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. It settled on its verdict long ago, and it is wrong. I have always known it was wrong, and I said nothing.

That is my crime. Not the only one — I have lived eleven hundred years and the ledger is long — but it is the one that has kept me from sleep.

Three hundred years ago I crawled into my grief like a wounded animal seeking dark, and I stayed there. Not because I love the pain. Because the grief was the last thing that held her to me. Without her, the rest ceased to matter. Empires rose. Kings died. Wars were won and lost and won again, and I watched it all from a great distance, hollowed out and purposeless.

She was called a great many things in the end. Few were kind. Fewer still were deserved. Even those who had loved her went to their graves believing the lie, thinking their loyalty misplaced and their faith a fool’s devotion. I could have told them otherwise. I chose silence, and that silence followed them into the earth.

That is the weight I carry. That is why I will never fully forgive myself.

I am no poet. I am a warrior, 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, and 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 places of memory, but the world’s to judge and misunderstand all over again.

And yet.

In all my ages there has never been one like her. Not before. Not since. I carry memories that stretch back beyond the birth of empires, and of them all, hers is the one I have held most dear. She deserved infinitely better than my silence.

So today this old warrior puts down his sword and takes up the pen. Three hundred years is long enough. Long enough for silence. Long enough for lies. It is time the world knows the truth behind the Rose that shattered an Empire.