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Kara A. Ehrveil

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Overview

Kara A. Ehrveil was the only child of Empress Avery R. Ehrveil and Lord Isaac Acentino, conceived during Avery’s exile after the Roscarte Coup and raised in hiding. She inherited the throne as a child following her mother’s assassination, co-founded The Second Lilaris Empire with Nordvik Alvaldi, and in her later reign converted the Empire into a democratic republic through The Constitution of the United Provinces of Lilaris. She was married to Riven Skorne, Duchess of New Ides, in the wake of the Night of the Veil. She is also the founder of X-Seven.

Appearance

  • Hair: Dark auburn, in natural waves, often tied back with loose braids modeled after her mother’s style.
  • Eyes: Sky blue.
  • Build: Slender but athletic.
  • Clothing: Earthy tones with elegant embroidery. The mix of practical cuts and formal regalia is deliberate, reflecting the gap between her secluded upbringing and her eventual public role.

Background

Hidden Childhood

Kara was conceived while Avery R. Ehrveil was in hiding after her forced abdication. Avery had taken refuge with Isaac Acentino, at the time her closest surviving ally, and the two became involved during the exile. Kara’s birth was kept secret from the start. She was raised in a guarded household far from any court, given an unusually practical education in governance, and trained from an early age in both combat and politics.

Both parents were involved. Avery handled strategy, history, and the demands of leadership. Isaac taught negotiation, alliance work, and how to read a room. Despite the isolation, Kara was not sheltered from ordinary life. Her parents made sure she traveled, met people who had nothing to do with court, and understood the cost of the power she was going to inherit.

Inheritance

Kara was sixteen on the night her mother died. The resistance had retaken New Terranova earlier that day, and Kara had been kept out of the fighting and locked in the old observatory of the palace while the battle was finished. She heard it through the walls. When they came for her just before dawn she was told the fighting was over and that her mother was alive and about to deliver the victory speech.

A bomb had been planted in the throne. Avery delivered the speech as written and was killed mid-sentence as she reached the final line. By the time Kara was brought into the throne room the floor was already black with blood, and she had to be carried across it to where her mother had fallen. Nordvik Alvaldi met her in the wreckage and handed her the crown without a word of consolation. She put it on. She gave her first order before the dust had settled: merge the broken remnants of the Ehrengard Empire with the failing state of Saludo into a single new polity. The result was The Second Lilaris Empire. She was not yet old enough to govern alone, and Nordvik served as her co-sovereign rather than as her regent.

The events of that night are described in her own hand in Kara’s Diary. The entry is brief and plain. She did not cry.

Personality

Kara reads as cautious in public and decisive in private. She inherited her mother’s tendency to think in long arcs and her father’s instinct to use words first. She does not perform warmth, but those who know her say it is there. The trait most often noted by staff is her willingness to wait. She does not move on a decision until she is sure of it, and once she moves, she does not revisit it.

By her own private writing she is also deeply lonely, and a great deal more wounded than the public bearing she carried through her reign ever suggested. The years of hidden childhood and the manner in which she lost her mother left marks she never disguised well in correspondence, and others she carried more literally. The full picture is set out below under What She Carried.

Reign

Co-Rule with Nordvik

The early years of TSLE were jointly held with Nordvik Alvaldi. The arrangement worked because the two trusted each other and because Kara was still young. Nordvik handled most of the day-to-day public business while Kara grew into the role. She was styled Empress; Nordvik was a co-sovereign rather than a regent.

The Huge Larry Crisis

The most damaging events of her early reign came during the Huge Larry Crisis. Her father had by that point converted New Ides into the self-styled Idesian Empire and aligned himself with the Larry Cult as a true believer. Kara filed Case No. 593-LIR-NT in her own name against him, his godhead, and four other defendants, charging assault, battery, unlawful assembly, and treason among other offenses arising from the Princess Salem Incident.

The trial collapsed before judgment. Isaac was killed days later in the Night of the Veil alongside every other defendant. Kara withdrew from public life for months. Nordvik held governance through the mourning period.

Riven Skorne and the Imperial Wedding

After Isaac’s death, Riven Skorne assumed leadership of New Ides and moved to distance the duchy from Larrist ideology, eventually bringing it into the Empire. Kara had by then known Riven for some time, and her private writing from the period documents a years-long attraction she did not expect to act on. The Rainbow Crosswalk in New Terranova Proper, hand-painted by Kara herself and publicly declared a symbol of diversity and kinship across the Empire, was privately a signal aimed at one person. Riven noticed.

The two were married in Dominion Hall. The accompanying Idesian Accord formally restored New Ides as a Duchy of the Empire under Riven, recognized her as Imperial Consort and Duchess by right of blood, and named Kara First Patron of New Ides, a ceremonial title within her wife’s domain. The anniversary of the Accord was declared the Day of Reunion, a minor imperial holiday.

The marriage is described in Kara’s Diary in language that is not present anywhere else in her writing.

The United Provinces Constitution

Late in her reign, Kara and Nordvik jointly drafted The Constitution of the United Provinces of Lilaris at Dominion Hall. The Constitution converted the Empire into a democratic republic, with an elected National Assembly, an elected Chancellor, and a High Court. The Twin Thrones were reduced to ceremonial offices held by the Scions of House Ehrveil and House Alvaldi. Citizens ratified the document by overwhelming popular vote.

What the public did not know was that Kara had written X-Seven into the text of the Constitution itself. The clause authorizing X-Seven sits inside an otherwise unremarkable interpretive section (Article X §7(g)), and the offices the clause depends on are entrenched in Article XI §2 against any future amendment. The unit answers to no elected body, has no public roster, and was her deliberate insurance that the Republic she had spent her reign building could not be unwound by whoever came after her.

What She Carried

In private, across the whole of her reign, Kara carried a chronic practice of self-injury that began in the weeks after her mother’s burial and that she never fully set down. It was not known to the public in her lifetime. Riven Skorne, Nordvik Alvaldi, and her household physician were the only three people who knew. The full record, including the relevant Diary passages, the surrounding ethical and philosophical questions, and a plain-language reference on the signs the practice presents to those who might recognize them in someone they love, is collected in What Kara Carried.

Legacy

Kara A. Ehrveil’s reign is the most consequential of late Landfall-530 - Noble Blood. She inherited a state built on the ashes of three previous regimes, converted it into a working republic without bloodshed, and embedded into that republic a permanent guarantor against its own future failures. Whether X-Seven was a betrayal of the document she had just written, or the only honest acknowledgment of how easily such documents fail, is one of the most argued questions of the late epoch. It does not have a clean answer.

She and Riven were still serving as Scions of Unity, the ceremonial successor office to the Twin Thrones, when The Blaze arrived. What happened to either of them in the collapse that followed is unknown.

Sources

Trivia

  • The principle administrator of Landfall (confect1on) took the legal first name Kara in-real-life following the life of this character. The name “Kara” was chosen by confect1on while she was settling on a new name for herself during her transition. She knew it sounded right when said aloud with her surname since it was the middle name of a family member. In this way, the character of Kara A. Ehrveil was a fitting room for a name. While she played Kara, the name stuck to her out-of-character as well, and when she asked her friends why, they said it just fit her. This carry-over had not happened with Avery or any of the characters she played before.


Riven Skorne (left) and Kara A. Ehrveil (right). Art by TheRedCookie.

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