Opening post by Lord Vickon Ryswell · #1
Look, I took my banner out of [ENVY] three days ago and rode alone again. Then I swore my sword to [SITH], which seemed a plain enough arrangement until Sofia Marchetti walked out of that banner too. A piece of cloth can be folded, carried, and left in a mudroom; calling it an oath does more work than the cloth ever will.
Right, I have already said I am done with Sofia Marchetti, and I mean the practical sort of done. It ends when one of us rides to the other’s walls, or when we meet in the same rally and neither of us makes anything of it. Until then, the banner is less a promise than a notice pinned to the gate. Does a lord owe loyalty to a house that cannot keep its people?
Look, you can tell me the show and the books have always treated vows as sacred, but Iron Realms is less forgiving. My level 21 keep does not know whether a departing lord had noble reasons; it only knows which colors are outside the walls. I have lost a crop to a frozen river before, so I distrust anything that promises a harvest merely because it was planted. What survives when the banner is gone?