father. How could he foul up such a promise? By disgust and disappointment alone, Eudoxia took all power from Yury, and left him in charge only by name. All funds, coming in and out of their House went by Eudoxia’s lips alone; leaving Yury to nurse broken pride, and to only find some rebuttal in remarrying someone his daughter’s age.
She cursed him for it, she stripped him of his pride and left him only to act as her mouthpiece. He would learn his lesson, he would not leave his daughter to look a fool.
But it seemed, such a move was uncalled for — as only years, weeks, days before the ceremony that’d tie her to the Tsesarevich, Ivan called her name. She went without query or hesitation — draped in furs and rubies, a splendour of her wealth and good fortune. Still, only young, she moved as if she had expected such an audience. As if her time spent in the surrounding woods, with women banished by the deceased Tsar, had something to do with it. When they met, finally alone beneath the dancing hearth full of embers and ash, Eudoxia refused to kneel; and met him face to face, grasping her cloak of wolf-fur around her shoulders.
This moment would be recalled in poetry, history and mythology — it would become a moment in which the dark arts and the Russian crown intertwined. Where love, lust and need became something that took root in the bones of the Rurik Dynasty.
“My Tsar,” were her first words. “I am here.”
