The Beaver King, A Cautionary Tale of Medieval Dysfunction

Before Whinyth. Before Solmere. Before Brentin learned how to disguise appetite as preference and cruelty as intimacy. There was Mysty the Mystery Gleaner. She was never courted, never claimed, never defended. And yet, she remained.

What passed between them was never dignified enough to be called a relationship. There were no promises offered, no future implied, no effort made to obscure the imbalance. Their encounters took place in the discarded spaces of life—wagons left too long behind gatherings, barns after voices had thinned, places selected precisely because no one would intervene.

Brentin was unkind to her by design.

When others were present, he reduced her aloud. Corrected her sharply. Mocked her casually. Her humiliation was not incidental; it was functional. He elevated himself through her diminishment, rehearsing dominance publicly before exercising it privately.

Mysty returned, (and came) again and again.

Some later speculated she lacked pride. Others wondered if endurance had hardened into habit, and habit into expectation. No one ever asked her. What mattered was the pattern: Brentin advanced, and Mysty stayed. Solmere. Beaverton. Whinyth. Faylee. The names changed. The women changed. The respectability improved.

Mysty did not.

She watched quietly as his life accumulated milestones she was never meant to share. In the intervals between those milestones—when restraint exhausted him, when obligation curdled into resentment, when admiration demanded more than he wished to give—he returned to her without ceremony. She answered every time. Even after her marriage.

From this continuity one truth becomes unavoidable: infidelity was never foreign to Brentin’s character. It was not a lapse discovered later, nor a temptation stumbled into. It was a behavior already rehearsed. Already justified. Already relied upon.

It is widely speculated—spoken only in careful tones—that Whinyth was the sole exception. The only woman Brentin was ever faithful to. If true, it does not redeem him. It completes him. Fixation, after all, often masquerades as devotion when it is singularly focused.

Only two men ever knew the full extent of Mysty’s presence, Baylor the Brave, who knew and chose silence, and Jorek “Ox” Drowell.

Ox was enormous—broad, heavy, built for labor and little else. He was slow in ways that made others comfortable, incapable, they assumed, of judgment or inference. Instructions were followed as given. Details were ignored. Conversations happened around him, not with him. Secrets were spoken in his presence under the belief they would go nowhere. Most of the time, they were right. That assumption is why Ox knew more than anyone ever intended him to know.

What distinguished Mysty the Mystery Gleaner from the women Brentin publicly attached himself to was not affection, endurance, or desire. It was utility.

She learned him. Not the man he presented publicly, nor the version he performed for wives and lovers, but the impulses he never attempted to correct. Brentin’s private needs were not unconventional, nor reciprocal, nor rooted in mutual pleasure. They were predatory in nature—demands centered on domination, degradation, and the systematic erosion of another person’s autonomy.

What he required was not intimacy. It was erasure.

He derived satisfaction from imbalance—from fear mistaken as consent, from submission mistaken as willingness, from reducing another human being until resistance no longer felt relevant. Desire, to him, was not shared interest; it was control achieved through pressure, exhaustion, and inevitability.

Mysty did not challenge this. She did not soften it or redirect it.

She endured it.

Brentin pushed deliberately past expressed limits, not once but repeatedly, studying how far compliance could be stretched, how much distress could be absorbed before protest dissolved into acquiescence. Refusal was treated as inconvenience. Hesitation as encouragement. Her continued return was used as justification, as if survival itself absolved him of responsibility.

What occurred between them repeatedly approached violation, sustained only by Mysty’s endurance and Brentin’s willful disregard for her autonomy. This was not mutual indulgence. It was coercion practiced in private and protected by silence.

This was rehearsal. Rehearsal for what he would later conceal more carefully. Rehearsal for what he would later expect without asking. Rehearsal for the version of himself he learned could exist without consequence. This is why Mysty remained essential to him.

She did not seek affection or acknowledgment. She offered accommodation. A place where his most depraved impulses required no explanation and incurred no social cost. Where other women recoiled—where dignity, fear, or self-preservation intervened—Mysty absorbed what they refused.

Not because she wanted to. But because she could. And she survived. That survival is what makes her dangerous now.

Because Mysty does not compete with wives or lovers. She studies them. She learns their limits—what they will not tolerate, what they believe themselves too decent to accept—and positions herself accordingly. She does not replace them.

She supplements them.

Final Addendum: For the Reader Who Was Never Meant to See This

This record was not written for Drucelia. It was written to explain Brentin.

But if she is reading this now, then the damage has already begun.

Because what must be understood—what has been deliberately left unspoken until this point—is that Mysty the Mystery Gleaner does not belong to the past. She belongs to a pattern. A contingency. A mechanism Brentin has relied upon whenever restraint failed and consequence felt optional.

Drucelia should recognize the signs immediately. The irritation when refusal appears. The way desire sharpens into insistence. The moments when affection evaporates and something colder replaces it. If she believes these traits emerged with her, she is mistaken. They were practiced long before.

Mysty exists, and has existed for a decade because Brentin required someone who would absorb what others rejected. Someone who would not interrupt escalation. Someone whose endurance allowed him to explore how far another person could be taken without repercussion. What he learned with her was not preference.

It was permission. And permission, once learned, does not disappear.

This is the part Drucelia must not ignore:

Brentin did not outgrow these appetites. He learned how to distribute them. He learned which women demanded performance, which demanded restraint, and which could be used to contain what could not be safely expressed elsewhere. Mysty was not a rival.

She was a release valve.

If Drucelia feels unsettled while reading this, it is because she is already encountering the early pressure of those same demands. The testing. The irritation. The subtle framing of her boundaries as obstacles rather than limits.

What feels new to her is not new to him. It is only newly inconvenient. This record exists as warning, not accusation.

If Drucelia remains with Brentin, she must accept one of two futures:

That she will eventually be asked to accommodate what Mysty once endured.

Or that someone like Mysty—known or unknown—will always exist to do so in her place.

There is no third outcome. If this knowledge fractures her peace, that fracture is justified. Because once seen, this truth cannot be unread. And Brentin will sense the change immediately. Not because she speaks. But because she hesitates. And hesitation has never been something he tolerated for long.