The Archduke

We are all here, enduring this endless trial in a world of gravel and clouds, to attune for the sins of one man. One who once was a revered leader, but was consumed by hubris. He made the ultimate blasphemy, a heresy so gross his single punishment was not enough to appease the wrath of the gods.   But before we get there, let me tell you a story

The way the Archduke is depicted in the early notebooks compared to the later one has a striking contrast. From an admirable leader unjustly smitten to a monster who played with the lives of his subject for his amusement, the perspective has a major shift. Nonetheless, all agree that it was a kind of person that appear once in a millennium.

A reign of reforms

While very little remains from the archduchy, an almost exhaustive biography of his last sovereign was amongst the few books salvaged in the early days of the Ordeal. It tells the life of the man, his name redacted, from his rise to power to his dire project.

Third of five siblings, he was a prodigy amongst the prodigies and rose to a position of power right after the death of his father, by removing both his elder sisters from the competition. The first he convinced that her talent would be more suitable as a general than a political animal, and the second by a fortunate accident when it was clear she wouldn't yield her birthright.

A few years after sitting on the throne, he was already accomplished in the craft of magic and alchemy, two occult science that were lost during the Punishment, and came forth with an ambitious plan for the archduchy.

He multiplied the urbanism and social reforms, leaning especially toward a better education for all the population, even against the will of several nobles. It was his belief that a nation is only as strong as its weakest citizens, and that for his reign to be prosperous, he needed to have well-educated subjects.

A dream of eternity

Once the country was reformed to fit his view of a powerful nation, he turned into what he viewed as his grand project. He thought that mortality was not inevitable, using as example the centuries-old lighthouse keepers. If the gods could grant immortality to the watchers at the edge of the world, then surely he could do the same through research and intelligence.

The gods failed to share his point of view, and when it was clear a simple warning was not going to stop the man, they intervened for the first time in recorded history to subject the entire archduchy to the Punishment. Because of the hubris of a single man, all great that he was, the whole population was thrown under, in a world between life and death, where survival is an everyday struggle and escape a faraway dream.