Ceres's Plot Arc
Mar. 14th, 2021 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingBalthazar’s plot arc is simple: he says he will go to a temple and find a magical artifact, and he goes to a temple and finds a magical artifact.
Meanwhile, Ceres begins and ends at the same place, but along the way…
Ceres opens the story by sending a hero to fight Balthazar. This “hero” is actually a convict whom she has effectively exiled, and she intends for Balthazar to dispose of him. He does so, but not before the hero kills two people and injures a third.
Back in Whitespire, Ceres grants a private audience to a viscount from an outlying territory who essentially wants to stop paying taxes. Ceres dismisses him, but she allows herself to be seduced by his daughter, who wants the viscount to step down so that she can manage the estate. While engaging in an openly sexual relationship with the daughter, Ceres realizes that the viscount is being manipulated by a political faction whose members she wants to provoke into revealing themselves. She therefore orders the head of her intelligence staff to direct a covert attack on the viscount’s estate.
Members of a separate anti-monarchist faction, fearing that they will be blamed for this attack, offer a scapegoat in the form of a magic school grad student who has been distributing seditionist tracts. Ceres has actually discussed the matter of this scapegoat with one of the leaders of this faction, who is a close friend (and the author of the romance novel series Balthazar is addicted to). She therefore sends the grad student to Balthazar, ostensibly to die in exile but actually to study with Melchior, who has strong anti-monarchist and anti-imperialist leanings of his own.
Ceres has grown fond of the viscount’s daughter, and she doesn’t want her or her father to become pawns of court politics in the way that the grad student did. She therefore engineers a minor scandal involving the viscount, which serves as the excuse the daughter needs to transfer power away from her father. At the end of the first story arc, the viscount and his daughter leave the castle alive and unharmed. Ceres has not been able to figure out who was backing the viscount at court, but she is content to have secured an ally in the viscount’s daughter, who will almost certainly manage the estate better than her father.
All’s well that ends well, but there’s still the dangling thread of Ceres having sent Balthazar someone that he was forced to kill, which was not very cash money of her. Balthazar says that this isn’t the first time she’s done this, which is even more disturbing.
I played this off as a joke in the first story arc, but I want the second story arc to address it directly. At the beginning of the second story arc, probably at the end of the second chapter, Ceres is going to reflect the main theme of the story back on Balthazar and say that these “heroes” have a choice. What she means is that no one is forcing them to attack the people they see as their enemies, but this raises the question of whether Ceres is giving Balthazar a choice in how he handles the circumstances she has created. This points deeper into the theme, suggesting that some choices aren’t so simple, and that people suffer when they try to deal with these choices on their own.
Also there will be a lot of jokes about oral sex.
This summary is much more complicated than the story itself, hopefully. Ceres is not an unreliable viewpoint character, and none of this is supposed to be a mystery. The narrative goal of this intrigue is to set Whitespire up as a battleground while establishing that it is primarily a battleground of relationships and feelings.
Meanwhile, Ceres begins and ends at the same place, but along the way…
Ceres opens the story by sending a hero to fight Balthazar. This “hero” is actually a convict whom she has effectively exiled, and she intends for Balthazar to dispose of him. He does so, but not before the hero kills two people and injures a third.
Back in Whitespire, Ceres grants a private audience to a viscount from an outlying territory who essentially wants to stop paying taxes. Ceres dismisses him, but she allows herself to be seduced by his daughter, who wants the viscount to step down so that she can manage the estate. While engaging in an openly sexual relationship with the daughter, Ceres realizes that the viscount is being manipulated by a political faction whose members she wants to provoke into revealing themselves. She therefore orders the head of her intelligence staff to direct a covert attack on the viscount’s estate.
Members of a separate anti-monarchist faction, fearing that they will be blamed for this attack, offer a scapegoat in the form of a magic school grad student who has been distributing seditionist tracts. Ceres has actually discussed the matter of this scapegoat with one of the leaders of this faction, who is a close friend (and the author of the romance novel series Balthazar is addicted to). She therefore sends the grad student to Balthazar, ostensibly to die in exile but actually to study with Melchior, who has strong anti-monarchist and anti-imperialist leanings of his own.
Ceres has grown fond of the viscount’s daughter, and she doesn’t want her or her father to become pawns of court politics in the way that the grad student did. She therefore engineers a minor scandal involving the viscount, which serves as the excuse the daughter needs to transfer power away from her father. At the end of the first story arc, the viscount and his daughter leave the castle alive and unharmed. Ceres has not been able to figure out who was backing the viscount at court, but she is content to have secured an ally in the viscount’s daughter, who will almost certainly manage the estate better than her father.
All’s well that ends well, but there’s still the dangling thread of Ceres having sent Balthazar someone that he was forced to kill, which was not very cash money of her. Balthazar says that this isn’t the first time she’s done this, which is even more disturbing.
I played this off as a joke in the first story arc, but I want the second story arc to address it directly. At the beginning of the second story arc, probably at the end of the second chapter, Ceres is going to reflect the main theme of the story back on Balthazar and say that these “heroes” have a choice. What she means is that no one is forcing them to attack the people they see as their enemies, but this raises the question of whether Ceres is giving Balthazar a choice in how he handles the circumstances she has created. This points deeper into the theme, suggesting that some choices aren’t so simple, and that people suffer when they try to deal with these choices on their own.
Also there will be a lot of jokes about oral sex.
This summary is much more complicated than the story itself, hopefully. Ceres is not an unreliable viewpoint character, and none of this is supposed to be a mystery. The narrative goal of this intrigue is to set Whitespire up as a battleground while establishing that it is primarily a battleground of relationships and feelings.
