William Wyndersen
King William Wyndersen
Mental characteristics
Personal history
William was the first born of Prince Wryn Wyndersen, the only son of King Wallace Wyndersen. Shortly after the birth of William, Weigriff received word from Malan of a mysterious force invading from the great desert of the west that threatened to conquer Malan and move east towards the other provinces. In order to prevent the spread of this potentially global threat, King Wallace sent aid and troops west to help the humans of Malan take back their lands. This left Weigriff more vulnerable to attack from their ever lurking and aggressive draconian neighbors. The attack came as expected, and Weigriff had to buy the aid of the goblins and ogres of the north to push back the invaders. Due to a tactical misfortune however, Prince Wryn was slain by the invaders, leaving behind his two year old son William, a year old daughter, and yet to be born male and female twins. This meant that when King Wallace’s time had come, the crown would pass directly to William, as Wallace had no other sons but Wryn.
As William grew into a young man, he was rather uninterested in his impending duties to the crown. He pursued his own interests instead, which included studies of the sciences, studies of magic (though he had little natural competence in magic), and women. Against the wishes of his grandfather, he remained unmarried throughout his early adulthood. His general disinterest towards his duty worried his family and other noble families, as well as the political bureaucracy. Though the role of the monarchy had dwindled over the years, the crown was still an important and necessary position to have a capable individual in. When the question came up of yielding his claim to his younger brother, who showed far superior interest and seriousness towards his family duties, William refused. Despite his lackadaisical ways, he was adamant that he would step up to the challenge when the crown became his, and would be just fine doing things his way until that time came.
The time finally came at the age of 30. King Wallace was no longer well enough to continue his reign, and despite his sickness was able to decree that the crown must be passed on. William held true to his word, and immediately began to take his birthright more seriously upon his crowning. His previous lifestyle had already left a bad taste for many however, and some looked to control or abuse the power of what they perceived to be a weak king. At the top of this list of potential abusers was the masterly deceitful Helen Ward, a young and very attractive woman of a wealthy and powerful noble family. Through various means, Helen put herself atop the potential bride list, and soon became William’s queen.
Their relationship fared well at first, and to William, Helen seemed to be an immensely helpful figure in upkeeping the politics of the monarchy. This changed a short time after the birth of their first child, a boy whom William had named Wryn after his fallen father. She began to overreach in her power as queen, often ignoring William or attempting to make important political and personal decisions behind William’s back. It became clear to him that her interests in the marriage went only as far as the power the crown brought her and any children she would have with him. When confronted, Helen threatened that her family and others would pull out their economic support for the crown, which was still in debt to the goblins and ogres for providing substantial aid in the last war against the draconians. An inability to continue paying the debts might risk an unwinnable war, and so William felt he had no choice but to sit back as Helen played the stronger role in the monarchy and distanced their son from him.
In light of his standing amongst the other nobles and the threat of financial starvation, William began to regress a bit into his old self, becoming more and more apathetic. He often left his castle to masquerade amongst the common people as an ordinary knight, attempting to experience what a normal life might be more like, and to also better understand the commoners’ opinions of the crown. It was during one of these excursions that he met who he had considered the most beautiful women he had ever seen, a traveler from the far west named Meili Fan. Her name, appearance, accent, and more were unlike any other person he had met or heard about from Weigriff. He continued to meet with Meili day after day, and experienced a rush of freedom and emotion that he had never felt before. His long daily disappearances did not go unnoticed by Helen.
Helen hired spies to keep an eye on William during his trips into the city and soon learned about his affair with Meili. As long as it kept him distracted from her slow usurpation of the crown, it was of little concern to her. Her opinion changed however after discovering that Meili was pregnant, a potential threat to her son’s succession rights should William attempt to take back power of the crown. Indeed, William had considered doing just that, should the child be a boy. William’s relationship with Meili rekindled his desire to properly take on the role of the crown, seeing a possible future with it in which he would be happy with both his partner and lineage. The political challenge of divorcing Helen whilst marrying a “nobody” foreigner would be nearly impossible with the threats of economic starvation from other nobles, but he was willing to play the game and take a chance now.
Helen’s countermove to learning of Meili’s pregnancy was to start being more diplomatic and open with William again, attempting to make his affair feel unneeded and forgettable. William played the part to avoid suspicion, unaware of Helen’s knowledge of Meili. In the meantime, William began operating behind the scenes with loyal politicians from parliament on a solution to a potential war between nobles. During this time, before the birth of Meili and William’s child, a second child was conceived between William and Helen. This was a major complication to his plans, as his best course of action for Meili and their child may have been to divorce and remarry before the birth. However, he did not feel right in denying another child of his from the family name in such a way, and also knew that another child on the way would double the efforts of the Ward family to stay in power. War with the Wards, other houses supporting them, and potentially goblins and ogres protecting their investment, would be an impossible scenario.
As time was running out on figuring out a course of action, Meili proposed the idea of instead holding off and playing the long game instead. If their child had Wyndersen blood, perhaps William could get away with retroactively legitimizing the child after a much later divorce with Helen. In the meantime, William could attempt to negotiate with the goblins and other parties behind the backs of others to come to an agreement in his favor should things go awry. If the right parties could be convinced to side with the crown in the face of potential conflict, then the conflict would press no further and William would be free of the Ward threat.
In the final days of Meili’s pregnancy, William had her smuggled into the castle and hidden away from all but his most loyal servants and guards. Their child was born soon after, a girl whom he had decided to name Wyss in homage to both his own family’s naming scheme and Meili’s culture of origin. The girl had something very wrong with her, or at least very abnormal. She had light blue hair, and eyes that glowed ever so slightly with an unnatural shade of turquoise. These characteristics were almost immediately reminiscent of creatures often called demons from a place far to the north west. Nothing else seemed visually out of place however, and despite these inhuman traits, everyone present felt a strange sense of tranquility after the child’s birth. This was certainly some form of magic, and it was decided that the child had been born with an unknown form of savantism, a rare condition in which the magical capabilities of the individual are highly amplified from birth with no magical training. For William, this was exciting news that he was incredibly proud of given his passion and interest in magic. However, this would prove to be a big bump in the road later on as others would see it differently, a sort of karmic justice to have a “demon” child in what would become a high profile affair.
Despite William’s attempts to keep them hidden in the castle, Helen quickly found out not only about the child but its condition. This seemed like a great opportunity to incite opposition against the crown by spreading word of the illegitimate demon child born to the unfaithful and incompetent king. It was highly successful, and for a time it seemed that William had very few allies left amongst the nobility and the people.
A few months later, Helen and William’s second child was born, a girl named Willow. To the surprise of everyone, Willow was also born with savantism, albeit the normal and recognizable version of it where the only modified features are paler skin and whitish blonde hair. Despite his hatred for Helen, William was again proud and excited to be the father of a child with such a gift. He was also in a good mood due to the birth of his last legitimate child meaning he could press forward with plans he had successfully pulled off in the background. In the time between the birth of his second two children, he had sent emissaries to the goblins to renegotiate the debts of the crown. He had agreed to pay increased interests on the debt given that the goblins would support him against internal military conflict should the need arise. With this agreement in place, he would be safe to divorce Helen, marry Meili, and forcibly allow the children of his previous marriage to stay legitimized, as he did not feel that they should lose that right due to his own mistakes and problems with the Ward family.
Following through with his plan brought an absurdly bad wave of unpopularity. It was viewed by the general populace as threatening his own country and people with foreign mercenaries in an attempt to legitimize his affair with another foreigner, which was honestly a fairly accurate view. However, the other nobles, Ward family included, knew that the ogre armies were not something they could take on without the entirety of Weigriff united against them. They were forced to accept William’s wishes, with one caveat: he could not marry Meili. If he did this, the people of Weigriff could be stirred into a dangerously unruly state, and they would all have far more problems than their own noble exclusive conflicts. William reluctantly agreed, but decided he would not remarry, at least not for some time.
In the years that passed, his unpopularity festered, and Meili and Wyss were not particularly safe in the city. Wyss was often in the safety of the castle anyways due to her young age, but Meili was not happy being so often confined to a castle or being seen by others as nothing but a mistress to the king. In the interest of her happiness, William arranged for a secret lodge to be built just outside the northwestern border of Weigriff, a place Meili could come and go from as she pleased with the permanent protection of kingsguard. This way, she could continue traveling the world as she originally set out to do, while still having a place to come back to where she could see William and Wyss without the threat of others.
As William’s children grew older, they all proved to be incredibly remarkable people. His youngest, Willow, was a child prodigy, and ironically a great mentor to her two older siblings. Wryn, while taking much more after his mother’s side of the family, grew to be an exceptional warrior and strategist. Wyss, despite her original societal handicap of being seen as the affair demon child, became skilled in extraordinary types of magic that the current world hadn’t seen before. She could summon creatures from other regions, continents, and even other worlds, as well as having the strange ability to put the minds of any into a sort of tranquil and peaceful state. Though William’s initial years on the throne were quite disastrous, the people and their opinions changed in time as his children grew older and gained their respect and praise through various means.
After many years passed and his children had grown into young adults, a strange incident caught the attention of William’s son Wryn, who had begun working with the intelligence division of the military. The citizens of a town in the forests of northern Weigriff were disappearing into thin air. Further investigation revealed that one of the town’s denizens, a wealthy rancher, businessman and magical savant, had been experimenting on people with necromancy and dark magic. Before being discovered he had already created many unfathomable horrors and gained an enormous amount of power, the likes of which Wryn could not stop. The town was evacuated and quarantined, but there was nothing that could be done to stop the necromancer. Eventually, a continent wide spell was cast that raised the dead and spread a seed of dark mind control magic amongst the people. The necromancer vanished after the spell, his physical form presumably vaporized by the overloaded power of the spell. Remnants of his magic were spread in his dark seed however, and with the dead rose a cult of necromancers that upkept his will.
The military as a whole proved ineffective against this threat, as knowledge could pass between mind controlled agents of the necromancer that hid amongst the common people. They would simply avoid the military where it was strong and strike supply lines and areas that were not reinforced enough, forcing the military to spread itself thin to stop the bleeding and prevent as many attacks as possible. William and his castle remained safe from the threat due to an ability of Wyss to detect and remove the seeds of dark magic from people. However, it would be impossible to safely send her to every afflicted location and cure every single person in the realm. Thus,
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he assigned Wryn and his other children to lead a small, covert operation named The Huntsmen to hunt down the cultists responsible for spreading and managing the dark magic of the necromancer that still plagued the region. William remained in the capital to try and maintain order as best as possible lest the most populated cities of Weigriff become entirely consumed by panic and rioting.
Relationships
Current Location
Species
Ethnicity
Honorary & Occupational Titles
King of Weigriff
Year of Birth
14985 P.T.
56 Years old
Birthplace
Spouses
Siblings
Children
Gender
Male
Eyes
Green
Hair
Medium-long, faded blonde, somewhat curvy
Height
6'1"
Weight
193
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