A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1786 - 1786: By Claudia's Will - Part 2

Lord Blackwell was a man of relentless and fierce activity. When he could not move, he found himself shaken, almost disturbed. He was a creature that always wanted for something to do. The frown on his face that so sat there in recent years had likely come as a product of lacking in that regard.

True enough, the campaigns forced on him into those Verna lands had come with no shortage of difficulty and strife, especially for the continuation of his House, with all the threats that had been made against him, and yet, Blackwell was hardly discontent there. He was angry, frustrated, and at times even anxious as to what the future might hold, but it was hard to call him truly unhappy. For Lord Blackwell, true unhappiness was a lack of emotion. It was that which came when one could not move. It was empty, and void, and depressive – and only then did it invite in the anxiousness of fear and the like.

But he spat on those emotions when he sat in his chest, and he stirred the cauldron of his heart with the anger that came so naturally to him. So naturally, that he used it to crush all that was not it. His sadness, and even at times his happiness. The death of his son Ferdinand had been dealt with in such a fashion – in the form of a raging anger that had been the catalyst to see a civil war started.

It was not lost on Lord Blackwell that he was the very reason the realm sat in the state it was in. On his shoulders, there rested a weighty responsibility. Enough to humble even him before the Gods. So now he bowed his head, and he prayed. He walked with delicateness as of late, as if all the ground beneath him, and the snow, was just a thin covering before an even thinner sheet of ice. That he could fall through and drown at any second, and become a drowned corpse, forgotten to time, as so many millions of men before him had been.

His fist was clenched, his teeth ground, anger stirred again. He despised the fact that he was here, kneeling as he was. But something had dragged him in through the church's magnificent doors, and its grand lion-headed knockers. It was a whim. That was all that had brought him to kneel. Yet even as he knelt there, he felt the pulling of significance.

The church was empty, there was not a priest in sight. There was no one to close the doors after Lord Blackwell, to quell the cold wind that he allowed to come in for his absent attention. That wind stirred the many lit candles, pulling their flames in directions that they would rather not go in, and threatening to blow them out entirely.

It ran under Blackwell's cape, and lifted it, forcing a chill into his bones, for the cold steel armour that he now wore. His beard bristled as he shook his head against the chill. He told himself he'd come in here for a reason, that there was a purpose behind it, but he could find none.

The very fact that he was sitting kneeling here as he was likely could be blamed on that lack of purpose. In the heart of a civil war they sat, with a thousand problems to solve, and all of a sudden, Lord Blackwell had found himself without anything to do. A few weeks ago, he'd wanted nothing more than to see the Pendragon lands quelled, and that problem duly solved, but now that it was indeed solved, he was unhappier than he had been before. For it was not his hands that did it. It was Queen Asabel, and she'd done it with an ease that he could never approach. So effective was her positioning in solving the problem, that Blackwell merely slowed her down when he was near her. She was better left to her own devices, to see it done by her own will.

Nothing was the position that Blackwell was forced in – or at least, nothing in that regard. The fact that he could do no more in healing the territory that he had helped burn put him at an impasse. Blackwell's many answers and decisions came not through the generation of rigorous thought, but through activity, where one effect might spawn another effect. In being robbed of the problem he had intended to solve, he now lacked the means to generate the next stage of his strategy.

He was stuck as to the matter of what to do next. It was easy to blame that on the problem that he had been robbed of solving - and indeed he did – but it also pointed to, he thought, the tensions that had built up throughout the course of their war. As with all things, and with all battlefield, there were points in which the world seemed to come to a stand still. When one needed not a series of rigorous and fast moves, but a single carefully selected play.

They were at a point in the civil war where the dangers of inactivity were far outweighed by the dangers of a single move spent too quickly. To move now put him in more danger than simply watching and waiting. But of course, one could not watch and wait forever.

It was a difficult position to be in. Those that studied strategy as younger men seemed to think of it as a single long drawn out plan. Blackwell himself had thought it to be that. Now he wasn't so sure. For all the victories that he had won, he had not done it off the back of a single plan. His thinking was dynamic, and ever-changing, ever likely to transform into something else entirely. He often felt his way forward than he did think his way forward.

Rarely, though, was he ever sat in one place as he was now, with such a feeling of uncertainty. He felt that went to show the quality of his opponents, that they could tie him up so splendidly, simply out of respect for the might that they wielded.