[right][sup][sub][h1][b][color=4a2706] 𝖉 𝖚  𝕲 𝖚 𝖎 𝖑 𝖑 𝖆 𝖗 𝖒 𝖊 𝖘[/color]
[color=bdbdbd]𝖉 𝖚  𝕲 𝖚 𝖎 𝖑 𝖑 𝖆 𝖗 𝖒 𝖊 𝖘[/color] [/b][/h1][/sub][/sup][/right][hr][table][row][sup][h1][color=2c2c2c][b]▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅[/b][right][b]▅▅▅▅▅[/b][/right][/color][/h1][/sup]
[center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/XYJW8GmH/hellie-name.png[/img]
[h2][sup][sup][color=bdbdbd][i](Hloþhilde du Guillarmes)[/i][/color][/sup][/sup][/h2][/center][/row][ROW][CELL][center][sub][sup][sub][h1][b][color=4a2706] 𝖕 𝖗 𝖔 𝖋 𝖎 𝖑 𝖊[/color]
[color=bdbdbd]𝖕 𝖗 𝖔 𝖋 𝖎 𝖑 𝖊[/color] [/b][/h1][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][/center][COLOR=bdbdbd][indent][justify]Though obedient, dutiful, and attentive to a fault, none of these qualities have ever seemed to improve "Tilly's" situation any. She's the spare—her sister the heir—and the sooner she accepts this is all the sooner she could one day, maybe, know peace.

Tilly has never asked whether her father ever truly loved her; not for any lack of wondering, but for fear of the answer. She knows her mother loved her terribly, but mother is dead now—has been for years—maddened in her scarce and restless sleep by the Dreaming Fevers. A few wetnurses who doted on her when she was a babe-girl, maybe a scullery maid or two she had once presumed to call friend, but now there is no one. Only an elder sister who looks down on her with pity, and the man who strikes them equally and utterly powerless beneath his well-laid plans—their purpose, their roles, all pre-ordained before they'd ever had any say. Perhaps before they'd ever been born at all. No wonder the younger sister, neglected and ignored (save for when she is being chided), has recessed so deeply into herself, speaking only when spoken to, moving so quietly as to startle those she passes.

Where grooming and rulership have made her sister Helgeða headstrong, willful, and self-assured, years of obsequiousness have turned Tilly to jelly, a slippery, pliant thing, aiming at all times to anticipate the appetites of others, sense their wraths and retributions, and appease these ere they have ever had the chance to arise. A creature which shrinks away into shadows; a creature easily controlled, easily used. Whisper a few false promises into her eager ear, promises of affection and adoration and praise, and she becomes alike to wet clay in the hand. Offer her friendship (real or feigned), and for that friend she would burn the world.

'Tis no secret that her father loathes this fawning complacency, but who else but he could be to blame for it?—when he and all his droughts of passion are the very reason the younger Guillarmes sister so dearly thirsts—for appraisal, for judgment, for consideration, for any kind of regard whatever, no matter how it might condescend to her. Still, in his hard and unyielding wisdom he did not see the role he had played in breeding into the creature the very same weakness he resented, so he gave her, as no heir at all, but nonetheless his daughter, a choice most cruel: to do him, and all his forebears, no dishonor, she could become a magistrate, a prioress, or a soldier. And so on June the 27th, 594 Imperial, Hloþhilde of House Guillarmes chose the sword.[/justify][/INDENT][/COLOR][/CELL][CELL][center][sub][sup][sub][h1][b][color=4a2706] 𝖕 𝖔 𝖗 𝖙 𝖗 𝖆 𝖎 𝖙[/color]
[color=bdbdbd]𝖕 𝖔 𝖗 𝖙 𝖗 𝖆 𝖎 𝖙[/color] [/b][/h1][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][img]https://i.imgur.com/aC7JENs.png[/img]
[sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][/center][/cELL][/ROW][/TABLE][hr][table][row][sup][h1][color=2c2c2c][b]▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅[/b][right][b]▅▅▅▅▅[/b][/right][/color][/h1][/sup]
[center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/qMFbPNgZ/theuerdank-fraktur-regular-1.webp[/img]
[h2][sup][sup][color=bdbdbd][i](Helgeða du Guillarmes)[/i][/color][/sup][/sup][/h2][/center][/row][ROW][CELL][center][sub][sup][sub][h1][b][color=4a2706] 𝖕 𝖗 𝖔 𝖋 𝖎 𝖑 𝖊[/color]
[color=bdbdbd]𝖕 𝖗 𝖔 𝖋 𝖎 𝖑 𝖊[/color] [/b][/h1][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][/center][COLOR=bdbdbd][indent][justify]A charming and affable girl from the start, all her life "Hellie" blossomed where her baby sister withered, dared where the latter cautioned, smiled where the other sulked. The wherefore, of course, is not lost on her: she had every access to their family's opportunities and assets, their manservants' fondness, and, seemingly, the sheer luck and good fortune which could only have been scraped straight from the marrow of their long-dead gods—for Hellie comes as caustically witty as her father, as beautiful as her mother, and in all, effortlessly captivating. Any plump rosebush, pruned and watered and bee-visited, would flourish where wilts its brittle and shaded cousin. Their mother loved her, as deeply and truly as she loved all her children (every miscarry, every infant taken by the pox), but their father—their father dragged Hellie to every gala, every court, glinting all the while in tooth and eye ("My lord," he would say, "prithee meet my daughter, Helgeða")—and of this she despised every moment.

Not for the injustice of the sisters' circumstance (though it was certainly unjust) but for its insincerity did she loathe and dread the thought of a life wasted politicking. She had wanted, once, longer ago than she cares to recall, to be a singer, and yet father permitted singing only when entertaining certain guests; guests, he would say, "of the correct temperament for song," lest a child's chirping shouldst irritate and avert. So when very few of father's friends fell into that jovial mood, and those who did were all covetous old lechers with vile ideas slithering across their thoughts the way wrong notes slither between the staffs on the page, less interested in the melodies than the pretty mouth whence they spilled, Hellie stopped singing.

One year, not so many years ago, a new fashion swept through the courts of Laachtalia, and all the sudden the upper classes, but especially young, wealthy débutantes, were seen all over the empire trading the lustre of their jewels for smooth, dull jet, their silvers and moon-golds for pewter or arsenical bronze, all their garishness for funereal black. Walking down a city road, the unaware observer could have sworn one of the emperor's sons or perhaps a prince-elector had died, for the state of dress throughout the city, and every city, forespoke of a populace ordered into mourning; but when the gazettes called the new style infinitely slimming and august, or purported it to bestow on the rakish young a dignity and elegance seen nowhere else across all their ranks (except, mayhap, the opera houses), father fell right in. And Hellie, for her turn, while selling off her favorite tailcoats, pretended she had all her life detested color.

And on and on and on.

Tilly will never understand what it's like to be the favorite; because deep in the yearning twinkle of her gaze as it crosses the room, she still envies. It's Hellie who knows best that there's nothing about her to envy whatever. Ah—but it may be 'tis for the best. If Tilly ever offered it, Hellie would switch with her in an instant. A dangerous thought, when there is the prosperity (a meager one, but prosperity all the same) of an earldom to think of. Duty comes first, and Hellie's sister has sacrificed quite enough already, she reckons. 'Tis work best left to those with ever more to give...[/justify][/INDENT][/COLOR][/CELL][CELL][center][sub][sup][sub][h1][b][color=4a2706] 𝖕 𝖔 𝖗 𝖙 𝖗 𝖆 𝖎 𝖙[/color]
[color=bdbdbd]𝖕 𝖔 𝖗 𝖙 𝖗 𝖆 𝖎 𝖙[/color] [/b][/h1][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][img]https://i.imgur.com/luyOTrb.png[/img]
[sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][/center][/cELL][/ROW][/TABLE][hr][table][row][sup][h1][color=2c2c2c][b]▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅[/b][right][b]▅▅▅▅▅[/b][/right][/color][/h1][/sup]
[center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/gJmrGygz/theuerdank-fraktur-regular-1.webp[/img]
[h2][sup][sup][color=bdbdbd][i](Grinault-Pôntëfors du Guillarmes)[/i][/color][/sup][/sup][/h2][/center][/row][ROW][CELL][center][sub][sup][sub][h1][b][color=4a2706] 𝖕 𝖗 𝖔 𝖋 𝖎 𝖑 𝖊[/color]
[color=bdbdbd]𝖕 𝖗 𝖔 𝖋 𝖎 𝖑 𝖊[/color] [/b][/h1][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][/center][COLOR=bdbdbd][indent][justify]Everything he gilds he gilds in pinchbeck; his every surface a veneer like a derelict hôtel, or the hand-crafted facets of a glass gemstone; done everywhere and always in mimicry of a palace's majesty, a sapphire's brilliance. A pretender through and through is he, even though he sits his house seat legitimately; an artifice, though he is flesh and blood like any other.

This is a man who, upon the birth of his two daughters, issued not one thought to the sweat at his goodwife's brow, the labor of her breathing, the blood, the feces. He cannot even admit (not truthfully) to the abject dignity of having wondered what to name them. Oh, his thoughts resided on names, 'tis true enough—but not how melodic their syllables, or auspicious their meanings; rather, what reverence those names should stir in the peerage, and what awe in the commons. In the end he would deign to bestow upon his children, one after the other, the names of Nērunnian warrior-queens, that as women grown they should command more authority and respect wheresoever in the heartlands they one day traveled, from Pfalz-Dräven to the Free Cities. They would find better husbands that way, enjoy the fondness of their more instructors, take more pride in themselves. They would, in a word, seem "more Laachtalian."

His every uttering he weighs and measures, drop by painstaking drop; every tic, every habit carefully cultivated in service to the counterfeit which is his personage.

Have his friends and confidants (of which there are, most assuredly, few) even met the man behind the mask? Had his wife, Agalind, before her death? Has anyone? Even his daughters, those forlorn, long-neglected daughters, struggle to recall a time when he was merry with laughter and drink, or wallowing in sorrow, or swept away, rudderless, on any one of the terrible, beautiful raptures which make a man a man. Which make him more than his own homunculus, shambling empty-hearted along from plot to plot, obeying with all his life some design beyond his understanding.

The rumor which prevails among the manservants goes that after, in very brisk succession, losing first his elderly father to an execution by hanging, and then his wife to that horrific, soul-eating disease, the lord of Rodon succumbed to some delusion dictating that he could have saved either or both of them if he had only been wiser, wealthier—in some tangible measure, more powerful. But no matter. Grief, jealousy, hate, madness—all bevels on the same blade. A blade which has cut at this lowly noble family for as long as anyone alive has known.[/justify][/INDENT][/COLOR][/CELL][CELL][center][sub][sup][sub][h1][b][color=4a2706] 𝖕 𝖔 𝖗 𝖙 𝖗 𝖆 𝖎 𝖙[/color]
[color=bdbdbd]𝖕 𝖔 𝖗 𝖙 𝖗 𝖆 𝖎 𝖙[/color] [/b][/h1][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][img]https://i.imgur.com/2isKLpX.png[/img]
[sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][/center][/cELL][/ROW][/TABLE][hr][center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/TPQ9ryj2/image-1.png[/img][/center][hr]