Chapter Text
It's strange to picture Beron Vanserra as a boy, looking around at the ancient wood monolith called The Forest House with wonder and running through the woods chasing after foxes, picking acorns and snacking on wild blackberries that stain his small, pale hands purple. To think that once upon a time, he was innocent too, and laughed with his brother and sister underneath a starry autumn sky as bonfire light bounced off of bright brown eyes and caught glints of red from his tawny hair.
What moment over the last 860-odd years was the one that set him on the course he's on now?
Was it the Autumn Civil War, which killed much of his extended family? Where swaths of forest burnt to cinders as Vanserra loyalists battled against the separatist Embers and Larrians that tried to overthrow them? Was it their execution? It was said that the river Reynard ran red that day with the blood of traitors. Beron's father forced him to watch, forced all three of them, for it was integral that the ruling family mete out justice and not flinch in the face of it.
Was it when - when Beron was barely a man, his uncle briefly took the throne after the bloody assassination of his father, only to be poisoned by Helena, his eldest sister? Was it watching Helena's family be cut down in retribution by Robin in the name of justice, sibling left to fight against sibling, forcing Beron to be the one to drive the blade into his own brother's back? Or was it when he saw the light leave his mother's eyes as her last remaining child was crowned with fire, watching as she mourned the death of Beron, her son? For from that moment onwards, he would be her son no longer: only Beron, the High Lord of Autumn.
Perhaps the change came when his first wife died with child, burying with them some of the last remaining pieces of his heart, or when second, young wife looked at him with suspicious russet eyes full of disdain.
Or maybe - just maybe - it was when he held his eldest son for the first time, saw the flames in Eris' wide dark eyes and knew that for the crown to survive - for Autumn to remain whole - this tiny, innocent creature's hands would end up just as sullied as his own.
I wonder whether he looks over the sea of crimson and gold leaves spreading out beneath his chamber windows and mourns the child he used to be.
I wonder whether he remembers him at all.