The Rose of Vraycia

It is time. Past time, if I am being honest, and honesty is the least I owe her. I am Mikhael Val’Rhayne, and I have been a coward for nearly three hundred years. The woman I loved is dead. The world believes it knows why, and settled on its verdict long ago. That it knows the shape of what she did, or thinks it does. But it doesn’t. I know the truth of it. I have always known. And I said nothing. Did nothing. That is my crime. Not the only one I carry, I have lived eleven hundred years, so you see I’ve had some time to rack up a long ledger. But it is the one that has weighed most heavily on me. The one that has crushed my soul. The one that has kept me from sleep the most. Three hundred years ago I crawled into my grief like a wounded animal seeking dark. I held onto it, not because I enjoy pain and suffering, but because the grief holds her to me. Without her, the world ceased to matter. Empires rose. Kings died. Wars were won and lost and won again, and I watched it all from a distance, hollowed out, purposeless She was called a great many things in the end. Few were kind. Fewer still were deserved. Even those who loved her went to their graves believing the lie. They died thinking their loyalty had been misplaced, their faith in her a fool’s devotion. They never knew. I could have told them. I chose silence instead, and that silence followed them into the earth. That is the weight I carry. That is why I will never fully forgive myself. She deserved infinitely better from me. She always did. So, today is the day. Three hundred years after my Rose of Vraycia was taken from me, I am finally done being a coward. It is long, long overdue. Three centuries without her have felt both an eternity and a heartbeat, which is perhaps the cruelest of all grief’s tricks. But time has a way of teaching even the most stubborn of wounds to scar, and grief and I have made our peace. An uneasy one. A necessary one. Because in all my ages, there has never been one like her. Not before. Not since. I carry memories that stretch beyond the birth of empires, and of them all, hers is the one I have held most dear. I am no poet. No master of words. I am a warrior, born and bred alongside my brothers for one purpose, and that purpose was never gentle. My hand has held a blade steadier than most men hold their faith. And yet for three centuries, that same hand has trembled over blank pages. I think I know why. Because once I write her name, once I shape her into words and bind her between covers, she becomes history. Fixed. Finished. No longer mine to hold in the dark and unfinished places of my memory, but the world’s to judge and perhaps misunderstand all over again. And yet. The world deserves to know what it has forgotten. What it was allowed to forget, to misunderstand, while I said nothing. So the time has come for this old warrior to put his sword down and put pen to paper, for the world deserves to know—to remember—the Rose that shattered an Empire.