Chapter Text
The first time Claude encounters the Fallen King of Faerghus, it’s in a history book for class.
Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd is recorded in many historical accounts as the last king of Faerghus before the Kingdom fell to the Adrestian Empire during the Five-Year War. He fell in the Battle of Gronder Field in 1185 to Adrestian forces, led by Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg. As the last in his bloodline with no official living relatives, King Dimitri’s death marked the end of House Blaiddyd and of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.’
‘Oh.’ A pang of sadness passes through Claude, then he blinks, surprised with himself.
It’s a tragic tale, sure. It’s a sad thing, to lose so much history with the death of a historical figure — the answers to questions that will forever remain mysteries — but one that happens so many times throughout history that it just becomes routine. History, after all, is written by the victors. And House Blaiddyd was hardly the only noble house that met its demise during the Five-Year War.
But just for a moment, Claude swore he felt an actual, real moment of sadness when he read those words – ‘King Dimitri’s death…’ ‘…the end of House Blaiddyd…’
A yawn overtakes him and he reaches his fingers up to rub at his eyes. How late was it? His gaze drifts over to the clock on the wall and he grimaces. Late enough. No wonder his brain was starting to go a little haywire.
For once, he listens to his body and decides to call it a night, but not before quickly scribbling a little note on the margin of the text: ‘King Dimitri – who is he?’
He switches his study lamp off and slips underneath the covers of his bed, still unmade from this morning, and slowly, he drifts off into a warm, dreamless sleep.
As it turns out, Faerghus isn’t discussed much in class, which isn’t really a surprise. The kingdom had been in a steady decline since the death of King Lambert during the Tragedy of Duscur, and any hope they might have had at building a strong nation was lost when the prince murdered his uncle, the regent (supposedly – Claude had his doubts), and was subsequently executed for it. And all that was before he’d seemingly returned from the dead five years later, only to be wiped out by Adrestia in a dramatic three-way battle with Leicester.
The basics of it were covered in class, but Claude found himself dissatisfied with what little they were given. He itched to know more, to learn more, to dig deeper. What secrets were these books hiding? What were the truths written between the lines?
And so, like with every other niche interest that caught Claude’s fancy, he researches.
He starts with the Wikipedia page, which is always a good starting point, but never the most refined or reliable. Faerghus itself still existed as one of the three major regions of Fódlan, but Claude skips the paragraphs on its tourist spots and business districts and goes straight to its history.
It’s a chronicle as depressing as the place itself, it seemed; always embroiled in one rebellion or invasion or another from the start to the very end. It was an offshoot of Adrestia and was ruled by House Blaiddyd since its inception, with its bloodline unbroken until the demise of its last king, lost in a haze of madness.
As for the reasons for that madness, that much is unknown. Claude frowns at that. There isn’t much to go on beyond that; just a couple of scant sentences about how it could have been undiagnosed mental illness, or a poison of the mind, a sickness, or plain happenstance to begin with.
For some reason, none of these tentative explanations seemed right to Claude. He’d always been of puzzles and mysteries, and he had a knack for knowing when he was onto something and when he was just chasing a dead lead. Call it intuition, call it a gut feeling. All he knew was that this sixth sense of his had never been wrong before, and that there was something more to House Blaiddyd and the Fallen King than ‘He was just crazy, I guess.’
He opens a new tab on his browser, and turns to the forums.
“Hey, Claude~” he hears before a head of bubblegum pink hair pops up in his line of vision.
“Hey, Hilds,” he greets back as he puts the last of his books away in his locker. “What’s up?”
“So about that invitation to Lorenz’s place this weekend…”
“Oh, you mean his dad’s birthday party that he told Lorenz to invite our class to?” he supplies. “Sure, what about it?”
“Yeah, that. You’re coming, right?” She looks at him expectantly, already a glimmer of mischief in her eyes.
Claude sends an impish grin her way. “Why, Hilda, you know I would never turn down an opportunity to experience Mr. Gloucester’s hospitality.” He shuts his locker and starts heading down the hall. “Eeeexcept this weekend, I’m afraid. I’ve already got plans.”
“What?! Claudeee…” she whines as she trails after him. “Are you seriously going to leave me to sit through a stuffy dinner party at Lorenz’s house by myself? I’m going to die of boredom.”
“Hey, don’t go dying at the party now! Or else you’ll never hear the end of Lorenz’s ‘Of all the times’ spiel. You know the one.” Her answering groan confirms that she, indeed, knew the one. “Besides, I already gave my regrets to Lorenz. You should have seen his face when I told him I couldn’t go – you’d think that Saint Cichol Day came early or something. In any case, isn’t the rest of the class going to be there too?”
The air abruptly turns nippy as they step through the double doors of their school; Hilda shivers a bit. “Yeah, sure.” She rolls her eyes. “And you expect Marianne or Ignatz or Lysithea to fuck around? And we both know that Raphael is going to be too busy eating everything in sight.”
“Which leaves Leonie,” Claude points out.
“I’m looking to enact a little mischief, Claude, not commit a felony,” she says flatly.
Claude couldn’t even disagree with that. Leonie tended to get snippy with Lorenz’s holier-than-thou personality even on the best of days. He couldn’t imagine her staying in a room full of stuffy rich people for more than an hour without popping her lid off. Claude wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up begging off just to spare herself the headache of dealing with the obscenely-wealthy-and-out-of-touch-with-reality, as it were.
“Guess you’re just gonna have to behave yourself then,” Claude shrugs.
Hilda hits him on the arm a few times with a perfectly manicured hand. “Uuughhh, you suck.”
“Ow, hey! Well, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yeah, I’m not.”
She hits his arm again.
“Aw, c’mon, I need that!” he laughs, clutching a hand to his abused arm. They slow to a stop at the crosswalk. “But joking aside, I really do have something scheduled for the weekend.”
Hilda raises an eyebrow at him. “More nerd shit at the library again?” It wouldn’t be the first time Claude blew people off to hit the books when he was particularly invested in whatever personal research project he had going at the time.
“Nope.” The sign turns green. “An art exhibit.”
Hilda’s other eyebrow goes up in surprise as they cross. “Since when were you into art? Isn’t that more like an Ignatz thing? And can’t you just go next weekend?”
“It’s not just any exhibit,” Claude says. “Limited time, this weekend only.” He pulls up the poster on his phone and shows it to her.
She reads the title aloud, “’Lost Visual Histories: The Art of Faerghus and Her People’. Oh my Goddess, it IS more nerd shit!” A couple of people cast her a look as they walk past.
“Not at the library though.” Claude slips his phone back into his pocket.
“Like that matters.” She shrugs it off with a wave of her hand. “But fiiiiine, be like that. I know how you get about that king you like so much. King Dimitri, was it?”
“I never said that the exhibit was about him.”
“Hah! Right, I guess you’re just super into Faerghan art history and not because you totally have a crush on a dead guy from, like, five hundred years ago, huh?”
Claude felt his ears grow warm. It sounded stupid when she put it like that. But no matter the case, he dared not to make any sudden movements. Not with Hilda, not with how observant she was. “I could be.”
She rolls her eyes. “You might be good at talking out of your ass any other time, Riegan, but when it comes to that king of yours, you’re an open book. I’d sooner believe it if you told me that Lorenz finally landed a girlfriend from all his pitiful attempts at flirting.”
He shrugs. “Call it an academic fascination then.”
“Playing it cool so doesn’t suit you. But fine, keep your secrets,” she says, then lets out a loud, dramatic, long-suffering sigh toward the heavens. “I can’t believe I’ve been ditched by my friend who’d rather gawk at paintings of his history crush because he’s a big giant nerd.”
Claude laughs.
Later that night, he lies in bed, thinking about why he hadn’t felt the need to deny it.
Hilda isn’t right. But the thing is, she isn’t wrong either.
All things being equal, Claude might have gone to the exhibit. Leicester and Faerghus have a shared history, and that might have been enough to pique his interest. He’d always been into history, the shifting powers and hidden struggles, the anecdotes that shaped the world into what it was now. It had always been his favorite subject at school, and a personal research interest regardless.
So he might have gone to the exhibit still, but probably not at the expense of Hilda to suffer through an entire dinner party with Lorenz by herself.
But there was a reason why he had to drop everything and go, the reason why he bought a ticket online the moment this exhibit was announced.
The Derdriu Metropolitan Museum of Art would like to thank the Historical Association of Faerghus and the Fraldarius Estate for graciously loaning some of their finest pieces of art to the Museum in celebration of Fódlan History Month, including select pieces originally bequeathed to them by the House of Blaiddyd, ruling house of the former Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.
So Hilda was right. But there was no need to tell her that.
When Claude enters the museum, he heads up to the exhibition hall immediately, not bothering to walk through the floors of contemporary and historical Leicester art. He’d seen them often enough on school field trips, and besides, Almyran art was more his speed.
He didn’t imagine that Faerghan art was any nearer to his speed than Leicester art, frankly. Even approaching the exhibition hall’s entrance, he could already spot an endless collection of winter landscapes and dreary scenery. Gratuitous usage of the color gray, too. Ah well, let it not be said that Claude didn’t give it a chance, at least.
True enough, the art was reflective of what many Faerghan painters would have seen around them at the time – which is to say, Claude was right in predicting that there were countless paintings of snow, snow, and snow, quiet places and silent forests. There was an overarching feeling of loneliness threaded throughout many of the paintings, a certain desolation born out of living in a frozen tundra. Life was difficult out in the cold, and even looking at these paintings, Claude could feel the chill in his bones.
As he walks deeper through the hall, giving the paintings the respect that they deserved even if he wasn’t really into them, Claude gradually starts seeing more things of interest. A lone hunter with a wolf by his side. The eyes of an animal shrouded in shadow in a dark forest. Moonlight catching on the surface of an icy lake.
As he comes upon a wall with a large painting of a hunter fighting off a bear, Claude finds himself more drawn to a smaller picture of an elk taking a drink of water from a stream, its eyes bright as it stared at the viewer with equal parts suspicion and curiosity.
He moves on to another wall, where his eye is caught by a small but vibrantly colored kingfisher in flight, diminutive but bright in a bleak landscape.
In another part of the exhibit, dwarfed by a sprawling tapestry of the snow-capped mountains of Faerghus, he drifts towards a lone painting of a flower sprouting from a mound of snow. ‘Winter Crocus,’ the placard read, ‘c. 1147, artist unknown. Inscription on the back reads, “Even in the harshest cold, I will bloom from snowbanks forevermore.”’
Interesting, he thinks, though it doesn’t completely encapsulate the feeling the words had evoked in him. He presses on.
The theme shifts into one of battle, which isn’t surprising, given Faerghus’ old warrior culture. The main piece is a painting depicting an army of Faerghan soldiers riding out to battle behind their king, but Claude spots a portrait off to the side and wanders closer towards it.
It’s a melancholy image of a family – the man garbed for war with a sword strapped to his hip, his wife clutching his capelet with a pale hand and tears streaming down her cheeks. The man is knelt before his child, holding a dagger out to them, with the child reaching towards it, their face unseen to the viewer. ‘To a Future Yet Unknown, For a Hope Worth Fighting For,’ the inscription next to it reads.
Again, the words tug at something within Claude. These paintings were more than just postcard landscapes and chronicles of war. It was strikingly obvious now that whoever had curated the collection had wanted to show the viewers the soul of Faerghus itself – a warrior culture, but not a culture of war. Its fauna, its flora, its people – there was only so much that words in a high school textbook could teach. In this, Claude felt like he was reaching…a new understanding, of sorts. Of what, he wasn’t exactly sure. He’d never been the sentimental type, after all. But an understanding all the same.
In some ways, he felt like he was catching a glimpse of something, unraveling a small part of the question that was still written in the margins of his textbook: ‘King Dimitri – who is he?’
The exhibit eventually leads to the part that must have been loaned by the Historical Association of Faerghus, as they were mostly relics and art pieces stored behind glass and with cordons in front of each painting.
Claude’s heart leaps to his throat. This is what he’d come all the way here for.
He steps past the divider separating the area from the rest of the exhibit. There’s a meandering route threaded throughout it, one that encourages looking at everything on display. Mostly, there are paintings and portraits, a few statues and sculptures, and even some textiles reportedly hand-woven by King Lambert’s first wife herself.
Claude takes his time and parses through the displays, reading through all the blurbs written beside each piece, filing anything of note away in his mental catalog. He’s not exactly sure what he’s looking for, if he’s being honest, but more knowledge never hurt anyone.
The path eventually leads him to a line of portraits depicting the members of House Blaiddyd through the centuries. It’s not complete by any means, with many probably lost to war or calamity, but more and more seemed to have survived in the latter years, before stopping completely, as the kingdom fell into ruin.
Towards the end of the lineup is a portrait of the last royal family of Faerghus: King Lambert, his second wife Queen Patricia, and a young Prince Dimitri.
Of course, Claude is familiar with this painting. In almost all the books and articles of Faerghan history, it was almost inevitable for this painting to appear, though it was the first time he’d seen it up close. A quiet feeling wells up in him at the sight of it; pictures truly didn’t do it justice.
For all intents and purposes, it was a run-of-the-mill royal family portrait, with all the sobriety and gravitas that it called for. But up close, he could appreciate more the slight natural smile that King Lambert’s facial structure granted him, the rich drape of Queen Patricia’s heavy skirts, the gently rounded cheeks of the then-adolescent Prince Dimitri.
He was a cute boy, wide-eyed and apple-cheeked. Claude could hardly believe that he would grow up to be who many a historian often called the Boar Prince of Faerghus.
There was something tragic about it, looking at the portrait. This had obviously been painted before the Tragedy of Duscur, the event that would lead to Faerghus’ downfall. King Lambert had his fair share of enemies, Claude knew from the bits and pieces he was starting to pick up from his personal research, but this portrait had definitely been painted during the time that he was in peace talks with Duscur, despite the opposition from within his own ranks. Had he played his cards right, he might have survived that horrible affair. And what would have Fódlan looked like then?
…Food for thought, at the very least. Claude moves on, though a heavy feeling weighs in his heart for reasons he can’t quite explain.
The next painting is the last in the line, by virtue of it being the last surviving piece before the kingdom’s decline. Though Claude couldn’t really imagine that it could be any more meaningful than the actual, real-life version of the painting he’d seen in literally dozens of books and articles.
Then he stops.
Prince Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, Age 17
Artist Unknown, 1180This is the last surviving piece of art owned by House Blaiddyd, which depicts the young Prince Dimitri before going off to the Officers Academy at Garreg Mach Monastery. He is depicted wearing the uniform of the Officers Academy, with the blue capelet marking him as the leader of the Blue Lions House, the designation of students from the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus. Any art depicting the prince in later stages of his life may have existed, but have unfortunately not survived to the present day. The most common depiction of Prince Dimitri during the Five-Year War are artistic renditions based on various historical accounts and writings.
The boy in the picture is fair-skinned, blond, with the same striking blue eyes as his father. He wears a stern expression, one carefully devoid of emotion. It’s clearly the same boy as in the previous picture, but aged up a few years. In that time, the soft cheeks have given way to prominent and noble cheekbones, the juvenile haircut traded out for a short, handsome one. He looks regal, royal, looking every inch the prince he was raised to be. Broad shoulders and a proud bearing, garbed in the prestige of the finest military academy in the continent at the time, and as a leader, no less.
That young man in the painting was definitely a prince.
But somehow, Claude felt something off. Something missing.
He was a prince. But was he still Dimitri?
Claude startles at the thought, unbidden as it was. What a thought to have about…about a historical figure he had no personal relation to. Not by blood, most certainly not by friendship.
And yet…somehow…
Claude looks up at the painting again, trying to think normal thoughts like the prince’s role in this land’s history, how the disaster at Duscur might have shaped him and turned him into that mad king that everyone spoke about.
But the more he looked, the more he thought about what the prince might have felt, how painful it must have been to go through all of what he did alone, and at such a young age. How had those things irreparably hurt him? Could he have been saved, had the circumstances been right? Could he have been happy, at the very end?
Claude stares into those eyes, those blue, blue eyes, and thinks that maybe he sees the pain in there. Maybe he sees the anger and resentment. Maybe he sees the loneliness. Maybe he sees the heartbreak, the guilt, the cry for help, the anguish that lasts for too many lifetimes.
Gods, he was Claude's age when this portrait was made. Seventeen and already carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Claude couldn't even imagine it.
As he stares at the painting, Claude finds himself wishing for nothing more than to reach out and touch it, to touch him.
It’s not your fault, he wants to tell the prince -- so young, so damned. It’s not your fault, Dimitri.