#eirian || into the nightlands

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Welcome back!! I hope that you’ve been doing well.

I’m so glad that you’ve returned to this hellsite. You are honestly my favorite hetalia writer. I’m obsessed with your characterization of these immortal weirdos.

Do you think you’ll be continuing the time travel fic at some point? No rush! I’m just curious if it’s abandoned.

Thank you! I'm getting back to normal and yes, Danegeld will be updated. I will be finishing that thing if it kills me! I've got two chapters written but had to be fixed slightly before publishing as I had the whole time travel plot start moving into the past. There's... A lot of goddamn ways to do time travel plots who'd've thunk.

Further explanation under the cut for spoiler alerts.

I also had to solve the problem about how to chart Arthur's ebb and flow relationship with his mother and match it where the cultural relationship of the divine feminine or just the feminine in general and how that looks when mother, son and grandson son are equally vicious cunts but in extremely different flavors. Eirian as firmly in the pre-Roman iron age with possible memory to the bronze age with some knowledge of the néolithique. Arthur who firmly counts his descent from many places but with a nonetheless Celtic family and went from his mother's paganism to three more flavors of paganism before finally Christianity. But then Christianity becomes Catholism, protestantism, the church of narcissism and then cultural diversity finally reaching all the way round into a functionally polytheistic society. And then the puritanical upbringing of the grandson. That's right in case you thought I was only going to commit one kind of sacrilege, I'm on a roll. And how they will react to this world where the Pagan and Christian are still locking horns is all in that.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Arthur and anglo saxon poetry fucks me up. We call it the Dark Ages because of a dearth of sources, but we have a melancholy poem describing the ruins of Aqua Sulis, or Bath, in the centuries after the Roman Collapse. I might make this into a fic someday, but Arthur is only a boy half-grown and roaming through the anglo-saxon heptarchy, a world he still can't quite wrap his head around, Cumbrian, a Celtic language, still first to cross his lips as he stares up at a ruined city. But more and more of what will one day be English rolling around in his mind, two languages with so few loan words there is nothing in English we can use to construct his mother tongue. Walking through a city, what was once a real and robust city and now lays dead and decaying, he wonders.

Who's bones are these broken beams? His own? Were he and Alasdair and Rhys something once called Britannia, now faded? Are they Rome's, who died thousands of miles away in a place Arthur hasn't seen for centuries? His mother's? She ruled and represented nebulous things, these borders shifting and flexing. Rome made a desert and called it peace, but she ruled it anyway, lady of the waters and the north. Maybe. He's unsure. He touches fallen tile and broken stone and knows what he knew when she drew her last. The end of a world that began failing long before. He'll never be able to sort the losses out; the words he may have once used to describe them are dead and gone by the time there are experts enough to study it. All that once made sense has been forgotten under the weight of a thousand years.

This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed.

and

Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed. The rebuilders perished, the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior, joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour, proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings; looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones, at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery, at this bright castle of a broad kingdom.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Did their mother leave Rhys the sword specifically? Or How did he get it?

This is based on the very vague idea that religion and displacement killed Britannia, and this is probably the second wave of Anglo-Saxon invasions, so I refer to the Jutes to try and be specific but eh???? This takes place as the Germanic invaders come to close around the family hillfort, I fucken guess. Idk, There was one Celtic British tribe called the Brigantes in Ireland, Scotland and England and maaaaaybe in Wales. It's a fucken reach, but I'm basically writing fantasy at this point anyway. But anyway, as the Romans pulled out in the 5th century, that transformed into the Kingdom of Rheged in what is now Northern England and Southern Scotland. Arthur is about ten, Rhys is probably sixteen, Alasdair and Brighid about 18. Alasdair has been stabbed, and Brighid was sent away to her her own territories. None of this makes fuck all historical or chronological sense ngl but this scene gripped me by the neck and wouldn't let go until it was on paper. TW for offscreen violence and... consensual implied???? murder.

The Jutes breached the steep sides of the earthworks on the seventh day. The carnyx made their harrowing cries, and Rhys shoved a Jute down and pried his sword from the man's neck, whipping around as the carnyx blew two short notes and a longer third, the signal to summon him to mother. Arthur was on the inner walls with the other archers. Rhys saw his youngest brother flick blood from his fingers as he nocked another arrow and slipped between the maze of stone battlements as fast as his legs would allow him. Arthur glanced down, a frown on his face as his arrow flew, and then he was off the gallery, hanging from the beam and running next to Rhys for home.

"Go back," Rhys said. "Go back, I'll come for you after."

"Mother summoned you," Arthur said, keeping pace. His tunic was wearing thin at the elbows, all the wear of firing, and Rhys ached. He would have to find his baby brother a new one soon and find his cloak before winter closed in.

"Yes," Rhys said.

"I'm coming."

Rhys slowed, stopped for only a moment, his momentum nearly tipping Arthur over as Rhys gripped his arm.

"They breached the walls." He said and Arthur nodded, his too-large eyes watering.

"I know."

"Do you understand what comes next?"

"I... I want to say goodbye. Please. I'll go if you say, but I need to say goodbye."

Rhys squeezed his eyes shut, taking a breath, pain he had ever scarcely imagined twisting in his body. "When I say go, you go."

Another nod, more tears. Rhys held his brother's trembling hand. He was still so young, sandy hair still fine. He kissed his brother's forehead.

"I won't let anything happen to you today." Rhys said fiercely. "But you have to go when I say."

They moved again. In the stone hall, they found mother on the yew throne before the altar where she had once been worshipped.

"Mother!" Arthur leapt into her lap, crying freely now. Her hair was loose, streaming over her shoulders in firey spirals, so like Brighid's. He sobbed into her arms, and Rhys could barely keep his grip on his sword. Not even his own, Alasdair's old one. He'd lost his brother in the fray and Alasdair had not responded to the call. His mother cradled her youngest son and stared at Rhys, searching his face.

He nodded, and his understanding of his duty seemed to give her more strength than she'd had in decades. She gripped Arthur tighter.

"Don't go! Don't leave." Arthur cried and then in a much smaller voice. "Don't leave because of me."

Mother cradled his face, her war torc glinting. "It is not your fault. This is not your fault, sweet boy. All things must journey beyond the sunset. It is only my turn now."

"Where?" Arthur trembled. "Where will you go?"

Rhys had to close his eyes. The world had changed so much, Arthur could not immediately recall where they went in the end.

"West, my love. Beyond the sea and the sunset. With all those gone and all those yet to be. West."

Arthur clutched her tunic in his small, trembling hands, but his small mouth set in a line.

"Someday," She said and kissed him. "In some form. You will find me again, my love. My sweet boy. I love you. I love you so much. Find your cloak, find your bow and live, my sweet boy. Stay alive." She set him on his feet again.

"No," Arthur shook his head and his control broke complete, sobbing. "Mother no, please don't make me go."

"You must," She touched his cheek. "You must find your siblings and you must go. I will see you again."

"Wait for us, Mama." He cried. "Don't go too far west, please. Please."

"I will see you again." She said firmly, and her tears broke over her cheeks. "Go, my boy. Go now."

He wouldn't. He screamed and kicked. Rhys had to lift Arthur as he beat on his back and tossed him from the hall, slamming the doors behind him as he howled. His mother was in tears, beautiful and trembling. The great golden war torc around her neck glinted.

"I am sorry," She said and she gripped his hands. "I am so sorry I have to ask this of you."

"I know." He whispered.

"I won't die under the hooves of the Germans," She said, fiercely, her nails puncturing his palms. "I will die as I lived."

"I know," He said again, unsure how he had managed to keep his sobs boiling in his belly and not rising to spill out.

"You have to keep the peace, my love." She said. "You have to keep the peace between all of you."

"I will." He said and that was what broke the sob open. He dropped Alasdair's old sword. "Don't hate me when I fail. Please. I'll try but I---"

"Never." His mother flung him on her and held him like he was newly weaned and tiny again, clinging to her as all light and life and warmth in the world. "I will never hate you. I will love you and your siblings still when the fire in the sky goes out, Rhys."

The cacophony had grown louder, shouts and screams and clanging metal. She gripped him.

"My torc goes to your sister. What's left of the gold you can divide amongst yourselves." She lifted her hands from him and he went cold without them. She reached behind her seat and lifted her sword. "And this, this will have to be yours."

"Is this..." He stared at the leaf-bladed sword he had watched her wield all his life.

"Yes." She said and pressed it into his hands. "Through my heart, my love. The blood will soak the soil, but my cloak can cover the wound. Wait for your sister to bury me in the barrow. It's cold enough. You know where."

Rhys sobbed. They poured out of him in the rush of the great rivers. One, two, three great gulping sobs, and then he shook his head, rubbed his eyes and looked at her, breathing hard.

"It is time. Remember what I told you." Her dreams of her youngest son, her wisdom for Rhys, her love for all of them.

"Keep the peace. Arthur will one day build impossible iron ships. You love us."

"More than anything, I love you." She said, and he knelt before her on her throne. Her hands were white. She opened her cloak to reveal her tunic, and he lifted the sword.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

I am absolutely stuck on the dynamic between Brighid, Arthur, Alfred, and Jack rn. They're both Arthur's sons, but Jack was hers to raise first and she contributed to Alfred's upbringing too, and they may as well be hers with all the people they're getting from her, and that's happening because of Arthur's policies. And Arthur, for his part, parents them based on vague memories of his mother - but you've said a lot of those are actually Brighid.

Point of all that being, would you mind expanding on the early part of Arthur and Brighid's relationship, before he became a colonizing shithead? What are these memories with her that he's attributing to their mother? How did that relationship influence his parenting (both the things that he's aware were Brighid and the things that he thinks were mum but were actually Brighid?)

Okay so just to preface this so no one starts reading this like they do my more modern things where I can usually have a basis in fairly accepted and confirmable fact, we’re going so far back that not only is this not chronologically accurate, its only archaeologically plausible. This is the literary version of saying, "it's for ceremonial purposes” on the label of an artefact anyone with courage would call a prehistoric bong. There’s a big trend for “History of X in 100 Objects” right now. In my personal collection is a 'History of Ireland in 100 objects.' I’m not saying this is accurate or realistic. However, it is based on historical themes that lend themselves to what is ultimately a historical fantasy as plausible as I can write it. That said, let's crack this can of fuckery.

So, to start out, this is all pre-1066, which is when, after the Norman invasions of England, Wales, and and Southern Scotland, the history of the British in Ireland begins. Before that, we’re talking about a world where Irish raiders are a menace on the Welsh coast, and the Dál Riada is the result of an Irish migration, where the peoples on the Irish Coast brought Gaelic culture and eventually merged with and overtook the Pictish culture already occupying the area. The balance of power is very different in this world. This is not the 18th and 19th century when Brighid is firmly under the heel of a British jackboot and even when the British government was willing to concede slightly on empire, the British army nearly revolted when it was even considered to maybe, perhaps, rein in unionist violence in nineteen-fourteen just months shy of WW1. Winston Churchill was also behind that, in case you need more reasons why he's an allmighty cunt.

I give them all Celtic roots. Brighid is probably 300-500 years older than Alasdair, and then political solidification in Wales brought Rhys along and then Arthur as the reorganization of Celtic Britons in Roman Britain. This might be a hot take, but while the Anglo-Saxon ‘invasion’ in the 400s-500s brought Germanic rule and language to England, the Cumbrians and other Celts were not wiped out. Mostly it's a cultural shift. So he’s born as much a Celt as his siblings and experiences dramatic changes earlier in his life than they do. However, if you get to the root of English culture under all of the bullshit of empire and all the German royalty who built up their legitimacy by reviving Anglo-Saxon memory, history has more Celtic elements than someone might think.

In Northern England, Southern Scotland, Eastern Ireland, and the maritime fringes of Wales, there was an Iron Age tribe by the name of the Brigantes, whose name was taken from the northern goddess Brigantia, which means either ‘the exalted’ or ‘highlanders.’ Either way works for me because it is the root word of Brighid’s name, the Welsh word for prestige, honour, dignity and power, all things connected to fire, power and elevation. As all modern knowledge of her comes from 8 inscriptions and some statuary material, and her name is so goddamn appropriate, I’m running with it. It’s so close to Brittania. According to Strabo, writing about a now-lost account of a Greek sailor and explorer Pytheas, it comes from a feminine name likely from the Celts itself.

In the tradition of Catholic patron saints of specific places, Brigantia seems to have been a goddess associated with lakes, rivers, and coastlines. Saint Brighid, from the same name base, is the patron saint of Ireland, bastard children, babies, children, midwives, sailors and poets. Me, hitting a bong in 2021; yeah, that sounds like mother and daughter to me. Eirian, whose name is a version of the Welsh name for King Arthur’s mother because I’m ✨original✨ ruled her own kingdom directly. She was a queen regnant in a culture that saw that crop up often. She was a product of the Iron Age, a warrior culture where swords and a hierarchy of militancy ruled society. Brighid was her firstborn child, and very much her mother’s daughter, sharing that long, beautiful hibernian gold (think rose gold) hair down to her waist. She was tall and gorgeous, with a head for politics as well as martial talent, but Eirian was as much a goddess of the hearth as the sea and war; she still took her tributes in blood, and treasure. She ruled directly with iron and faith.

Brighid, however, while just as capable of that, had a personality that found early Christianity very appealing. It’s hard for us to imagine now, but 1,500-2,000 years ago, Christianity was, in many ways, a much gentler religion than some flavours of what we now call paganism. And while just as capable at every aspect of ruling as her mother, I do think Brighid has aspects to her personality that were kinder, a bit softer. She was an artist in the scriptoriums, a weaver, all these things in her golden age. And she was grown, or near it, by the time Arthur came along. And the gentlest things he remembers about his mother are usually Brighid. An image of a woman weaving, red hair pouring down her back as her fingers fly over the shuttle and her feet work the treadles. That is Brighid. Another of a woman’s elegant and quick fingers on the spindle, fitting the handle into a clumsy child’s hands, laughing when he gets frustrated. Also Brighid. Picking him up and giving him a raspberry even when he kicks to be let down because he wants to run everywhere, is also Brighid. Teaching him to put his knife into the kidney because he’s young, and that's the highest he can reach? That’s his mother. The two images, his powerful mother and his bright sister swirl together when Arthur gets into a strange mood.

He'll yammer away in Cumbrian and hum the tune of the songs who's words he cant remember. When she died in the 5th or 6th century, they scattered as their various regions expanded and solidified linguistically as Common Bythronic became Welsh, Gaelic, and Cumbrian (Scotland’s native Celtic language is actually extinct, replaced by Irish Gaelic in late antiquity.) England imploded under the pressure of the Germanic migrations, so I picture Arthur kind of wandering through his numerous kingdoms most of the year. Brighid may have, too. It was common for high-status people to go on progress and stay with the nobility from time to time in various European societies. However, I can also see her with her own mini-kingdom inside the Gaelic system of ranking kings, over kings and high kings. Arthur would usually spend the winter with one of his siblings. Usually Rhys, but he would have been welcome with Brighid for a long time, even as the wee cuckoo, half-German bastard that he was. He may have even lived with her for long periods. But once, she was power, and once she loved him and once he wasn't the cause of all the horror of her years. It was a different world before the Vikings came.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

One of my favorite things about the Irish National Museum is how so many of their non-Irish collections were donated by wealthy Irish Americans. But they have this absolutely incredibly Italian 16th-century wedding chest that I can only imagine Romano giving her when he makes another trip to America while she’s living with Alfred, and she took home with her. Just how many pieces of wealth she was stripped of by the British Empire, and here is this absolutely exquisite piece of Italian history in the national museum he gifted her in my stupid history AU lmao.

Another thing I think she kept is a little coin-like token that were very common gifts from convicts about to be transported to lovers and mothers. This one is to a mother from her son who was transported in the 19th century but there were also a lot of them that were commissioned in Australia and sent back for anniversaries. Jack might not even remember when he asked Matt and Alasdair to make something similar and give it too her.

So one of my favorite headcanons is that oftentimes nations had buried their objects in 'hoards' when people in history were trying to save their wealth, they buried it. I like to think that sometimes they accidentally come across their old things again.

My favorite incident of this would be the 'Backworth Hoard' that was found in real life in the very early 19th century, right around 1810 or so, but it was long before decent archaeology, so people added onto the handles of the spoons and the pot because Jesus Fuck my beef with the Victorians never ends. My favorite thing, however, are two bracelets and a necklace with these spoked wheel pendants. In all likelihood, they were probably a sun symbol in their original context, but they look a lot like ship wheels, no?

Another 19th-century find we don’t know much about in the original context is a collection of Roman Era amber beads found around Colchester dated to around the 1st century. They, in all likelihood, were very expensive imports from the Baltic of Northern Europe. Still, they remind me of the teething beads my brother had as a baby (don’t give them to children. They’re probably dangerous, it was the 2000s no one knew shit back then I s2g). Still, I had a mental image of Boudicca racing to claim Arthur with Erian’s (Mama Brittania’s) blessing during the Bouddicean revolt. Someone grabbed him so hard, and abruptly the cord of beads around his neck snapped and was flung to the ground only to be discovered 1,800 years later when he’s having the last of his children. History echoes.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Forgive me for imposing my own headcanons on you but I like to think your characterization of Arthur was greatly regretful and mournful of his mother's sacrifice for him UNTIL Alfred is born. Only then does he completely understand her decision to give herself for him because he knows he would have given absolutely anything for his son

Respectfully disagree! When I write about Brittania's death or Eirian's death, her sacrifice was not her death but how long she endured and strove to survive before meeting her end. Rhys ending her life was her choice, not a sacrifice. It is a choice many people make when survival no longer outweighs the losses of independence, identity and dignity. Her son spearing her through the heart with her own sword is the final sacrifice to the woman who was once a patron goddess in her own right. Her death was a release from her sacrifice.

Every moment she survived was another moment and another chance for Arthur to grow and mature before her death. Every harvest she saw was another year to teach her children how to survive her end. I don't think any nation will willingly go to their permanent deaths on behalf of another. And even if she had, Arthur's co-opting of the human term 'parent' is not the same to his children as it was to him and his mother. Arthur replaced her on their land as a result of cultural changes and a breakdown of what fueled her existence. His own children came into being as the direct result of something far more sinister, and there's a very inherent difference. Kill for his children? Yes. Endure the temporary damage of a human death? Occasionally. Volunteer his permanent national destruction for them? Never.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

What was the first meeting between Eirian and Brighid like? I’m assuming bittersweet.

Very much so. Eirian sent Brighid away when the last days came. A hill-fort in the aftermath of a capitulation was nowhere she wanted her only daughter, her heir, to be. As population displacement, Christianity, famine, plague and linguistic drift as her language parts to become her children's inheritances build and build and build and her hold on her personal territory as a microcosm of the Atlantic Archipelago comes under direct threat from Jute-Anglo-Saxon incursions, there may have been an offer of marriage from a Jutish king who did not have the sense nor the judgement to understand what they are. Instead, Cumbria faced overland and seaborn problems with plague and famine left them weak and open. So when the end comes, Eirian sends her away.

She's on a boat in the Irish sea, sailing west. We have some suggestions that death was a journey to a place known in modern folklore as the otherworld or the nightlands, the place of the gods and the fae, the place where nations may have a presence in just by the nature of their esoteric existence. Sometimes its envisioned as an underworld or a world like ours only separated by a thin curtain even thinner at Samhain. Sometimes it's an island to the west.

Brighid is an island to the west, her emerald isle her own sense of heaven but her mother's essence, something I imagine looking like the Angel of Death from The Prince of Egypt rolls across a calm Irish sea on a moonless night, bright and silent and terrifying. Where it would normally be searching for the human remains of its earthly shell, tonight it is calm, now beyond the need for her human body. Whatever crew may be on the boat shrink away as it approaches and Eirian's first visit, and the only one in this form, begins with Eirian's form emerging from the billowing tendrils of light, like a ship emerging from fog. Few words but much grief. "I love you. You are the best of me, do not let the ages turn you against yourself and into stone." Brighid knows what has happened she probably did the moment her mother sent her away. Two tall, regal women, one standing on the deck of a small ship, the other a ghost. Mother and daughter. A goddess of war and fire and the patron saint of a green rolling land and all the futures possible. Brighid is on the cusp of her golden age, a time of creativity with little parallel in western history, she is now a patron saint, walking where a mother goddess once did. But change is always upheaval and loss, even for beings who may walk the earth for millennia. It will be a long time before she sees her mother again.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Tell us more about #3, #6 and #9, please!

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh

The Blue Hour — Valley Forge — 1777

Hopefully this will be this years Christmas fic. A very small portion of the Continental Army starving and freezing at Valley Forge in the winter 1777-1778 consisted of French Canadians who had joined the American cause during their absolute disaster of an invasion into Quebec. Most of them returned home because the US congress couldn't support its own military, much less foreign volunteers who came without their own money and supplies. And I saw one brief mention of how upon seeing an American in a red coat that had been dyed a shitty drab brown to differentiate them from the British, a nameless French Canadian handed over a blue wool coat that had belonged to his own French-born father in in the Seven Years War. And the symbolism. Matthew and Alfred are trading colours, trading mentors, and trading values. Matt spent his entire life dressed in blue and fighting the British empire and gifting that to Alfred with some various others.

L'heure bleue is when the sun sets below the horizon but there's still just enough light to see what reflects blue through the atmosphere. Just enough love left in them to keep the dark at bay.

My Mother Told Me — Wessex — 9th century

I've only mentioned it a scattering of times through some fics and I can't decide how old Arthur and Rhys are for this but its the carving out of the Danelaw in the 870s as Magnus and Sigurd pincer their way through Arthur in the east, Rhys in the West and then turn north towards Alasdair. At some point in this madness, Magnus cut Arthur shoulder to opposite hip, laying him open before Rhys shot him full of arrows and they fled across the Irish sea. This is the day he earned his title of half-dane.

My Mother Told Me is from a cinematic translation of an adaptation of a skaldic poetry Egill Skallagrímsson that talks about a man who's mother foresaw hime become a powerful viking with ships who would travel much and kill many. Pretty much an ironic dead-ringer for Arthur.

Why does thou sit upon my grave? — Cumbria — 6th Century

This is a reworking of the fic I posted and took down about the series of events that lead to Eirian's (Britannia's) death. How when she was already weakened by Christianity and paying off German invaders to keep a hold of her throne in Rheged, the sun disappeared from the sky in 536 with a volcanic eruption and 541 CE the first wave of the the black death swept through and when they've only just recovered, bad luck in several forms hits them and the final blow comes when another wave of anglo-saxon invasions slam into Cumbria and when their own hillfort collapses, she decides it will be the end of her life. and the consequences of their inheritances and when her youngest son lays himself on the grass that has grown over her burial barrow and cries until he wakes her.

Why does thou sit upon my grave? Comes from an English folk song where the narrator is a body beneath the ground awoken from death by the sobbing of a loved one.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

I think my favourite fiction of yours is the Summoning. It's written beautifully. I adore that love Alasdair bears for Matt, enough to raise the dead and ask the impossible. And the gulf between him and his mother is so tenderly painful. The layers of formality; the misunderstandings of time. It's perfect. I have to ask though: do Rhys and Arthur follow through on her request (or does Alasdair keep the visit to himself?)

AWW thank you! That was honestly one of the best things I've ever written. Being outside of time but also so anchored in this 17th century world where everything is fire, blood and witchcraft carved out of them all. Eirian is there, a shadow of who she was, existing in the nightlands, this land of the dead only to occasionally walk between worlds and into the realm of the living because the only thing that can are ideas, and love might be the strongest idea there is.

And they do! Not specifically because he relayed that message, I think he might have kept that to himself because their world is one where by and large, any attachment is a screaming weakness. Brighid, Alasdair and Rhys have a somewhat easier time connecting with their mother, they could probably do it semi-regularly just to catch up if they wanted. They still speak languages that descend from hers, the celtic fringe that survives every day. Pictish, probably closer related to Welsh and Cumbric than Gaelic, was kind of torn from him in late antiquity and the early middle ages but it was replaced by Gaelic, his form of what was Brighid's language. Those three are kind of laced into each other. Invasions and counter invasions, defined by degrees of alienation from the imperial core that Arthur represents.

Arthur's inheritance is largely dead. His people never were completely usurped by the Germanic speaking peoples who formed England, but the words are gone, with only a handful remaining for him to use to name things he loves in at least a twisted way, the way his mother loved him. So its harder, I think, to look that far into the past, that far beyond the world Arthur had more hand in shaping than maybe the rest of them combined. He, like his siblings sees his mother in whatever space-time exists between this life and the next. She's a part of the tether that keeps them constantly on the balance between human and not, alive and not, real and not. The only difference being that it's the main way he sees her because dying is so much easier than unlocking things he could feel and speak in a language gone from this world. His mother is almost entirely reserved for those places. When crushed into the depths by a shipwreck under unfathomable pressure, rolling out of a plague cart, looking up at the heavens from some godforsaken rock of his second son or second empire. He sees her in the places where his arrogance and his over confidence has laid him bare to human consequences of cold, exposure and hunger. Mirages of what the Romans named barbaric when the image of 'civilization' Arthur imposes on the world everyone else tears him to shreds.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Tags

By Character

Aditya || brimful of the wine of truth

Alfred || o beautiful for spacious skies

Alasdair || my heart's in the highlands

Arthur || stone set in the silver sea

Brighid || An Bearna Bhaoil

Egill || Fár bregður hinu betra ef hann veit hið verra.

Eirian || into the nightlands

Erzse || In raptures I embrace

Francois || temperee par des chansons

Gilbert || from this baltic cannonball

Jack || a land of summer skies

Jan || God made Earth the Dutch made Holland

Katya || бо лишало на серці сліди

Kiku || these flowing islands

Leon || A wider view fills Heaven's glass

Ludwig || in deinem Herzchen klein

Magnus || climb the roots of Yggdrasil

Matthew || my country is winter

Maria || lo que viví lo estoy muriendo todavía

Rhys || my word for heaven was not yours

Sigurd || D'er klent Sted som stokk fyre Hamaren

Tolys ||

Yong Soo ||

Zee || ahakoa he iti he pounamu

By Relationship - Platonic

Alasdair and Matt || is mig amharc le dicheall

Alfred and Matt || lonely boys with the longest borders

Alfred and Rhys || Yn fy mhen a’i lond o freuddwydion

Alfred and Zee || freedom and fairness

Arthur and the children || bilge rat and his bouncing baby bilge rats

Britannia and her children || they made a desert and called it peace

Jack and Brighid || bound for Botany Bay

Jack and Zee || pieces of me across the Tasman sea

Jack Zee and Matt || battered bonds once so strong

Matthew and François || Quelques arpents de pièges

By Relationship - Romantic

Alasdair and Francois || an auld and abiding love

Alfred and Ludwig || our shooting stars were supersonic

Alfred and Tolys || with the awe of love realized

Maria and Alfred || De ilusión también se vive.

Maria and Matt || Al mal tiempo buena cara

Arthur and Gabriel || leagues of sincere affection

Arthur and Francois || our most dear enemy

Brighid and Romano || each our unlikely other half

Katya and Matt || the soil of our souls

Jan and Kiku || my favourite hello and hardest goodbye

Jan and Matt || the bells of liberation echo into eternity

Gilbert and Erzse || heart of iron beat for me

Gilbert and Arthur || heart of iron and heart of oak

By Topic

working pages

the great windmill debacle of 1994

the great incineration of 2023

Alfred and the stars || the first golden retriever in space

fairybait || baby alfred being chunky and cursed

Matt and Ferality || 80% uninhabited 100% uninhibited

meatsack mechanics || the sociology and biology of nations

Art History and Aesthetics || our eyes across the ages

WW1 || half the planet having daddy issues in a trench

archives || sing o muse the voices of the dead

By Type

the ask box || probis pateo

queued posts || Between the devil and the deep queue sea

the shitpost pile || forgive me my shitty sense of humour

my writing || cacoethes scribendi

research || sauntering through the stacks

Ideas || i should write this someday

ask box games || chaos coming soon to an inbox near you

moaning || personal/business posts

Character Sheets || bodies and flesh of borders and fences