Bergenheim
Establishing Nation
Prologue
King Laurtrec the Cinder, last crowned monarch of Bergenheim, was desperate. The rains had ruined the cannon he had prepared, the land torpedo traps that mined the way to his castle gates. His love of gunpowder and explosions had been foiled by nature herself.
His remaining royal soldiers stood ready to fight on regardless, clad in shining full-plate armour, a mere fifty-one Knights against five thousand. His hundreds of arquebusiers would prove useless by dawn, and his mercenaries, lacking the honour of later Freikorps of Bergenheim, would desert him likewise.
Dawn would bring death and dishonour, and an end to his line. He had never much cared for the company of women, preferring fine, slender young boys instead. His cousins were all dead, or fled, from an earlier, failed plot to usurp him. Now he stood alone, his page tenderly affixing his armour. He would go to meet them, he decided, and be the kind of warrior king his father had always demanded he be.
He lifted up the sword Morgenrote, forged from the iron of a fallen star, and kissed the pommel delicately. It would carve many a traitor before he fell, he knew.
"Will you stand by me, page?"
"Sir?" the boy asked querulously, terrified and broken to his royal master, in ways both fair and foul.
"Whats your name, boy?" The King asked, a sudden inspiration striking him.
"Its...Otto, sir. Otto Blucher."
"Kneel, Otto."
The Page did so with glazed eyes, used to performing such a duty for his king.
"No, not this time, boy." He placed the flat of his sword delicately on the boy's shoulder.
Otto did not flinch.
"Rise, Sir Otto, of House Blucher. Let you stand by me, as my last knight. You who have served me so well."
Otto looked up at the King with terrified awe.
"Gladly, your majesty A-anything-" he stammered.
The King sighed. "I would grant you my own sword to carry, did I not need it so well. Ah, whoever heard of a Knight without a sword? Go to the armoury, with my blessing. Take any sword you so fancy. It may serve you well come the dawn, if only for a short while."
The boy hid his fear as best he could. "Are you...sure, your majesty?"
"I do not repeat my commands, Sir Otto."
The boy lept to obedience, though his joy was tempered with the knowledge that such fortune would be short-lived, Tomorrow the Canton Lords would take the castle with certainty. Five thousand against five hundred scarce a fifty. With all cannon and shot ruined, and even the crossbows rotten and dampened. Their odds were indeed grim.
The boy's journey to and from the armoury confirmed in him the mounting sense of dread, that this was a hopeless and lost cause. Yet how could be abandon his King? For all the evil the King had done him, had he not also done him a great good? The young man could not reconcile the warring emotions.
So it was that he did not return a good hour or more later, a simple estoc at his belt. He had little skill or training with any kind of sword, but he felt a simple, hefty long-sword would not be disgraced too much by his clumsiness.
When he returned, he was shocked to find the King had already started drinking heavily.
"What kept you boy? I am...I grow weary. Curse this storm, does it never end? How it rages with sound and fury..." The King babbled furiously. He had been drinking steadily all day, but, alone, he had set to bottle after bottle with furious determination, rendering himself sodden with drink. He would not greet the dawn sober, he swore.
"You sent me for a sword, your majesty. To be your Knight?"
"Knight? What madness is this...gah, what's done is done. Knight or knight, get my damn armour off, I need to rest...and take pleasure..."
"But your majesty, I just put your armour on..." The boy felt even his little hopes fading. Had his knighthood been just a passing fancy for this drunken king? Was he to die a mere page, still? An ember of defiance glowed in the young man's heart. Having tasted a little of something greater, if only for a breath of a moment, he could not so easily go back to being the King's...Page.
"Are you defying me?" He ranted. "Insolent boy! They're all insolent! Traitors, everywhere. I ought to thrash you with the flat of my sword.." he drunkenly reached for Morgenrote, raising it high, to strike at the shimmering, moving target in front of him. He no longer saw the Page, only the Enemy.
Otto cried out, and, by some strange instinct, drew the estoc he had just acquired, to ward off the blows.
Morgenrote was a thousand times better a sword. But in the hands of a drunkard, it skittered and clanged against the simple long-sword nonetheless.
He blinked, the loud clang of steel bringing him somewhat to his senses. "You...you dare unsheathe your sword before your King? You...you...villain...Guards..guards...execute this...this...insolent wretch!"
The drunken rages of his King had been endurable before. But the boy could not now bend knee so easy. Could not cringe and beg and whine. With a sword in his hand, and the memory of knighthood on his shoulder, he could not find it in himself to calm the King as he had a thousand times before, with a display of pitiable grovelling.
Instead, he did the only thing he could. Not out of treachery. Not out of hatred, or anger. But simple self-survival.
He slid his sword around the drunk king's guard, and, with a sickening thud, into the King's armpit, exploiting a weakness in his armour. The thin long-sword slid through the gap, and the King coughed blood.
Otto looked into the King's startled eyes, a mirror of his own terror and suprise.
He withdrew the blade, and watched as the King slid to the ground, groaning. "You...I...can't..." he coughed. "Not even...the Dawn?"
Otto was terrified. He did not dare help the King. If the King lived, he would die. If the King died...he would likely also die. The sin of Regicide was unlikely to be forgiven of a mere page, even by the victorious Canton Lords.
But a Knight...fleeing with the deserters...
He took the King's sword, even as Laurtrec looked up at him, gasping his last breath. A sword of this quality would mark him as a real Knight, even if he could find nothing else to do so.
And in the chaos of war, who would notice one more young battle-field knight?
Otto fled his master, sparing him only one backwards glance, as the King crawled feebly to the door, trying to call through blood-choked lips for the Guards.
Otto ran. He might not have escaped, but given so many others were fleeing the King's doomed castle in that dark storm...
He found a group of Landsknechts roping themselves down from the rain-slick battlements, and disappeared into the night, the Sword of Kings on his back. A knightly heirloom, he called it.
A treasure that would be lost to the ages, even as dawn broke, and the Lords found their quarry dead in his bedchambers, soaked in blood and spilled wine...