V&V Stories Thread

[GeneralHankerchief]

Corsica, 1108

"And there I was in the Diet session, getting massacred by the very same people whom I showed the utmost of leadership and mercy to do, and then I just realized something. You know what? I don't feel like doing this anymore! I've had one bad thing after another happen to me since I was six years old. So I just up and left!"

"Oh Heinrich," cooed one of the women in a nigh-incomprehensible accent, "You're so independent."

"It's about time," said Heinrich, nodding lazily. "I mean, I'm Emperor, right? I'm supposed to have all of this power and wealth, right? I might as well have some fun with it!" There were three girls attending to Heinrich tonight. Three was a common number; sometimes there were more or less though. The Kaiser could never remember their names. Most of this was due to their identical olive complexions, raven-dark hair, and generous endowments, but at least a small percentage was the Kaiser simply not caring. If any of them could ever learn German without speaking it in such an atrociously Mediterranean accent, then he would start paying attention. Maybe. "So I send some letters off to the right people, weigh down those envelopes with a couple pieces of gold out of my personal wealth, and the next thing you know, I'm touring the most beautiful islands in the world!"

"And we are glad to have you," said another one, massaging his shoulders and working her way down to his back. "I propose that we celebrate our generous and dashing guest," she continued, "A toast! To Emperor Heinrich the Free!"

"Excellent idea, my lovely! And a further toast, to our generous Pisan republicans, for allowing me sanctuary here! It is a silly little government they've got set up, one that'll never catch on, but a toast to them nonetheless!"

Heinrich and the girls began drinking in earnest, making more and more extravagant toasts.

"To the Carthaginians! I don't know why, but here's to 'em anyway!"

"To my good Catholic mother! If she'd see me now, she'd kill herself!"

"To Mount Vesuvius!"

"To the castrati! They're all so adorable, I don't want them to ever grow u-oh, wait..."

"To Matilda of Tuscany! She's the one that sold me out, and I just know she and that damn Pope were lovers. If I can ever prove it..."

The toasting and drinking continued on and on long through the night, but a few hours and several drinks later, one of them women produced a special bottle from heaven knew where. "Now," she slurred to the Kaiser, rendering her accent even thicker than usual, "a special treat for our special guest. You try unique Corsican wine now, brewed from a special mix. A lot more fun than normal wine, but you get nasty dreams too."

"I stopped having dreams years ago," Heinrich said softly. "Gimme the bottle!" He snatched it from the girl's hands and drained the entire bottle in one gulp. "Whoa..." he whispered, as the girls gave each other uneasy looks, "you weren't kidding about this stuff being strong..." The Kaiser quickly became drowsy, going from rowdy to passed-out in a span of only five minutes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Heinrich..."

Wha-?

"Heinrich..."

W-where am I? Why do you sound so familiar?

"Heinrich..."

What is this place?!

"This is your domain, Heinrich. Your imperial dominion. Do you not recognize the forests of Germany? The icy peaks of the Alps? The restless waters of the North Sea?"

There used to be more...

"Indeed there did, Heinrich, far more. Far more and then some again. Come Heinrich, let me show you all that was and may yet be." And at the next moment, the Kaiser was zooming across the south side of the Alps, the rolling hills of Northern Italy, the plains to the lands of Staufen, the mighty rivers of Poland, and...

Rome! By God, Rome itself! Oh, how I have missed that city! And inside is Castel St. Angelo, with-

Inside the castle was Pope Gregory himself, writing a notice at his desk. He spoke as he was writing. "By Papal Bull, Henry IV, King of the Romans, is hereby excommunicated from the Holy Church of Rome, and denied recipiency of all its most sacred Sacraments..." - he looked up, directly at the Kaiser - "...and he shall have one year from this Bull's issuance to satisfactorily reconcile himself with the Church, else this excommunication will become permanent." He stood up, grinned, and turned, making out with a woman who could only be Countess Matilda...

I knew it! That blasted Hildebrand has taken up that vile Countess in an unholy conspiracy against me! Oh, if only I could smash him for good before I die...

"As you wish, Heinrich." That familiar voice was back, and before the Kaiser could say anything the vision whisked him away from Rome, now he was outside another city, he implicitly understood it to be Genoa, and he was at the head of a mighty host, and the host easily took the city, and now they were zooming in the city, going into the buildings, now under them, and then they were in the city's catacombs, its sewers, and Heinrich was walking away from Pope Gregory's corpse, which had been forcibly drowned and left to rot forevermore in the infernal muck -

Yes! Finally! Oh, how I have longed for this day? But how is this possible? How do I achieve this great victory?

The voice ignored him. "See what could have been, Heinrich. See what could still be, and more." And yet again they were whisked away from the foul scene, and under Genoa, when Imperial armies in mass quantities were driving to the east, not to conquer territory, but to head to the Levant, Jerusalem, and give it to the new Papacy in an attempt to reconcile the grave sin that the Empire had previously committed. All of the great Electors, the great heroes of the Empire, Heinrich's family members were talking, about how they were cursed, cursed by his horrible actions, and how they weren't sure that even such a great venture as the unsanctioned Crusade would make up for it...

Pah, they were always weak.

"Were they, Heinrich? For even as they dilute their strength so horribly to make up for your sins, see the Reich continue to prosper." They were moving away from Jerusalem now, back to the west, back to the Reich, and now there were armies en masse, storming across Europe in all directions, taking Paris and Palermo and Budapest and Arhus, and even in the East they were expanding too, Papal Jerusalem now being protected by five cities, to the point where fully half of Europe was under the control of the Imperial Eagles, and the Empire had truly entered a golden age not seen since the Pax Islamica several centuries back, and not in Europe since the glory of Ancient Rome, a thousand years' dust by now.

Then all is well then, is it not?

"No, Heinrich. All is not well. For as the Empire expands its borders, it rots from the inside out. See your family, Heinrich, your successors, and how they cope." And then there was more discussion about how the Kaisership was cursed, cursed despite all their successes and glories, and Heinrich saw a parade of men go by that he understood to be future Kaisers; one of them murdered in his bed in the desert, another one taking a direct hit from an artillery shell, yet another one ambushed by a band of mercenaries while traveling on a road west.

"See, Heinrich, the Reich tear itself apart due to your actions." He was underground once again, seeing a dimly-lit room, with six hooded and cloaked men discussing the future of their plans and the fallout from their last moves, and he came to realize that these men, these Germans, had ordered the assassination of their Kaiser, and finally this was a blow that Heinrich understood, finally he realized what it was coming to, but before he could ruminate on this there were more visions, of French armies streaming in from the West, Poles from the East, and Byzantines, more Byzantine armies than he could count, coming in from the South and East, he saw them laying waste to Italy: Bologna, Florence, and most especially his beloved Rome, where afterwards the streets were filled with not vendors but weeds, and still he saw that there were Germans fighting each other, he saw a wretched amount of carnage in the fields directly north of a city in the Swiss Alps, Bern, and he saw one Imperial noble beheading another one, this one his own grandson and a hero of the Crusades and about a thousand different adventures, and then he saw this noble in turn get speared by a remnant of German cavalry that had just taken the city, their own commander fallen in the city square, and he saw the same council as before still meeting, still discussing, as if nothing had happened...

What is -

But he was cut off, there were still more visions to see. The fratricide, it seemed, was over, but the bloodshed was not, another Kaiser, another grandson, fell at the city gates, passing off the Holy Grail, the most sacred of all relics, to some unimportant Nubian because he deemed his own people unworthy to possess such a venerated object; a great plague sweeping through the realms of the Reich, its subjects dying by the tens of thousands if not more, and there were nobles, valiant and heroic nobles, dying by the bucketful just to maintain the status quo against the Byzantine Empire, and nobody seemed to care but that Satanic council...

Make it stop, I beg you, make it stop!

"No," rumbled the voice, it having turned sinister and menacing. "See, Heinrich, see the doom of your Empire."

No no, please no -

"See the doom of your Empire!" And they were on another Italian field, and it seemed like every single armed combatant the Reich could put up was present, and then they all started killing each other in mass quantities, far deadlier and more efficient than that last fratricidal battle he saw before Bern, or even that plague, and there was another noble, another Elector, watching it all, a morbid curiosity the only reason why he bothered in the first place, and there was the last Kaiser, valiantly charging, but getting caught up in a deadly maelstrom of soldiers, his contingent the epicenter of the entire battle, and then he saw the Kaiser's last remaining brother, from the same generation and family as the man who had been previously been murdered on the council's orders, hold his soldiers up at the critical moment, to let his brother, his friend, his master, his Emperor, die, be charged by a man wearing obsidian armor, by the very ruler of that council itself, and still the fighting continued, the entire Reich embroiled in a massive blood feud that not even treason and regicide would satisfy...

No more... no more...

"This is what happens when you take the wrong path, Heinrich. No matter whether you press too hard or not hard enough, it all ends the same. Vendetta and ignorance are two sides of the same coin, and how many tries will it take before you find the right path?"

Who... who are you that speaks to me so?

"You will address your Emperor by his proper title!!" the voice spat, and suddenly there was a great shining light, and then for the briefest of moments, Heinrich could make out...

...no...

...his own face.

"Apply what you have learned, and perhaps you will do it right this time!" and then everything went black.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kaiser Heinrich awoke with a start. He managed not to scream, but he was sweating and his heart was pounding harder than it ever had in his entire life. It took two full minutes for him to recover to a semi-normal state. The girls, still drunk, looked at him uneasily, asking him if everything was okay. He ignored them, wordlessly stumbling away in the direction of the nearest shipyard.