The Golden Years

For thirty-eight years they are very good at it.

This is the part that gets left out. The Avari rule well. The roads are safe, the treaties hold, the grain moves, and the men at the top of it do not change with the weather or die and leave a succession crisis behind them. Leopold von Lachsenhausen commands. Victor von Lachsenhausen negotiates. Severin Falkenrath knows everything. Lucien Alvaro de Castillon decides. Elias Castillon watches.

Whatever else is true, an ordinary person in these years is safer and better fed than their grandparents were.

What holds it together is that they do not die.

Rulers who cannot be outlasted cannot be waited out, and everyone below them adjusts accordingly. It reads as reverence. Some of it is reverence. Underneath, it is the simple arithmetic of people who have understood that these five are a permanent feature of the world, like the weather in the passes.

The empire is built on that belief. Not on the shares. On what everyone else concludes from them.

Then the thing they took begins to take its price.

It does not arrive as a catastrophe. It arrives as a change in temperament, slowly, over decades, in four men who have no one to compare themselves against because nobody else has ever lived this way.

Leopold von Lachsenhausen gets violent.

By the 1320s he treats mortals as expendable, which is not a metaphor: they are, to him, now. He has watched two generations of his own soldiers grow old, and the third is harder to take seriously than the first.

Victor von Lachsenhausen goes the other way. He moves nations and stops registering what is inside them. Detachment in a diplomat looks like composure for a long time before anyone names it.

Lucien Alvaro de Castillon becomes suspicious of everyone, which is the joke of it: he is right, and he is wrong about which of them, and he never once looks at the man who has been standing beside him since 1233. The brothers put distance between themselves and him, and that distance is what Severin will use.

He is also the one who could still stop it. He built it and he could put it down. But he cannot picture himself as a man who used to run an empire, and a man who cannot picture something will not do it.

Severin Falkenrath does not change at all. That is his whole character. Four of them are being taken apart by what they are carrying, and he is the same man who walked into the ruins, keeping to a plan with eighty years left to run.

Ava Montclair told him in 1249. He is now seventy-two years past that and has become it so completely that the sentence no longer describes a risk.