Eafa (ˈæɑ.vɑ)
"I always knew something was wrong. The world - it never felt right to me. But it wasn't until I saw what went on below the castle that I knew how wrong things had gone. I didn't choose to become a rebel. After what I saw, I had no choice but to rebel." - Eafa, after becoming King of Gewisse.
Eafa led the rebellion which shattered the Kingdom of Wuffa, and established the Kingdom of Gewisse on the eastern coast of Ynys. He was instrumental in revealing the horrors the Wuffan royal family perpetrated in secret, and personally executed the former King of Wuffa after sacking the capital of Lorbeer. He is considered a great hero by the citizens of Gewisse, and he is the grandfather of the current King, Leofric Eafason.
Early Life
Eafa was born in the city of Lorbeer in the year 3863. His family was not affluent - his father was a cobbler, but was conscripted into the Wuffan army when Eafa was six and never returned home. Eafa was the youngest of five and the only boy in the family, and began doing any job he could acquire to help the family make ends meet. When he was sixteen, he was recruited into the city guard under the Lord Mayor of Lorbeer. After three years he was promoted to the rank of Sergeant, and led his own squad.
At about this time, Eafa's mother fell ill and could no longer work. Eafa's older sisters had all married and had children, and Eafa felt that he was solely responsible for her care. This led to Eafa seeking a position in the castle guard, which paid better than the city guard. With a recommendation from the Lord Mayor in hand, he was able to become a sergeant of the castle.
During the first year Eafa worked within the castle, his mother grew steadily more ill before passing away during the Interannum of 3883. Eafa was devastated by her death, and considered himself personally culpable for not doing more to keep her alive. Later he would describe that he spent the next half-decade in a stupor of grief and blind to anything that was not immediately in front of him. His superiors interpreted his attitude as indifference to the anomolies and oddities of castle life, and believed that he would not care about what happened in the castle's lower dungeons.
This was not the case. When Eafa was assigned to duties in the torture chambers of the Wuffan royal family, he was horrified at the myriad and profane abuses he witnessed there. To his everlasting regret, he did not immediately attack the monsters who had ruled Wuffa for so long, choking down his reaction until he could leave the castle grounds. That was the last day that Eafa served as a Wuffan guard. He snuck into the palace that evening and freed who he could before fleeing the city of Lorbeer for the forests beyond.
A Bandit Hero
Once in the woods, Eafa lived as a bandit. He found allies among the Eofor, those folk who carried the legacy of the Eofordræht in their veins and hide away from the rest of humanity. He also found allies among other outlaws, and those who had become enemies of the Wuffan nobility. They survived by robbing the kingdom's nobles and wealthy merchants, while cultivating the good will of the peasantry. Eafa became one of the most wanted men in the kingdom, and never failed to strike against the government when the opportunity presented itself.
He also shared his story of what he had seen in the dungeons of Lorbeer. The tales spread throughout the countryside, igniting fury in the hearts of the people. But the Wuffan royalty either missed or ignored these changes in their subjects. When the mother of one of their captives found Eafa and begged him to rescue her son, he did not refuse. Instead, he gathered all the allies he could muster and launched an invasion of the capital.
Eafa's troops snuck into Lorbeer under the pretense of being ordinary citizens, and then most of them focused on causing havoc in the city to draw as many guards away from the castle as possible. Then he led a hand-picked crew through the maze of secret passages that honeycombed the castle into the dungeons, killing all who opposed them and freeing all they could find. Eafa himself killed the Crown Princess of Wuffa during that attack, when she tried to order the rebels to go away. The rebels took the prisoners they had saved and vanished back into the forest, leaving the city in disarray. Eafa's rebellion had finally begun.
Eafa the Rebel
Word of the raid on the capital spread throughout the kingdom, and the tales of the prisoners enflamed the already angry populace. Groups of rebels appeared throughout the land, striking at anyone who was seen as supporting the monarchy. Eafa became the symbol of their resistance to the monstrous royals, and then the leader of the army that formed to fight them. Every day, more people abandoned the cause of the Wuffan royal family, and either joined with the rebels or fled from them.
The rebellion moved swiftly at this point. More and more troops joined Eafa's band every day, and he led them on a march from Eoforwic to Lorbeer, destroying every force the Wuffan monarchy could send against them. In more than one instance, the troops sent to stop Eafa slaughtered their own officers and joined the rebel army, rather than fight them. When they finally arrived at the gates of Lorbeer, Eafa's Rebellion was an unstopabble juggernaut, and it crushed the royal city to gravel and embers.
The sack of Lorbeer was the end of the Kingdom of Wuffa. A distant branch of the royal family fled to the southeastern corner of the realm to form the Kingdom of Pengwern, which lasted only a few years before being absorbed by Creoda. Meanwhile, the rebel army began to fracture now that the great battle was won. Within days of their victory, different factions arose within the rebels, and a new war had begun.
Eafa, King of Gewisse
While several different factions arose, only two were worth mentioning. First was Eafa's supporters, who were mostly from northern Wuffa. The other followed a rebel leader named Delfinez from southern Wuffa, who believed that Eafa was unfit to rule any kingdom on Ynys due to his Eot ancestry. These two factions initially agreed to split the realm of Wuffa between them, and formed the kingdoms of Gewisse and Linesege. This arrangement was short-lived, however. Neither side truly felt that they had received enough of the territory once held by Wuffa, and war broke out less than a year after the division, in 3906.
Eafa led the armies of Gewisse personally, and left the creation of the Gewissen government to those left behind in the new capital of Eoforwic. Unlike the rebellion, the war between Gewisse and Linesege dragged on for a decade, with both sides unwilling to concede any territory to the other. Finally, in 3917 Eafa was able to overcome the last remnants of Delfinez's forces, and the Kingdom of Linesege was absorbed entirely into Gewisse.
With the wars finally ended, Eafa turned his attention to the needs of his kingdom. In Eoforwic, he felt lost and overwhelmed by the administrative aspects of kingship. He was unequipped to be a peacetime leader, and cast about for something he could do that felt needful. He quickly decided that there was one major issue that only he could address, that being the lack of an heir to the throne.
This process did not go smoothly. While Eafa quickly married the daughter of one of his generals, no heir arrived. For ten years, the royal couple failed to produce an heir until the queen finally became pregnant. Their son, Eafa Eafason was born in 3927. While some whispered that Eafa was not the father of the baby, Eafa himself expressed no such doubts, and quieted many rumors by bestowing his own name on the child. He was an attentive father, and spent more time with his young son than he did on the business of Gewisse.
In 3929, Eafa began to suffer from extreme pains in his abdomen, accompanied by high fever and delirium. He died only a few hours after his symptoms began, and doctors later pointed to a burst appendix as the cause of death. He was mourned by the entire kingdom, and his young son was named king, with his mother and a council of regency tasked with running Gewisse until he came of age. Seven months after Eafa died his second son Wecta Eafason was born, and this was seen as the final piece to secure his legacy.
Librarian's Note - The Mystery of Wuffa
While he rarely spoke of it, Eafa was one of the people who felt that there was something wrong about the very existence of the Kingdom of Wuffa. In some of the private papers that have been collected and preserved by the Lorekeepers of Foxbridge, Eafa reports having dreamed of different kingdoms that should have been there during the six hundred years that Wuffa ruled southwestern Ynys. He even drew the name of Gewisse from those dreams, as the kingdom where he believed he was actually meant to live. He is far from the only person to report similar dreams; different people have recorded dreams and delusions associated with Wuffa throughout its history, and their stories have shown remarkable consistency.
It is clear that something happened to produce this phenomenon, but at this point it seems impossible to identify what it is exactly. Some people have theorized that it was through the use of one of my cousin's coins, in which case the truth might be found in the Codex Pontis. It could also be some odd intrusion across the Dream from another reality - an immense Invasive Narrative that never truly took hold but was lodged in the minds of a few people. Finally, it could be related to the same kind of phenomenon that produced The Sleepwalkers' Tale, and indicate further attempts to create "The Turning of the World" (ref: Report #1459). Whatever caused the effect appears to have faded since the Kingdom of Wuffa was overthrown, but I will continue to investigate, if only to satisfy my own curiosity.
This is such a well written character article. Eafa was such an interesting person in his life, and it's a shame he died so suddenly.
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Thanks!