The Beaver King, Cautionary Tales of Medieval Dysfunction

In lesser courts, villainy is easy to name. It announces itself loudly and leaves damage that cannot be ignored. Beaverton produced a more insidious figure, one who caused harm not through action but through a disciplined refusal to act at all.

She would later be entered into the Masondonian record as the Dutchess of Non-Intervention.

Aloof by temperament, she moved through life with the emotional presence of a well-appointed statue. She did not quarrel, console, or interfere. Where others reacted, she observed. Where others chose, she abstained. This distance granted her the appearance of dignity while requiring none of the risk that true moral courage demands.

Many mistook this restraint for wisdom. Those who endured the court’s dysfunction understood it differently.

She was present for nearly everything that would later be preserved in the Minstrelle’s cautionary ballads. She witnessed volatile disputes that turned to cruelty, public humiliations disguised as correction, and cycles of chaos followed by uneasy calm. She watched as a young Baylor learned that peace could vanish without warning and safety could not be relied upon.

She did not orchestrate these harms. She allowed them.

Silence became her instrument. Neutrality her shield. By standing nowhere, she convinced herself she bore no responsibility for where events led.

Blindness, in her case, was not imposed. It was chosen.

Then came the Turning.

In that decisive severance, Baylor the Bound relinquished the last fragile ties to a court that demanded endurance without offering refuge. What emerged in Masondonia was Baylor the Brave, a man defined by the clarity that distance was the only mercy left available to him.

His withdrawal might have ended the story quietly, but This Minstrelle did not relinquish her voice.

Across taverns, crossroads, encampments, and candlelit halls, her Songs began to circulate. They were cautionary accounts of medieval dysfunction rendered with such precision that listeners recognized the figures behind the metaphors long before names were spoken. The Beaver King’s excesses were preserved in melody, the court’s absurdities cataloged in verse, and the injuries of those who endured it given language at last.

The songs carried more than grievances. They carried revelations.

Verses exposed secrets long guarded within the court. Transactions conducted in shadow, humiliations buried beneath official narratives, and decisions quietly rewritten after the damage had already been done were restored to their original form. Exploits once retold as triumphs appeared instead as recklessness disguised as authority.

The ballads concerning the Beaver King proved the most unsettling. His legend had been carefully curated for years, shaped into a figure of dominance and mythic stature. The Songs did not attempt to destroy that legend. They illuminated the cost borne by those who lived under it and named chaos as chaos rather than inevitability.

These were not accusations shouted in anger. They were records set to melody.

Eventually, they reached the Dutchess of Non-Intervention.

At first she treated them as distant noise, something happening elsewhere in a story she believed she had successfully avoided. Yet stories travel where presence does not, and truth has a way of reaching those who prefer distance.

Servants hummed fragments while at work. Travelers repeated verses at crossroads. Courtiers exchanged glances when certain lyrics described a figure who watched calamity unfold from behind a veil of detachment.

Recognition arrived slowly, but it arrived.

When she confronted Baylor the Brave about the songs, about his memories and the realities that shaped him, she offered neither sorrow nor confusion.

She dismissed them.

All lies, she said.

In that moment the final severance occurred. Cruelty can be endured, absence survived, and indifference rationalized. To deny another’s lived reality, especially suffering one has witnessed, erases the person themselves.

The woman who gave him life stood unchanged, composed and distant, her conscience preserved by the same detachment she had always mistaken for virtue.

Baylor understood then that there would be no acknowledgment, no reckoning, and no return to truth.

From that day forward she did not become his enemy. Enemies require engagement.

She became absent.

Masondonian archives record the matter without embellishment, as one might note a change of title or territory:

After the Turning, Baylor the Brave ceased all contact with the Dutchess of Non-Intervention, she having denied the truth of events she herself had witnessed.

Some losses do not arrive with funerals. Some people become absent while still living.

He carried the emotions of that moment forward, the grief and anger that come from realizing the person who should have protected you chose comfort over truth. Yet he refused to let those emotions bind him to the past.

Masondonia would be built on clarity rather than denial.

History, indifferent to those who merely observe it, continued without her.

In the end, she was not cast out of the story.

The story proceeded without her.