#lorelei kapple

[fatedtime]

🖊

Since I talked about Eliza and Aodhan I will ALSO talk about William who exists in the same storyline.

(i haven't drawn him in ages lmfao. sorry for the old art.)

William Hare is a sadboy twink who hides his misery with jokes and is stuffed full of magical bees.

Let me explain.

(This explanation will talk about bees living in people so if that squicks you out I'd recommend avoiding this lol.)

William Hare was born out of wedlock to Margaret Hare and Heinrich Kapple, the latter of which already had a wife and three kids. (Whoops!) The secret was kept though, and he was raised alone by his mother, who worked as a seamstress in a small village. She was a good woman, and kind, and he loved her dearly. While he occasionally saw the man he knew to be his father when he came to his town for business, the visits were short and he felt no real connection to him.

One summer, when William was a pre-teen, his mother passed away from an illness that swept through his village. Before she died, she managed to get a letter to Heinrich -- warning him that she was not long for the world, and pleading for him to take custody of their son.

Heinrich, for all his flaws, wasn't the kind of man who'd entirely abandon his own son. He retrieved William from the shelter, and took him home to the Kapple farm.

This caused a shitshow of cataclysmic proportions for the household, because Heinrich's wife, Alfrida, was not made aware this was happening or that her husband had cheated on her until there was a dirty boy on her doorstep, fresh from a plague town, and being told that he was Heinrich's son. Not helping matters was Alfrida having recently given birth to her fourth child, Ingrid, leaving her understandably not impressed by this sudden influx of bullshit.

The dynamics of the household from that point on would be difficult to explain succinctly, but suffice to say no one was happy about William's introduction into their lives -- except William's slightly older sister, Lorelei Kapple, whose sense of justice was strong, even as a young teen. She hated the shadow that was already being cast on her little brother, and she took him under his wing.

Lorelei and William became extremely close, far closer than Lorelei was with any of her full siblings. He was docile and inexperienced enough that he would defer to her headstrong personality, and whatever she wanted to do, he'd follow her gladly. To him, she was a source of protection and joy in his newly gloomy life, and to her, he was a patient, loyal, and level-headed side-kick. With whatever time they had away from farm chores, Lorelei would take William into the old forest that bordered the edge of their lands, where it was said the gods still roamed and the bees stored their honey in the trees.

Now, to briefly cover magic in this setting, the kind of magic that exists depends on the land one is in. The Empire I mentioned previously have the sort of magic you might associate with trickster faeries and demons who offer contracts in exchange for power. In Pais, or 'Land of the Golden Bees' as it was historically known before a colonizing power came in to try to control the land with a name, magic comes from bees and the honey they leave in things.

Or, uh, people! People in Pais get magic because the bees in the land become of specific individuals and decide to make hives in them, filling their blood with honey and blessing them with superpowers. This also used to confer an amount of religious importance, but the Empire has been trying to stamp out those connotations and folk beliefs.

Said blessing can happen at birth, but more typically it occurs throughout the childhood of the Beloved. This was the case for William Hare, one day in the deep dark woods.

William and Lorelei had not gone farther then they normally did, but the shadows were different that day. William was sensitive to the change, but something spurred Lorelei on -- like there was something she had to find out there. Trusting his sister, he followed, and they found the den of a wolf god.

To her credit, when the wolf in the shadows attacked her brother, she defended him with the entirety of her soul. She was just a teenage girl though, and was not able to stop the god from biting off her brother's arm, even as she tried to wrestle with a creature far beyond her ken. Lorelei Kapple did not defeat the wolf that day, but when the god bit her too and found that she screamed not in pain or fear, but defiant rage and an ironclad will, he let go and left the siblings be.

Lorelei's wounds would heal, but William was bleeding out. It was then that the bees came out of the trees, healed him, and made their home within him.

Their lives changed that day. Something was different about Lorelei Kapple -- a gods saliva flowed through her veins, and a sharper intensity fueled her behavior. William became Beloved, but he existed in a strange contradictory world -- those who had called him 'bastard' now paid him homage, and yet the homage was not allowed to be explicit, because the Empire had banned such worship. Some saw William as a symbol of rebellion, some saw William as a symbol of wives' tales and folly.

Still, they had each other, as they navigated this strange new world.

...Until they didn't.

Now, the draft came in two stages. It was never officially considered part of the draft, but the Empire had made a habit of actively scouting Beloved and enrolling them in their Military Academy to be conditioned into good little Imperial Loyalists. This was, however, made mandatory when William was sixteen as tensions spiked between the Empire and one of its long-time rivals. Later, all able-bodied men would be drafted -- or... the Empire would attempt to draft them, which kicked off a revolutionary war.

Lorelei knew that her brother didn't really have a choice when he left. That's not why she felt betrayed. It was that William didn't even think about taking her offer to run away with him, and find somewhere where they could escape the bonds of both gods and men. That, deep down, William WANTED to go study under the Empire. He WANTED to escape his small little village life where everything hurt so much and he felt simultaneously cursed and worshiped. That he kind of resented Paian loyalism, and god he just kind of wanted to piss off his dad by joining up with the Empire he fucking hated.

This was the worst mistake William ever made in his life btw.

Long story short, being used for the magic bees in your body and prepared as an agent of war fucking sucked ass, and William quickly discovered he hated academia. But he also would rather die than go back to his family, and he felt like he'd fucked it up so bad with Lorelei that she wouldn't help him either, so he persisted, growing more and more miserable and increasingly coping with his circumstances by developing a congenial, friendly, hedonistic front to fit in with some of the other officers. Eventually, he became a hopeless wreck, spending more of his time disassociating than not and preparing himself for a life of hating everything he ever was and would be.

When the Revolution happened, William jumped ship, and by happenstance, fell under the command of general Irene Hirsch.

This is already getting long but to make an incredibly complicated story short, General Hirsch -- through an alcohol induced rant -- managed to smack some sense of self-worth and the desire to live into William, and for the first time in his life he actually believed in something -- her. I must emphasize that as much of a mess as William is, Irene is 50x worse, but she also slapped him and told him to Fucking Believe in Something which was exactly what he needed to hear. (It did help that William is a bit of a Bottom Bitch and Irene was simultaneously a wet dog and a power dom.)

After the war, William was left directionless and lost, and he happened to learn that General Irene was accepting proposals for marriage. And -- well, his pedigree wasn't great, but he WAS an official war mage. Maybe she'd even... remember him?

(Spoilers: she does not. But that's a story for another time.)