Content warning
This article discusses chronic self-harm (cutting), suicidal ideation, childhood trauma, and the violent death of a parent witnessed by a child. It is written carefully but it does not soften these subjects.
If you are presently struggling with self-harm or suicidal thinking, please consider returning to this article at a time when it is safer for you to engage with it, and reach out to a mental health professional, a crisis line in your country, or someone you trust if you need support now. 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.
What follows is a record of an aspect of Kara A. Ehrveil’s life that she did not disclose during her reign and that was not part of the public understanding of her until her personal papers were recovered and released after the period covered by her bio entry. It is published here in plain language because it forms a real part of who she was and what governing cost her, and because the practices it describes are present in the lives of many people who will read this. The point of the article is not biographical sympathy. It is documentation. The signs that appear in her writing are signs that appear in other lives, and they are written here in a form that someone reading them in a friend, a partner, or themselves might recognize.
The Aftermath of the Throne
Kara’s account of the night her mother died is the most often-cited passage of her Diary, and the part that follows the bomb itself reads with a flatness the rest of the Diary never recovers from. She was sixteen. She had spent the night locked in the observatory listening to the palace shake. She had, by her own admission in the same entry, found herself in the hours before dawn imagining that the floor of the observatory would give way under her and that this would be easier than what was about to come. When dawn came they did not bring her to her mother. They brought her to the wreckage. She was carried across a floor she describes as black with blood and set down beside Avery’s body. Nordvik handed her the crown.
She did not cry: the line “I did not cry” appears in the Diary entry without elaboration. It does not appear to have been a triumphant fact; she does not write it that way. It is the observation of someone who has just noticed that something she would have expected of herself, in the form she would have expected it, did not arrive.
The practice that did arrive, in the weeks after the funeral, was a different one.
The Practice
Kara began cutting in the weeks following her mother’s burial. The earliest evidence is not in the Diary itself, which she had only begun to keep around the time of the coronation and which she did not at first use to record private acts; it comes instead from later medical correspondence between her household physician and the Provincial archive, recovered with the rest of her papers. The pattern she established as a teenager continued, with periods of abstinence and periods of relapse, across the whole of her reign.
It was never an attempt on her own life. The Diary makes clear that the passive thinking she had done in the observatory the night her mother died did not return in the same form. What returned, repeatedly, was a need for something solid in a life that had otherwise become almost entirely performance. Cutting was the practice she found, kept, lost, and returned to. She wrote, in one of the later entries, that she could feel the inside of her own left forearm more reliably than she could feel anything else; that everything else, including her reign, including her marriage, including the room she was sitting in, had at times the quality of something happening to a stranger she was being asked to play.
The Diary entry written the night her father died, after the Night of the Veil, contains a line that, read against the rest of the record, is one of the clearest signs that the pattern had persisted into her adulthood:
I lit a candle for him tonight. Just one. No grand pyre. No Imperial rites. He would’ve hated that. I let the wax run until it burned my skin.
The candle was for Isaac. The wax was for her. The same year she filed Case No. 593-LIR-NT under her own authority, drafted the language of her father’s prosecution, watched the Night of the Veil take him, and presided through a national mourning period, she was burning herself with private wax in her own chambers at night.
Her later “Sovereign’s Mirror” entry, written years afterward, contains another line that takes on its full weight only with the practice in view:
Tonight I saw all the parts I’ve carved.
She is writing about what the throne carved out of her; perhaps her heart, perhaps her humanity, perhaps herself. She is also describing what she carved into herself. Both readings are correct.
Who Knew
In her lifetime, three people. Riven Skorne knew from early in the marriage. The scars were not concealable from a partner and Kara did not try to conceal them once she had decided to accept Riven’s love. Nordvik Alvaldi knew from her adolescence under his co-rule; he had been the one to find her on more than one occasion and had arranged the standing medical relationship that produced the only contemporaneous record. The household physician knew because he had to. No staff member outside that physician was ever briefed. No public or court figure was ever told.
After her papers were released the wider picture became one of the most discussed elements of her interior life. By that point Kara was either dead or unaccounted for in the wake of The Blaze and could not be consulted.
The Ethical Dimension
There are angles of this material worth pulling on directly, and the Lilarisi tradition has not produced clean answers to any of them.
1. The Right to Private Wounding
A head of state’s body, in the Lilarisi political imagination as in most others, is in some real sense a public artifact. Citizens are entitled to a basic accounting of their sovereign’s fitness. They are not, by any standard the Republic articulated, entitled to her interior life. The question is where, between those two endpoints, a chronic practice of self-injury sits. A disclosed practice would have ended her ability to govern. An undisclosed one preserved that ability at the cost of asking the population to trust a leader who was, in a fact known to almost no one, harming herself in private through the whole of her reign. Neither outcome is clean. The arrangement she chose was the one that let the Republic she was trying to build come into being. It is not the same as the one that respected the public’s claim to honest information about who governed them.
2. The Lie of the Unbroken Leader
The decision to hide the practice rested on the same premise every prior sovereign of the period had quietly rested on: that the public is owed a leader who appears unwounded, and that anything visible to the contrary disqualifies the person. By choosing concealment, Kara reinforced that premise. She made it harder, by her own example, for any future Lilarisi leader to disclose the same kind of pattern and remain in office. The honest version of her reign would have included the practice openly; the version she chose helped entrench the convention that no honest version could exist.
3. Wounding and Empathy
She was famously a deliberate sovereign. The trait most cited by her staff was her willingness to wait, her unusual capacity for hearing a thing out before responding, her steady internal weighing of decisions over days and weeks. It is uncomfortable but not absurd to ask whether the same interior life that produced those qualities was also the interior life shaped by the practice this section describes. Did the chronic, private negotiation with her own wounding produce the patience and the listening that made her, by most measures, a good ruler? If yes, the conclusion is grotesque on its surface: that her capacity to govern well was downstream of suffering she should not have had to endure. If no, the alternative is that she was as good a ruler as she was in spite of the practice, which leaves open the harder question of what kind of sovereign she might have been if she had been able to set it down. The honest answer is that there is no version of her without it to compare against.
4. What Riven Bore
The marriage to Riven Skorne is the one part of Kara’s life that her Diary describes in language not used anywhere else in her writing. Part of what made it different was that Riven was the first person in Kara’s adult life who saw her unguarded. That kind of seeing is also a weight. Riven carried, for the years of the marriage, the daily fact of loving a partner whose body bore evidence of an ongoing private practice that no one else was permitted to know about and that Riven could not, by any avenue available to her, intervene to stop. The ethics of asking a partner to hold that knowledge alone, while the public sees only the official face of the union, are their own. Kara was aware of this in her later writing. She does not, in the recovered material, resolve it.
In Hindsight
The practice this article describes is one that many readers will recognize, in themselves or in someone close to them. The signs that show up in Kara’s record are the signs that show up in other records, and they are listed here so that someone encountering them in a person they love may have a better chance of recognizing what they are seeing than her own household did.
- A persistent need to wear long sleeves, gloves, or other coverings in contexts that do not require them. Reluctance to be touched in specific places without obvious reason. Resistance to ordinary medical examination.
- Small, controlled, repeated injuries that are explained, individually, with plausible everyday causes (a kitchen accident, a fall, a misplaced candle) but that recur more often and in more deliberate patterns than chance would produce.
- Use of pain as a private ritual around emotionally significant events. The candle entry in Kara’s Diary is the textbook form: a mourning act that doubles as a private injury, justified by the surface form of the ritual.
- A flatness of public affect immediately after periods of high private stress. Kara’s most composed public weeks were often, by the recovered correspondence, her hardest private ones.
- Late-night entries, late-night appointments, late-night solitude. The practice is overwhelmingly nocturnal in her record, and the household physician’s notes confirm the timing.
If you recognize any of this in someone you love, the most useful response, by the consistent testimony of the people who eventually helped Kara most, is to name what you have noticed without dressing it up, to ask without demanding an answer, and to remain present whether or not the answer comes immediately. Kara was not reached by anyone who did not do all three of these things.
If you recognize any of this in yourself, the simplest version of the same advice applies. The practice can be set down. It does not get set down alone.
She held the Republic together while she carried this. She carried it through her marriage, through the drafting of the Constitution, through the founding of X-Seven, through the negotiations that converted an empire into a republic without bloodshed. The Republic she left behind is, in part, the work of a sovereign who was injuring herself in private the whole time she was building it. Whether that complicates the achievement or deepens it is not a question the Lilarisi tradition has settled. It is part of what she carried.