Content warning
This article discusses chronic self-harm (cutting, burning), 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.
Support and a note on fiction
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 right 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.
The candle entry sits inside a particular set of circumstances the public record at the time did not contain, and that historians have reconstructed only since the release of the private cabinet correspondence. The mourning period the Crown observed for Isaac was, by standard Imperial protocol, supposed to run several months. The cabinet shortened it to weeks. The shortening was justified to the public on the grounds of the Idesian Accord and the necessary speed of New Ides’s reabsorption into the Empire. The shortening was justified internally by something else: the longer Kara’s mourning ran, the longer Nordvik remained the public face of the regency, and the closer the public came to noticing his absences during the week of the post-Veil explosions. The work the cabinet did to keep Nordvik at a distance from the events of that week, set out in detail in The Night of the Veil, was paid for in Kara’s grief.
The private record from the months that followed is the most sustained relapse in her adult life. The candle entry is the single most-cited line. The entries that follow are not single lines. They are pages. The household physician’s correspondence with the Provincial archive confirms an extended period of injury at a frequency that had not appeared in his notes since the years immediately after her mother’s death. The relapse did not begin to ease until two years later, when she was several months into her marriage to Riven and Riven had begun, by patient daily presence, to interrupt the pattern.
Whether Kara knew, during the foreshortened mourning, that the cabinet was protecting Nordvik with the time that should have been hers, is not recorded. The Diary entries from this period do not name Nordvik. They name Isaac. They name Avery. They name the inside of her own right forearm. What she knew, and when she knew it, are open questions. What it cost her is not.
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.
In hindsight: signs of chronic self-injury
The practice described here is one many readers will recognize in themselves or in someone close to them. The recurring signs are:
- A persistent need for 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 explained individually with plausible everyday causes (a kitchen accident, a fall, a misplaced candle) but recurring 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.
- A flatness of public affect immediately after periods of high private stress. Kara’s most composed public weeks were often her hardest private ones.
- Late-night entries, appointments, and solitude. The practice is overwhelmingly nocturnal in her record.
If you recognize these in someone you love, the most useful response is to name what you have noticed, to ask without demanding an answer, and to remain present whether or not the answer comes. Kara was not reached by anyone who did not do all three. If you recognize them in yourself, the practice can be set down. It does not get set down alone.
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 Wound That Counts
A soldier returns from the line with a scar across the chest, taken at the moment they pushed forward into fire. The Republic honors them. There is a ceremony, a stipend, a place to stand on national holidays. The scar, when it is read at all, is read as evidence of what the soldier was willing to give to the people they served.
A sovereign returns to her chambers from a state dinner, opens a drawer, and gives herself a cut along the inside of her own forearm in service of pushing herself through the work the next morning will require. The Republic, had it ever known, would have removed her from office.
The blood is the same blood. The mechanism by which it was produced is the difference, and it is the only difference. Both wounds were made in the act of staying in a position the person had been asked to hold. Both took place in service of other people. Both left the person diminished. One was inflicted by an outside agent and the other by the person carrying it, and the Lilarisi culture, like most cultures in the historical record, treats those as completely different categories.
What the category line actually marks is the source of the wound, not the cost. A wound the citizen can be honored for is one that confirms the story the polity wants to tell about itself: that suffering, when it arrives, arrives from outside, and that the citizen bore it courageously. A wound the citizen must hide is one that suggests the source of the suffering was already inside the polity, and inside the person it asks to keep working through it. The first kind of wound confirms the polity’s account of itself. The second kind threatens it.
Whether this counts as glamorization of violence is not a question with one answer. The polity that honors the war wound is not, in its own self-understanding, honoring violence. It is honoring the willingness of the wounded to remain in a role that violence had threatened to take from them. The polity that stigmatizes the self-inflicted wound is not, in its own self-understanding, rejecting violence. It is rejecting the idea that the cost of the role had become so high that the person was paying it into themselves. Both reactions are about the polity’s image of who it asks its people to be, more than they are about the wound itself.
The harder question, the one this article does not resolve, is whether the line is honest. The same body the Republic was prepared to glorify for taking a sword on its behalf had to spend two decades concealing the wax burns that came from the work the Republic asked of it. The line the culture draws between the wound that counts and the wound that does not does not track the cost the wound exacted. It tracks something else. What that something else is, and what it costs the people forced to live on the wrong side of it, is the question this section leaves open and that the Lilarisi tradition has continued to leave open since.
2. The Sovereign Who Concealed
Citizens are entitled to a basic accounting of their leader’s fitness. They are not, by any standard Kara’s Republic articulated, entitled to her interior life. The central ethical knot of her reign 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 sovereign who was, in a fact known to almost no one, harming herself in private through the whole of the work she was doing for them.
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. Both of those statements are true at once and Lilarisi political theory has not produced a way to hold them both.
The further cost is the one her concealment imposed on the leaders who would follow her. By choosing to hide, Kara reinforced, by her own example, the premise that the public is owed a leader who appears unwounded, and that anything visible to the contrary disqualifies the person. 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. Every Lilarisi leader after her who carried something similar carried it under a rule Kara’s silence had quietly written.
There is, finally, a harder version of the question that touches her capacity to govern at all. Kara was famously a deliberate sovereign. The trait most cited by her staff was her willingness to wait, her unusual capacity to hear a thing out before responding, her steady internal weighing of decisions over days and weeks. The same interior life that produced those qualities was also the interior life shaped by the practice this article describes. Whether the patience and the listening that made her, by most measures, a good ruler were downstream of the private negotiation with her own wounding, or whether she was as good a ruler as she was in spite of the practice, is not a question the recovered record can settle. There is no version of her without the practice to compare against and the discomfort the question produces is itself part of what it costs to read her honestly.
3. What the Three Bore
Three people knew during Kara’s lifetime. None of them carried it without cost.
Riven knew from early in the marriage. The scars were not concealable from a partner, and Kara, by the time the relationship became real, had decided not to try. What this meant in practice was that Riven lived for the years of the marriage with the daily fact of loving someone whose body bore evidence of an ongoing private practice no one else was permitted to know about, and that Riven could not, by any avenue available to her, intervene to stop. She could ask. She did ask. She could not demand. She could not bring it to a physician outside the household. She could not tell her own family. She could not even discuss it with Nordvik, whom she liked and trusted, because the rule was that the rule was kept. Her own diary, recovered alongside Kara’s, records the practice as the single hardest part of the marriage. Not because of what it told her about Kara, but because of what it forbade her from doing about it. Loving someone in pain and being denied the actions of love is its own kind of injury. Riven carried that injury for the duration of the marriage.
Nordvik knew earliest, from Kara’s adolescence under his co-rule. He had been the one to find her the first time. He had arranged the standing relationship with the household physician that produced the only contemporaneous medical record and that allowed the practice to be treated when treatment was needed. He kept the secret on the grounds that Kara had asked him to keep it and the alternative was a public discovery that would have ended her reign before it began. He carried, for the rest of his life, the knowledge that the kept secret was the practice he then watched continue across her reign. In the later years he carried it alongside a parallel knowledge: what the cabinet had hidden about him after The Night of the Veil. The pattern of his protection of Kara and the pattern of the state’s protection of him were, in retrospect, the same pattern. He recognized this. He does not seem to have known what to do with it.
The household physician, whose name Kara’s papers do not preserve, knew because his post required him to know. Kara often treated her own injuries, but he was tasked with verifying efficacy. He recorded only what the medical record required him to record, in language vague enough to satisfy any later audit. He kept the rest. He died years before Kara’s papers were released, never having mentioned his work to anyone in his private life, not even to his wife, whom he loved and to whom he otherwise told everything. His correspondence with the Provincial archive, recovered later, contains a single line in the margin of a routine status update from one of Kara’s worst weeks: I do not know what to do with this knowledge. I do not know what to do without it either.
The ethics of asking a partner, a co-sovereign, and a physician each to hold this knowledge alone, while the public sees only the official face of the union and the official face of the throne, are their own. None of them consented to being the only person in their position who knew. They each agreed to the silence once the silence was already in effect, and then they carried it for as long as their relationship to her lasted. None of them resolved it in the writing they left behind. Kara, in her later Diary, acknowledged it but did not resolve it either.
The cost of a hidden practice is, often, said to fall on the person carrying it. The practice this article describes fell first on Kara, but it also fell on three other people who could not speak. What is owed to those three by the wider record is its own question that has not been answered to in their case any more than it has in hers.
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, but it is part of what she carried.