Darkness fell across the barony one dutiful night, as a dreadful wailing pierced through the
lands below. Birds took to the skies, mice fled into distant bushes, and even the mighty bear slinked back into his cave. The sound of sheer anguish is not often heard in nature, so thus, life flees.
Even the supposedly thinking beasts in the village below, in the lands controlled by the Baron and his wife, endowed with such authority by the distant Exemplar, King endowed in turn by the gods themselves.
So, the wail was swallowed by its own echo, and replaced by much quieter sobs, which didn’t leave the stone walls of the good Baron’s keep. But, between it all, guard, servant and Baron, moved to see what all the ruckus was about.
The Baroness, a once diseased woman from a distant Duchy, stood over the corpse over what was once the scion of the house. Her son was dead. It was a tragedy, and the wail that had escaped her was only the sort that could come from a parent who had lost a child. The Baron looked upon the body, and rage filled his mind. How could this have been done to his child? And his heir at that. His first thoughts were of anger and revenge, and nothing could push him free of that path.
The doctor pronounced the obvious. Their son was gone. The guards, rational men with no time for distractions, pronounced the obvious: The culprit was not to be found.
The Baron, however, refused to accept that. In her grief, the Baroness joined him in his ignorance. This had to be the action of another, forcing his son’s death. They must have known of his importance, and used that as a means to attack him and his wonderful wife, him and his wonderful family. Assassins! Saboteurs! Traitors! They could be anywhere.
The village was searched, and anything which resembled the circumstances of the son’s death was ransacked and destroyed, whether it be object or person. He could stomach no reminders, no potential suspect or stone unturned. However, all he had done was make his entire world smaller. The Baroness couldn’t suffer it any longer, and instead tried to parley with the intermediary between herself and her lost child. She made compromises she thought would matter, with determination and hope she thought she had, as she used all that endowed her to fall for every magician, priest, bachelor, and miracle worker she could have her servants find. Some of them lied to her, and told her things would return to as they were if she stabbed the body with this or that, and told her that perhaps her son had done this to himself due to a whisper in his ear. Some simply shook their heads, told her there was nothing to be done, and whispered of her failings to the other baronies. And yet, the body remained. It didn’t rot, it didn’t decay, just like a pristine memory. At night, all the couple whispered of was what had been, their beautiful son, and the future he had once held. That, and how they could prevent this from ever happening again, to anyone’s son, to anyone’s child.
It became clear that the only way to change this facet was to change the world. All of the royal coffers were put into hiring the greatest envoys, to travel to every kingdom under the Exemplar’s great dominion, to spread this word. Each Baron and Baroness should lock their kingdoms tight like a vault, should ensure that anything which could bring their children, friends or fellows harm is destroyed, and should pledge to come together to make the ultimate accomplishment: Undoing death itself.
Some envoys had luck. It was only natural that some leaders had seen this already, Duchies and Baronies afflicted by this terrible medley. Ruthlessly they began making the world a better place and helping the Baron and Baroness towards their goal.
Most envoys were laughed out, made to be the butt of a joke for a generation of young diplomats. It was ridiculous, and rightly treated as such. They were doing just fine without a pair of fools who couldn’t accept reality telling them what to do. Even some whose children had died a grisly death in the second war, simply said that they had come to accept such a thing. What other choice did one have, then to reckon with reality?
Of course, there was no giving up for those two by now. Even as their power dwindled, and they spent the last of the royal coffers, and they sat dilapidated upon thrones of ash, they could not give up their grip on their own perceptions. They had to see themselves win, they couldn’t admit that the world would simply change.
The Baron and Baroness died of the next plague, without the gold to afford a bachelor of medicine’s help. By the decree of the Exemplar, their scion, despite changes to his state of existence, would be the next in line. The people all thought they would be ruled by that same silent corpse that had been paraded such by the Baron and Baroness when proclaiming what death had done to them.
Instead, sitting on the throne was a woman made resplendent and free from ignorance. Her eyes shone with the same brightness of the young boy who once ran amongst the keeps walls, but without the deathly entropy of the scion who had died. Life slowly returned to the Barony, and no more wailing over the world itself would be had. The Baron and Baroness were forgotten as footnotes of a bygone age and world.
Kindling And Miscellany 