HROTHBERTMETA
THEHOUSE
Bainbridge, North Yorkshire, England
Many of Bob’s previous masters have liked to encourage the impression that their charge was a creature of excess and vice, even before succumbing to the dark lure of necromancy. That he lived in sin, and reveled in wickedness– and so, of course, it was only right that he should suffer in death.
None of his masters have ever dared to return him home. After all, the Council might have ordered the place cleansed, but none of them were willing to take the risk that their might be nasty surprises waiting in store, should the Master of the House return.
(They aren’t unreasonable fears!)
In actuality, Bainbridge Manor was a relatively modest. The family’s title had never been a promise of wealth, and though the farmers on their land made sure they would never starve, the actual living conditions weren’t lavish. During the winters, much of the house was closed off to conserve heat, and the problems of the commoners were often the same problems as the manor.
Yes, Hrothbert was a bit eccentric, and often gone– but he was fair, and he didn’t tax his farmers to the bone, like many landowners.
These days, parts of the old walls still stand, though most of the house has been reduced to piles of rubble. Nobody lived there after Bob, and local legend whispers of terrible hauntings in those woods, and around the ruins.
HISTORICALNOTES
Bob was born in the 9th century, early Middle Ages.
A century before England was founded (Bainbridge was located in what is now Yorkshire, but was the kingdom of Wessex at the time).
The country was still actively at war with the Vikings, and the lands around his home had been all but destroyed by the fighting.
From his cursed skull, he’s seen the Crusades, the Norman invasion, and the plagues.
The world wars, and the creation of science.
He can’t fathom what citrus, or pepper, or chocolate taste like– because they simply didn’t exist in his world.
LOVECOMMITMENT
Once upon a time, there was a wizard. He was content with his world, and absorbed with his studies– he wasn’t looking for true love, or commitment. After all, what woman could hold a candle to the euphoria of magic?
And then he met Winifred, and everything changed.
She was beautiful and brilliant, with a mind for the Craft that rivaled his own. A curiousity that pushed his own understanding. She brought light to the still darkness of his laboratory, and laughter to rooms that had never seemed too quiet before.
When she died, the void she left was deafening. A terrible silence that reached into his chest and stole the air from his lungs.
There was nothing without her. No life, no light, no joy.
He would have sold his soul for one more moment with her. But the wizard had power, and in his all-consuming grief, he caught on a way to bring her back.
It worked.
The wizard explained that she had come very near death, but that he had pulled her back. For though his own soul was tarnished, he couldn’t condemn her with the same. Innocently unaware of his transgressions, Winifred lived.
For a time.
But all too soon, the life that had been taken against its’ will began to fade, and Winifred grew slowly weaker.
The horror that followed was done for love, but it was a blood soaked and cursed thing. And when the Council discovered what the wizard had done, they condemned him to suffer all the endless years of the world– trapped in the space between life and death, eternally apart from the woman he loved.
.
Bob hasn’t thought about falling in love for centuries. He knows the pain, and the madness, that follows with it. There is lust, and desire; but never the sweet agony of love.
And even if he were to find that emotion again, what sort of a lover could he be? Eternal and intangible, he would be trapped while his beloved grew old, and died. He would never be able to touch them, or hold them.
They would wither away, forsaking their chance at a whole life, only to share in his miserable sentence.
He couldn’t do that to them.
And yet…?
He loves Harry. From the time he was a little boy, the bright spark in his endless night, who found a vulnerable space in Bob’s armour and made a home there.
Perhaps love comes, in its’ own time.
Even when you aren’t looking.
LUCKKARMA
Bob believes that people make their own luck– an unpopular opinion when he was alive, and the Church liked to leverage the idea of divine fate!
Karma is a little more complicated. The Council stepped in to play judge, jury and literal executioner, with their own brand of expedited karma. And if karma is real, then what does that say about the condition of his soul?
He shudders to think.
Yet… Magic has a balance of its own, the Rule of Three. And he does believe in that.
You could say that he’s a bit conflicted, really!
AWFULSOUNDS
The sound of Harry’s voice coming from the lab with “Oops” or “Damn!” or any variation of that! It never ends well, and usually means there is some thorny magical problem he’s going to have to help untangle!
More seriously, Bob finds it difficult to hear the sounds of sickness (ie: vomiting, coughing). He can stand to be around it, but there is something about those sounds that made him feel cold, and his skin prickle uncomfortably.
They’re too ingrained as the sounds of plague, and death. Of chirurgeons with bloodletting knives, and jars of leeches. The sound of a world before science, medicine, or anesthesia.
Those aren’t things he’s going to forget any time soon.
HISCHILDREN
“A child.. our child, with your eyes. I can picture them so clearly.”
“Better they take after their mother, myn lykyng.”
Winifred had always wanted children, and Hrothbert– as the lord of Bainbridge– knew he would have to provide an heir eventually. He’d never given it much thought until he’d seen how incandescently happy his wife was, her face alight with the news.
For the first time in his life, Hrothbert’s studies had been set temporarily aside, as they prepared for their first child.
Aelfric came at midwinter. He was too small, and months too early, taken up to God before his first breath.
Eldric came two years later, a spring baby with bonny red curls like his mother. He was pink cheeked and healthy– and yet, his first night, sometime between midnight and the small hours of the morning, he simply stopped breathing, and was gone before dawn.
Mildryd was impatient from the first. She rushed into the world too early, too fast. She was the first child to fulfill her mother’s premonition, a little girl with her father’s pale blue-green eyes. His daughter, who struggled for breath in his arms while her mother slept, exhausted by her labour.
She’d been so brave, so determined, but simply not strong enough.
Bob doesn’t think about them often anymore, it’s been hundreds of years. But sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly low, their memory comes back to him.
Sometimes, he’s grateful they didn’t live to see the man their father became.