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Excerpt from Dying Concepts by Iohan Arias?

He? pulls a glinting silver cigarette case from an inside pocket of his camel-hair blazer, and, snapping it open, offers me one. I decline; he shrugs casually and lights one for himself, and takes a long drag. It is quiet here, outside of Greenwoods(approve sites). The tourists are returning to their hotels, and now only a few regulars hang around, sipping their coffee and beer.

He crosses his legs, tosses an arm over the back of the chair, takes another drag off his cigarette, and continues:

"The thing you have to remember, Dhr. Arias?, is that Alexandrina Victoria never stopped loving Albert, even after her enNoblement. Though her mortal soul had been extinguished by the tempestuous shards of the Four, though she possessed such power as even we cannot fathom, she remained, 'till the end, utterly devoted to her Prince-Consort. He was her first and fondest anchor, long before the Seven? ever came onto the scene, and she heeded his advice above all others. His opinion always mattered; his word was always valued.

"Of course, this infuriated the Council -- Entropy in particular, since he had sacrificed much of his personal power in the name of the experiment, and subsequently had lost dominion over the other Three. Yet so much had been invested in this new strategy, and in Victoria herself, that the Four continued to put up with her almost-flagrant violation of the Windflower Law. To simply abandon the Concordat after such a scant amount of time had passed seemed, even to the Darkest Lord, somewhat impetuous.

"Matters only grew worse as time progressed, however, and eventually the Council was forced to act. Initially they censured the Queen, warning her of how her love for Albert could be used as an Achilles Heel by the Excrucians to cripple the Concordat. But Victoria would hear none of this. She contended that the Council was simply politicking themselves into positions of greater power -- and, during one of their final meetings, she claimed that they resented Albert's presence in her life because they thought him a threat to their control over her. When the Four agreed that while this was in fact the case, but that it did not invalidate their argument, the Queen defied them still, denouncing their Windflower Law and their machinations, and screaming that she would never give up the mortal she loved."

He pauses for a moment to extinguish his cigarette. An instant later, a waiter arrives with another bottle of wine, which I did not recall ordering. Glasses are placed down, filled, and he takes a sip before resuming.

"Unsurprisingly, of the Four, it was Entropy who took this matter most poorly. Moments after Victoria had left his presence and the presence of his co-rulers, the Darkest Lord took action. The Queen returned to the Prosaic Earth to find her husband dead, having been laid low by what seemed to mortal doctors to be typhoid fever.

"This act devastated Victoria, and, as occured even in the history which English school children are taught today, she entered into a long period of mourning and seclusion. She retreated to her Chancel -- The Balmoral(approve sites), an emerald, fairy-tale land of gothic castles and chivalric gentlemen -- and with much effort summoned up the ghost of her deceased love so that she would never be without him.

"The Queen remained in The Balmoral for an age. A generation of mortals was raised without ever laying eyes on their Queen. The Council, livid at the weak emotions of their prized Noble, endeavored on numerous occasions to drag her from her paradise and set the Concordat back on track, but they met with little success. Victoria was listless and melancholy when outside her Chancel. She would not speak to Entropy despite his threats and his manipulations; would do nothing to advance the experiment's cause.

"For decades the Four tried. They appealed to her sense of duty. They reminded her of the Excrucian threat, and they told her how only she could lead the new, grand, brilliant effort against them. When that failed they resorted to threats. Twice they destroyed The Balmoral, and she rebuilt it. They cursed her bloodline so that Prosaic earth would remember her children as inbreds, imbiciles, closet-homosexuals and abdicators. They tarnished her image and made her people revile her. Monarchy would be abolished if she did not resume her duties as both Queen and Noble, they said.

"But she did not listen."

He stops again, and pours more wine for us both. It is now quite dark, and Singel is getting busy once again; nightlifers leaving their flats to explore the city.

"So in 1917 they killed her -- secretly, of course, using the Zeitgeist. Word could never get out that the 'Immortal Empress' was dead, or else everything would fall to pieces, thus the Four warped history so that in the minds of humanity Victoria was never an incarnate goddess. They initiated their own form of a Rollback so that everyone 'knew' she died in 1901, on the Isle of Wight, a sombre, darkly-dressed old monarch. Then the Council took their shards and -- though there had been some talk of enNobling the very concept of the Concordat -- invested them in someone else. Ultimately it was decided that only once-mortals could lead mortals on the path that the Four had set out, and this mortal was Victoria's great-grandchild, Victoria Alexandra Alice Mary, the daughter of her grandson George.

"As with all things, the Council's decision was not random. Victoria Mary was the perfect mortal through which the Four could carry out their new strategy. She was a brilliant girl, even as a human, and was both unabashedly ambitious and unquestioning in her support of imperialism. So they wrapped her in their power and infused her with themselves, and presented her to the people of the Empire as the Queen out of mourning -- fresh, reinvigorated, and ready to resume her duties.

"The rest is history; or, rather, was history. Was to be history? Perhaps. Regardless, Victoria Mary, the Immortal Empress who secretly replaced her all-too mortal, Noble ancestor, reigned gloriously for four centuries over an empire upon which a thousand suns never set. I personally believe that few were ever the wiser -- though some of my colleagues argue that one or all of the Trey Parkers caught on, and perhaps the other Seven? did as well. They were always exceptionally...exceptional, however, so if they deduced the truth of the matter, I would not be surprised.

"Not that it matters anymore."

See also: Chancels Legion, Concordat Magna, Trey Parker, Zanning, Leroy?, the Zeitgeist

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This is a V entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years