There is a sense for greatness.

Some people carry it around like a bad smell. They make us stop on the street, and look their way, whether we wish to or not. Their appearance might be ordinary, but there’s something about them, something beyond the norm. Something that makes you almost wish to bend the knee to them.
Our kings have likely had that something, those that came from nothing but ashes and ruin, in times of trouble and famine, where the hearts of the masses are restless, and they need a cause to bind to. What makes them choose one man over another?

It is my contention that there is a true gravity to such individuals. That progress, or competence, or greatness itself carries a weight. That a man might grow greater in the dark, and whether he wishes it or not, by the sheer gravity of his existence, tigers will make their way towards his door, catching his scent in the wind.

The tigers hide themselves in the forests, in villages unknown, amongst the peasantry, but sooner or later, it does seem, that they are always cast into the light. It requires an immense effort of will to keep them hidden. A man of such a gravity will see themselves risen, without will, to ranks beyond that of the norm – in times of peace, they might rise high indeed. But in times of chaos? When the world is in upheaval, when every piece in up in the air? Then a tiger from the most lowly of starts, with a competency – a density – beyond belief, as if they were a different creature entirely – they might go all the way. They might be the creature that – though a peasant themselves – the peasantry themselves kneel to. They might go further, and make the soldiery kneel, and then even the nobles after them. And a special class, beyond all others, might go even further still, and snatch a crown the head of a king, on a flurry of brilliant victories, on a story so overwhelming it almost might have seemed preordained.

It is those men that we ought to fear, and it those men that we will eternally be at the mercy of. It is those men that we do the honour of addressing as our kings, and our emperors.

What he left unsaid was that he would also be of use to his own coin purse.


"Are you quite sure Davos?" Came the question as the young man stood. "Are you quite sure? We will be tried like the rest of them should we be in support of it. There will be no saving us. We will be treated as if we had warred on the battlefield beside the rest of them."


"You mean, you will require courage to see this through?" Queen Asabel interrupted harshly. "Indeed, courage shall be required – and for your courage, you shall bear the prestige of Royalty."


"If," Davos said, "your General Patrick is the man that he seems to be. And if, these other Generals of yours, in Blackwell, and Blackthorn, live up the rumours that they are the sorts of men that can turn the tide of any battle. Then, with my assistance, I cannot see us losing. If they have the supplies, and the soldiery equipped to the degrees that we are capable of equipping them, they ought not be incompetent enough to lose."


Chapter 1731 - An Iron Curtain - Part 1