Content warning
This article discusses depression and suicide in detail, including the planning that preceded the death and the late-stage signs that surrounded it. It is written carefully but it does not soften these subjects.
If you are presently in crisis, please reach out to a mental health professional, a crisis line in your country, or someone you trust before continuing. Nothing in this article is intended as a substitute for that help.
Like every page on this wiki, the article is fiction set within the lore of Landfall. The character is played by a real person; the player is not the character. Acts and patterns described here are not statements about the values, views, or real-life behavior of the player behind the role.
The death of Edward Redcliffe late in Landfall-530 - Noble Blood was a suicide, planned over months and concealed from nearly everyone who might have intervened. This entry sets out the surrounding events plainly. It is included in the public record at this length, rather than left as a single line on Edward’s bio page, because the depression that shaped his final year is the same one many readers will recognize, and because the people closest to him did not see the signs until after they had stopped being signs and had become a history.
Old Yotem and the Final Year
Late in the epoch the Ehrengard Empire pushed Edward to commit himself fully to the development of his duchy of Old Yotem, reducing the share of his time he could spend at the Casino. He relocated south accordingly. Veltic Veltol, having spent his apprenticeship years under Edward’s mentorship in New Terranova, chose to follow him rather than remain behind.
From Old Yotem Edward began handing the Red Corporation over to Vetis in stages. Ownership of the Red Diamond Casino passed first; further assets followed across the months after, until the entire holding was Vetis’s outright. At the time the transfers were read as the careful succession of an aging proprietor preparing to retire from commercial life. In hindsight they were the methodical closing of accounts of a man preparing to die.
By his own later admission, recorded in letters Avery R. Ehrveil preserved, Edward had been carrying a deep and unspoken depression for several years before the end. It had set in slowly. He had concealed it from nearly everyone. Those closest to him noted only a steady quietening in his last months: fewer public appearances, fewer letters, less of the well-timed warmth that had been a hallmark of his presence. He gave away small possessions to friends with a sudden and uncharacteristic generosity. He paid old debts no one had asked him to settle. In their final private conversation he told Vetis he was proud of him, an unguarded sentiment from a man who had spent his life guarded. None of these were read at the time as what they were.
The Last Evening
Edward returned to New Terranova in the final week of his life to deliver a public address of thanks to the people of the city he had spent the bulk of his life serving. The address was warm and unhurried, and was widely received as a graceful farewell from a noble settling into retirement.
That evening Avery R. Ehrveil joined him on the outer patio of the Vesperine Temple, an Umbral Communion sanctuary on the high Northern hill of New Terranova overlooking both the city below and the lit windows of Dominion Hall in the distance. The sun was setting. Avery had grown worried over the slow change in him through their correspondence and had asked to see him before he returned south, ostensibly to share the view.
She was the older voice in their friendship and had been for years. That evening she sat closer than she usually did, her hand resting on his back where she could feel him breathing, and spoke to him the way someone speaks to a brother she is afraid she is losing. She did not pretend she had come for the sunset. She named the things she had noticed: the long letters that had grown short, the visits he had not made, the quiet that had taken the place of his old humor. She told him the work he had built would keep without him for as long as he needed it to, and that nothing he owed anyone in the world was so heavy he had to carry it alone. She tried, once, to coax a laugh out of him with an old joke between them. He gave her one, just for her, and held her gaze a moment longer than the joke deserved.
She held his hand for most of the conversation. Edward listened. He thanked her, and he answered her carefully. He did not lie. He did not let her in either. He spoke of the lamps coming on in the streets below, of the lit windows of Dominion Hall, of the years they had served alongside one another. When she rose to leave she embraced him, and held on longer than the occasion warranted. He returned the embrace without resisting it.
Edward walked back to his quarters in the Red Diamond Casino alone that night.
Death
He died at 2:14 in the morning.
The note he left identified the hour and named its meaning. It was the hour, decades earlier, at which he had been sworn in as Count of Everstead. He had wanted to end his service at the hour he had begun it.
The note also asked his friends not to read his death as their failure. He named Avery in particular, and asked her to forgive both him and herself. He thanked the people of New Terranova and Old Yotem. He left his remaining personal effects to Veltic, his correspondence to Avery, and his estate matters to the already-completed transfers handed to Vetis. He was found in his quarters by the morning staff, and caretakers of the Vesperine Temple found a plea for remembrance left where him and Avery had embraced the evening prior.
He was mourned across New Terranova and Old Yotem and the wider Ehrengard Empire. The Umbral Communion held a public service for him at the Vesperine Temple at sunset on the seventh day after his death.
In Hindsight
The signs Edward showed in his last year were quiet, individually unremarkable, and visible only when assembled together after the fact. They are recorded here plainly so that those who come after may have the chance to recognize them in the people they love, and act on them sooner than his own friends were able to.
- Steady withdrawal from social and public life across the final months.
- Methodical disposal of holdings, debts, and personal effects, in arrangements that read at the time as simple succession or housekeeping.
- A late and uncharacteristic warmth in private conversation, including unprompted expressions of pride, gratitude, or affection that felt out of step with his usual reserve.
- Long embraces and lingering farewells in goodbye contexts that did not call for them.
- A composed and graceful affect in his last weeks, after a longer period of quietening. A sudden calm following a long low period is itself a sign.
Edward was loved by people who reached for him. He was not reached in time. The record stands as it does so that someone else might be.