A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1819 - 1819: The Stirring of Great Winds - Part 4

By the time they met, Dominus, by sheer will, had clawed himself highly. A creature of the strangest qualities, and somehow Claudia loved him. For all his lacking talent, Dominus Patrick took suffering like a stone. His oath as a knight – that was his only driving factor, and it carried him all the way to the Fourth Boundary by the time he'd reached his thirties, and he'd only sat a handful of steps behind Arthur himself.

How could Arthur not look upon the man at that point, and find intrigue? That would have been a good question, had Arthur not seen worth in him long before. Arthur's curiosity as to Dominus Patrick had begun at the Second Boundary, when the two were barely out of the Academy together. Blake supposed it might have been special, how early in his twenties Dominus broke through, despite his lacking significance at the Academy. He'd found something else, another route, quieter than the rest, disciplined, stern and stoney, and for a time, he and Arthur had curiously been in the same place, until Arthur's talents had continued to blossom, and he had zoomed off ahead.

Blake took a seat on a snowy stone bench, in the suburbs of the Capital. He'd already walked quite a distance. The sky was dark overhead, and full of stars, but the wind was whipping up a horrifying storm, and that clear sky promised that it wouldn't stay.

People rushed past, no one interested in the old man shivering by the roadside. They were all quiet, and urgent, hostile and suspicious. That was the city that Blake was tasked with defending – for he knew that of himself. He knew that, despite being the High King's Chief Strategist, his true obligation was to ensure that the Capital was ever defended. To do that would be to protect his King. And, to do that, meant ensuring peace elsewhere.

"Love," Blake said, feeling rather pathetic just to dwell on the word. The harsh emotions of discipline and honour, he preferred those. He respected those, they were far easier to talk about. Seeing those in Dominus, he could not help but nod his head. Yet Arthur had known a great deal of love too, and he'd presented it. The love of a close friendship – that had changed Dominus, the rigid piece of stone that he was. The flaws that Arthur showed to Dominus alone, that great hero, who the realm held above all else, that was a love that had allowed him to continue moving. An impossible friendship, between low-noble, and future High King of all the Stormfront. That ought to have been enough for any man, for any God or Goddess that loved a good story. That those two could meet, and journey, and fight together as friends, that was impossibility enough.

"So why then, did they have to add more?" Blake said bitterly. "If not for love, the realm would not have descended into what it is now. It is love that turned the High King into what he is. Love enlightened, and love corrupted. Of all the women that Dominus Patrick could have chosen… why indeed did it have to be she? Why did the Gods put the two of them together, despite all the chaos that it brought?"

Blake was privileged in his position. He had information that others did not have. It leant to his strategy, and allowed him to reach further than the young men under him, who still continued to look at him with awe. For Blake knew, better than any other, just what had caused the war that they currently fought.

The world of men made it an impossible thing, but the Gods seemed to delight in it. They forced two together that ought not have been. And then they brought chaos with them. The entire realm, fallen to the current state, from the love of two that truly ought never to have met.

Blake ran his hand through his hair in irritation. "It was so incredibly foolish…" He said. "From all of us, at every step of the way, but in particular, from the three of them. From Arthur, that only encouraged it, that only delighted in seeing his friend happy. From Dominus, who did not draw a line, when he ought to have, when he knew to draw lines in everything else. That damn rigid man – why could he not do the same with her? And her. She feigned ignorance, that strange little creature, that little faerie of a woman. She was whimsy and courage in one."

He knew the answer to the question, but still he dared to ask it. For a man like Dominus Patrick, rigid like stone, focused only on one thing, how could he resist the love of someone like her? And how could she, in turn, resist him? The two were perfect opposites. The two were the perfect cures for each other's hearts. When they were together, the world danced, the very wind delighted in it. Merely for those two to be together, it brought the entirety of the Stormfront to stand, in one form of jubilation.

They had their happy few years. They were able to get closer and closer, but that was behind the shadow of a lacking certainty. Neither of them likely dared to cross a line. They danced around each other, truly simply content in the other's company. Blake did not doubt that neither had laid a hand on the other, properly, in the truest sense. He had caught Dominus Patrick once, against his will, in those magically golden forests that lay just outside the Capital, with his head on her lap, and a smile on both their faces, as she gently stroked his head.

They'd looked like something out of a fairy tale. Blake had been struck by the sight of the two of them. Not simply because of the implications of their closeness – for that was something in and of itself. But that, despite it all, it was beauty. Likely the single scene of highest beauty that Blake had ever laid eyes upon. He'd always walked through those Forbidden Forests, and he'd always had the sense that they were places of significance, of true and genuine magic, and that there'd always been the sense of something momentous, as if music was playing. But it was only on that day, when against his will, he'd laid eyes upon that momentous thing.