The Beaver King, Cautionary Tales of Medieval Dysfunction

This Minstrelle often refers to the Turning in the songs I sing, and so I wished to give it a formal definition.

Before any dates are named or meanings assigned, it should be said plainly: Baylor knew the family would never change, and that staying would cost him his marriage, his mind, and the rest of his life.

We speak of the Turning often in the songs of Solipsia, though rarely with precision, for it was not an event that announced itself to the world.

The Turning marks the moment Baylor the Bound severed contact, abdicated all claims, and departed from Masondonia.

It was not a realm-wide occurrence. No banners were lowered. No proclamations were read. The wider world continued unchanged and largely unaware. Roads were still traveled, courts still convened, seasons still turned. History, as outsiders measure it, did not pause.

The Turning is defined not by upheaval, but by absence.

For Baylor, this absence was not triumph, nor rebellion, nor drama. It followed the most destabilizing realization of his life: that the world he had been raised to serve was not as it had been presented to him. What he had believed to be duty revealed itself as control. What he had mistaken for order revealed itself as distortion. He struggled deeply with the understanding that his entire life had been built upon a lie, maintained through ritual, repetition, and expectation.

There was grief in this knowledge, and anger, and a shame that did not belong to him but clung nonetheless. To remain would have required him to continue performing belief in something he now knew to be untrue.

Nothing officially ended. Nothing was declared. And yet, within the House of Beaverton and its immediate orbit, something fundamental shifted. A presence long endured was suddenly gone. A role long assumed was no longer being performed. What had once been absorbed, managed, and quietly compensated for could no longer be ignored.

In Baylor’s own reckoning, the Turning is not marked by a road taken or a door closed, but by the moment he chose honesty over survival. Departure did not feel like freedom. It felt like loss—chosen, necessary, and permanent.

It is here, and only here, that Baylor the Bound ceased to be.

From this absence emerged Baylor the Brave of Masondonia, not by proclamation but by lived truth—no longer defined by endurance, but by agency. In leaving, he claimed what had never been granted: the right to name himself.

He is known now as Baylor the Brave of Masondonia, Husband of This Minstrelle of the Proud Family of Berth.

Within Beaverton, this absence became the axis upon which memory turned.

In written record, family accounts, and internal court reference, time is divided into:

BT — Before the Turning

AT — After the Turning

Court Footnote, appended in the margin of later Beaverton records:

The so-called “Turning,” as referenced in certain private family accounts and traveling songs, is not recognized as a formal event by the Beaverton court. No abdication was submitted, no decree issued, and no succession altered thereby.

The absence of Baylor, formerly styled “the Bound,” is attributed to prolonged personal discontent and voluntary withdrawal from familial obligations.

No structural harm to the House resulted, nor was any lasting disruption to governance observed.

References to “before” and “after” should therefore be understood as poetic convention rather than historical demarcation.

— Clerk of Record, Beaverton

Marginal note, added in a later hand:

Absence is not neutral.

That no decree was issued does not render the loss imaginary, nor does silence preserve what was already failing.

If no harm was done, then why does the record strain so hard to deny it?

The court may refuse the Turning, but it continues to date its grief from the same moment.

— unsigned