The Beaver King, Cautionary Tales of Medieval Dysfunction

Lady Jessalyn: The Quietus Ward and the Writ

Lady Jessalyn was remanded to the Quietus Ward of Vireholt under Concordant authority and household petition.

Within the ward she was evaluated and recorded in clinical terms stripped of household context. The physickers noted depressive collapse, chronic agitation, instability, and symptoms consistent with milk melancholia. This Minstrelle would add that the ward likely saw not a sudden transformation, but the culmination of years of untreated depression and unmanaged anger, sharpened by exhaustion, isolation, and repeated volatility.

She was subsequently medicated. The ward’s intent was stabilization rather than restoration. Sedation came first to quiet the immediate rupture. Tonics followed to regulate sleep and mood. The objective was containment of symptoms and reduction of risk.

Within the Beaverton royal family, such treatment was not regarded as care.

No member of the household accepted mental health as something to be tended with seriousness or dignity. Distress was framed as inconvenience, weakness, or moral failure. Lord Brentin in particular had been witnessed mocking therapeutic tools and ward practices, dismissing them as indulgences for those unwilling to govern themselves. His contempt was not corrected because it aligned with the household’s larger posture. They did not seek understanding. They sought removal.

What stands out in this period is not only the ward’s intervention, but the absence of any advocate.

No meaningful inquiry was made into Lady Jessalyn’s treatment. No petition was filed for reassessment, comfort, or clarification. No effort was made to ensure humane conditions. Once she had been removed from the household, the household behaved as though the matter had been resolved.

The Minstrelle’s Assessment

This Minstrelle records, with reluctance and without sentimentality, that Lady Jessalyn likely meant no lasting harm to herself or to her children.

Her lashing out that night bore the marks of a true mental break rather than calculated cruelty. That does not excuse the danger. It does explain the shape of it.

Equally relevant is what she had been taught to expect from consequence.

In Beaverton there existed an air, cultivated by the royal orbit, that certain behaviors rarely resulted in lasting penalty. Lady Jessalyn had been detained before by local guards. Yet detainment had never matured into accountability, reform, or lasting correction. It ended in release and return. The lesson absorbed was not restraint, but immunity.

The turmoil between Lady Jessalyn and Lord Bucker had always been present. They were young, volatile, and unequipped for the roles they insisted on occupying. The only models placed before them were the Beaver King and Queen, whose example was dominance and neglect dressed up as household order, and Lady Jessalyn’s own parents from Terra Firma, known for its neglected ghettos and generational poverty. Structure was not taught. Stability was not modeled. Responsibility was not rewarded.

Thus the Breaking was treated by the household as an aberration.

This Minstrelle records it as culmination.

Release and the Beaver King’s Pounce

Lady Jessalyn was released from the Quietus Ward.

Many believed she expected what had always happened after an episode of anger with Bucker. Separation would be temporary. The household would reset. The unstable life would resume as if rupture were simply a storm that passed.

She did not count on the Beaver King’s direct contamination of the situation.

King Robert had meddled for years, isolating, inflaming, and provoking. Yet he had never successfully removed Jessalyn from the family structure itself. This time he had a pretext, and he moved with the hunger of opportunity.

A Magistrate was called from Vireholt. A Solicitor was hired to mitigate and maneuver. Documents were filed quickly in the capital to ensure a writ of separation would be underway. Provisions were pursued to prevent contact with the children. Appeals were made to the Concordant Standard for criminal prosecution.

The speed of the response suggested preparation rather than alarm.

Who knows what promises were made to Bucker. It is easy to assume what was paid for him, and what was presented as protection, absolution, and paternal approval. The Beaver King understood his son well enough to direct him like a tool.

Return to the StillWoods

When Lady Jessalyn returned to the StillWoods cabin, she was not welcomed back into life.

She was permitted only to collect what had been set out for her in advance, a small selection arranged by Lord Bucker, though few doubted whose influence guided his hand. The rest of her life remained in place but inaccessible, a household made suddenly foreign by the simple act of being barred from it.

It was there she discovered the full scope of what had been done while she was confined.

The filings had already taken place. The separation was already in motion. The restrictions were already being treated as fact. She had expected to step back into a dysfunctional routine. Instead she stepped into the experience of being administratively erased.

Many would admit that her threatening behavior demanded consequence.

What sickened observers was that consequence did not arise from her husband’s authority, but from the Beaver King’s machinery. The matter should have rested on Lord Bucker alone, and everyone knew he was too stupid, too weak, or too pliable to execute any such decision without being filled with another man’s words.

This Minstrelle can only imagine the moment the truth reached her body.

Not as thought, but as nausea.

The last memory her young daughters would hold of her was not calm, not a story, not a touch, not a lullaby. It would be restraint and removal, officers in the room, voices raised, her own life split open in front of them. No mother wants to be remembered as the moment she was hauled away. No mother wants her children’s final image to be fear.

Shock does not announce itself with poetry. It arrives as blankness.

A pause too long. A breath that will not complete. A hand pressed to the mouth not to cry, but to keep something from escaping.

She was able to contact her family in Terra Firma. They guided her to seek a deed of retrieval from the capital, a legal instrument to reclaim what remained of her personal effects. The procedure was humiliating. It turned a woman’s belongings into a petition, her marriage into paperwork, her identity into a list.

Still, she filed.

Because she had nothing else to hold.

The Departure and the Reality

When the allotted items had been gathered, Lady Jessalyn stood in the doorway of the cabin as if waiting for permission that would never come.

The interior behind her looked rearranged, not simply cleaned, but reorganized around her absence. The small signs of children’s living had been cleared as though someone had tried to make the space look orderly for the record. It did not read as peace. It read as erasure.

She did not ask where the girls were.

The question itself would have broken her, and no answer would have been given.

She left the StillWoods with a bundle of selected possessions and the sick knowledge that her husband had betrayed her for his father’s design. She walked away not knowing when she would see her daughters again, and knowing that time, distance, and narrative would be used against her.

Then the practical truth arrived, blunt and merciless.

She had no work ethic to rely on, because no one had demanded one. She had no job skills, because no one had taught her any. She had no transportation, because she had never been expected to go anywhere alone. She had no home to return to, only the poverty of Terra Firma and the shame Beaverton had assigned her.

Her life had been removed.

Nothing had been replaced.

Thus began what would later be called Jessalyn Slumbthumb’s Silent Period, when her movements were scarcely recorded and her voice absent from official account.

This is where the record ends.

Not the story.