The Beaver King, Cautionary Tales of Medieval Dysfunction

From the Annals of Beaverton

Let it be recorded that Kellis of TrashTown, a kinswoman of the Masondonia/Berth line, has passed beyond the borders of the realm into whatever dark lands receive those who depart this world burdened by their own deeds.

The Minstrelle confesses that no songs of fond remembrance rise to meet this news. Her earliest recollections are not of feasts or festivals, but of grim labors — of arriving with kin bearing sacks, shovels, and bitter chemicals to carve a path through a dwelling that had surrendered itself to neglect. Such was the threshold through which that branch of the family was known.

In those days, Kellis existed at the margins of the clan’s story, spoken of more as a caution than as a relation. Children passed through her household like disputed wards of a failing province, and order was something imposed from without rather than cultivated within. Of the five children born to her, only four would reach adulthood, a loss that cast a long shadow over that troubled house.

The Minstrelle herself was counted among those unwilling wards for a season, serving not as guest nor as kin, but as a keeper of younger lives in a place where stability was a stranger. It was within that household that the Minstrelle suffered sexual abuse while under Kellis’s protection, a violation met not with safeguarding, but with dismissal and removal of the child rather than the threat.

From that hour she learned that protection was not a guarantee granted by blood.

Long years passed in deliberate silence. Distance became the only peace available, and so distance was kept. When Kellis reappeared after more than two decades — allied with Auntie Carrow, the Ear Rot of Solemere, whose disturbances were already well known throughout the family provinces — it served only to confirm that the separation had been wisdom, not cruelty.

The final sighting came in a tavern under another name, where, upon recognizing the Minstrelle, Kellis fled her post and vanished into the night rather than exchange even a single word. Thus ended their story: not in reconciliation, nor in open quarrel, but in retreat.

At news of her passing, the Minstrelle finds not grief, but a quiet lifting of a weight long carried. Pity is reserved for the four children raised within that troubled dominion, who endured circumstances not of their choosing.

Let it therefore be entered into the record: Kellis of TrashTown was a figure whose presence brought turmoil and whose absence brought calm. Her chapter in the Minstrelle’s life is now closed, its lessons retained, its burdens set down.

So recorded. So witnessed. So concluded.