Emma the Auspicious

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Emma was born the daughter of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy. Both her mother and her father were of direct Danish ancestry, settling in the Viking territory of Normandy, after Richard legitimized Emma's mother from mistress to wife. From this standpoint Emma watched many longships set off for plunder, returning with hardly a loss of life among them. The English must be dimwitted, foolhardy, and deserving of invasion if they could not defend themselves.

Her attitude was not swayed when she was first betrothed, and then wed, to the King of those weak, brittle people. Her seduction of the man was undertaken begrudgingly, but as it came with a kingdom there was hardly cause for her complaints to her parents to be heard. King Æthelred the Unready of England took the bait readily. In the midst of renewed Viking attacks, he was seeking a way in which he could restore order with the least cost to his own pocket and pride. A battle would risk its defeat and his own death, and there was no good in being King if there was not gold in the treasury to be King with. A marriage to the young Emma, Viking princess, gave a glint of hope.

The attacks, however, did not decrease in the slightest.

Æthelred did not count on his new wife getting her hand into his letter desk, and worming her way next to his advisors. The aging King paid little mind. There was little good a woman could do in affairs of state, but the Viking front was a front none less than the likes of God would change in England's favor. If it had been any other girl but the pious, devoted Emma, she would not have been as successful.

A thirteen year old Queen is rarely taken into confidences or given any chance to prove herself in this manner. Much less for one born Danish, but to her salvation she had also been born in the Catholic tradition of the Holy Roman Empire, as was not uncommon for Nordic nobles. The English were still grappling between secular canons and the rise of the Benedictines, a faction which also looked to the Pope in Rome for its authority. It was not difficult for Emma to come to the understanding that to win her legitimacy it would be to do so by the divine right of a common God. Her devotion, her compassion to the people was without rival, and with it she began to witness events in the London palace she would not have otherwise been privy to.

Emma may have been young but she was not blind. All talk around Æthelred and his advisor revolved around the Viking raids, which had been becoming rising in severity and frequency. The Advisor's words were of calming the King, who was unprepared for any major actions and took the advisor at his word that the tithe alone would satisfy. But Emma would not believe her Danish relatives could return peacefully to their homeland without first claiming Britannia for their own. It was a land ripe for the taking, ruled and inhabited by people too stupid to defend it.

Emma would do what she could to bring the event to its day of glory.

Then she would be embraced as Queen, her Vikings defending the castle, the land and its riches would be beyond dispute. All traces of the devil worshipers would be purged from the county. Perhaps the English would even be taught how to bathe properly as well. The first step had already been taken; securing payment to her brethren from some family in Humber, the Peverells, promising them their lands would not be threatened again.

The Queen had not taken kindly to the news that there existed in this godforsaken island those who consorted with the devil. She had been blessed with this information from the bishop of London, whom in her early days as Queen she had often sought advice and information. He had spoken of a place unplottable on any map where there dwelled people born with certain devilish abilities. The idea had turned Emma's stomach. These demons were the greatest threat to her Queenship, lived on untaxable land, and possessed abilities which might be capable of defeating the Danish in combat. Only such an atrocity could exist in a city as diseased as London.

But she would have to know more. If there was one talent Emma possessed it was the ability to stand back and keep a watchful eye. She had already infiltrated the British throne, keeping it was proving to be tricky.

The streets of London, behind its stolid fortress walls, was not a place for a Queen. Soiled shoes and jealous leers were the least of what might accost her in a city filled with the dead and excrement of its occupants. Placing her crown aside, it took two months before Emma found a trace of the unfamiliar magic she had been warned of. Taking the clothes of a chimney sweep who frequented the castle from the local orphanage, she began to comb the streets for a place that would be impossible to draw on a map, but the very idea of such a place baffled her. Surely if one could see it, it was able to be drawn? Was it invisible? But if it was unable to been seen with the naked eye, wouldn't a gap in the heart of the city slums be regarded as odd?

And there she had appeared, as if out of thin air. This last thought went unknown to Emma, for it slid from her mind before she had the chance to hold onto it, but the girl caught her attention for a different reason then her soiled and ragamuffin appearance.

She was holding a Rosary, the symbol of the devotion to the church, and toying with it in her dirt encrusted fingers. As she did so, each bead exploded with an audible POP.

Incensed, Emma bit back her immediate rage at the action and hesitated to hit the girl across the face, as she had been about to do. The urchin's head snapped up, speaking quick and sharp with a thick and distinctly Cockney accent. Muggle, was the insult that graced her royal ears, and to add further insult to injury, Emma had no possible hint of what it meant.

She got as far as 'I will have you know I am not a muggle, In fact I—' When she felt the appraisal on herself abruptly stop. Eleri, as she soon learned was the girl's name, took the news without a second's deliberation, asking next if Emma was 'Pure', or 'Tainted.' The answer, to the Queen of England, was clear.

What passed next was the forming of one of possibly the oddest of friendships in all of Britannia. Emma could read the chaos that resided behind Eleri's darkly hooded eyes; it lingered with the electricity of a storm and promised to be equally as destructive. It excited her with the possibilities that harnessing this devilishness could bring for the God-fearing.

Brief run-ins in with Emma's devised front of comparing magic from her homeland, (which was preposterous, as demons could not exist outside the island), to that of Diagon Alley's became shorter and shorter, and were replaced with letters when the Queen found it difficult to make excuses not to perform the witchcraft herself. The demon work Emma saw preformed over that period of time she has never recounted to any other living soul.

With the prescience of what atrocities Eleri would be convicted of in future, they were not for the faint of heart.

But neither Emma nor her newfound knowledge in Eleri could have stopped the St. Brice's day massacre, a day her husband ordered the annihilation of every Danish man in the county. While the Danish hold on the outskits of the country was far too strong for this order to be carried out with accuracy, one causality would send the Danish King Forkbeard over the edge. The death of his sister.

Luck or perhaps it was her routine to screen her husband Æthelred's correspondence on top of the other small unnoticed routines she slipped into at the castle in order to gain information, but it was Emma who received the letter from Forkbeard on the subject of the heartless killing of his sister. Naturally, she confiscated it. There was little need for the King's eyes to be graced with a matter as trivial as condolence.

A month later King Forkbeard of Denmark's longships were spotted once more sailing steadily for the coast of England, this time with the intent of raiding East Anglia. Raiding, raping and plundering their way across the country as they did so, coming at the end of their time to Humber.

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This is the second half of the prelude to The Founding rpg. Please visit our site for more information, the information is on our profile.