History

Rathare’s earliest memory is of his parents leading him up the uneven stone steps to a monastery and leaving him there. From the small hilltop, he could see their family wagon lurch away down the dirt road and the blank stares of his siblings looking back at him. He had thought they would come back after taking care of whatever business that trip was for. They never did.

Later, he would come to realise that the actual purpose of that trip had likely been to get rid of him, and even later still, he would understand why an impoverished family had decided to discard the burden of an extra mouth to feed. But it would take him years of complicated childhood feelings before he could look at his abandonment so rationally. Life in the tiny, rural orphanage run by the monastery was unsurprisingly harsh. Amenities were scarce, chores were relentless, and the director was a washed-up monk who despised his role - and by extension, his wards. To support itself in this isolated location, the monastery owned several grain fields and a mill, so the orphans would spend each day sowing, threshing, milling and cleaning without respite.

Occasional visits by the other monks would teach Rathare - a remarkably sharp child even then - the basics of how to read. He learned to sneak into the monastery’s small library whenever he was up there to borrow books, hiding them under his bed and swapping them out for new ones at his next opportunity. Eventually the director discovered his transgressions, however, and broke every finger on Rathare’s dominant hand as ‘punishment for the sin of theft’. Terrified, Rathare stopped visiting the library.

A turning point finally came as Rathare neared adolescence. While repairing the roof of a silo one day, trying not to watch the director’s angry beating of a clumsier orphan, something in him snapped. He shoved both the director and orphan into the gap where the roof was broken, sending them plummeting into the grain store below. Then he held his breath for as long he could, waited a few extra minutes, and ran to get help.

Both the director and orphan had suffocated in the grain by the time people managed to find them. Rathare told everyone that the two had slipped on the rickety roof and everyone believed him. After some commotion, the monastery sent over a new monk to be the orphanage’s director - and although they weren’t perfect, they were a vast improvement. The orphans were finally fed, clothed and schooled to a minimum standard. Life became decent. And Rathare, despite having killed two people, had never felt better. The realisation came to him then: all the talk about sin was overblown, and there was no such thing as a ‘good’ law or moral, really. Sometimes it was good to lie, or steal, or murder.

Rathare was soon picked out as one of the smarter, older kids and sent to the nearest town, where he could both work and attend the local school. He relished his freedom from the orphanage at first, but quickly grew tired of the new drudgery. Neither his classmates nor teacher could keep up with him, and his bookkeeping job - while stable and easy - was dull and underpaid. He eventually stole a modest sum from the till - an amount he should have received, he reasoned - and left, travelling northwards to a larger town.

Here, he would dauntlessly approach the well-reputed cathedral school and, with only a stack of self-written essays in hand, ask to be taken in. After several rejections, a passing bishop noticed his passionate arguments at the door one day and decided to entertain a look at his writing. The dissertations proved to be impressive for someone his age and so, with this bishop’s endorsement, he was finally accepted.

This began the part of Rathare’s life that most know about now: his brilliant studies that earned him accolades and sponsors, his dazzling sermons that caught the eye of religious higher-ups, and his climb through the ranks of academia and the church that would eventually land him the role as Bishop of Tirais, then Archbishop of Alesse. Although much of his achievement was genuinely thanks to his hard work and bright mind, a good part was also owed to Rathare’s cutthroat outlook. Whenever competitors with greater power and privileges stood in his way, he would remorselessly seek their downfall through whatever means possible, and consider it fair.

Thus has Rathare lived his life, and thus has it served him well. Even with the collapse of Delverne, he remains steadfast - life has never been reasonable so the recent disaster is, in some way, just another senseless cruelty of many. Like always, the most important thing to him is to survive - and he is confident that he has what it takes to.