Brigid of Amber

Not Quite The End

Intense when applied to a roleplaying game is having your GM ask your character to kill her father.

Unfortunately, my job situation forced me to move away and prevented me from participating regularly, but I was able to do through email and such. All during that time there was a continual plot thread: a prophecy that predicted the End of Reality. Seven beings from outside Reality would attempt to destroy Amber, Chaos, and all Shadow, and seven would oppose them. Every so often the GM would drop hints, clues, etc. for the players about the Prophecy.

Two weeks ago, at the regular gaming session, the players had their characters sit down for dinner, where they started discussing the Prophecy. They put all of the clues together, set out to save Reality, and did so by destroying it and recreating it.

Since I wasn’t there physically, I wasn’t involved. But I had heard about it it, and the following weekend I called the GM to talk to him about it. I asked the GM what Brigid was doing, had my own character go through a parallel situation in relation to the Prophecy, and, in the conversation with the gamemaster, had one of my finest roleplaying moments ever.

Brigid is an Amber-Faerie crossbreed. She’s also Princess Royal and Queen of the Unseelie. She got a message to come to Faerie (which is a separate realm apart from Amber) and, if she regards the people she’s with, to bring them along. This includes her two daughters. When she reached Faerie, the Unseelie and Seelie hosts are getting ready for War. The War for the End of Reality. And it is up to the four monarchs to decide the ultimate fate of Faerie, the four monarchs being Brigid and her uncle Titan of the Unseelie and Galahad (Brigid’s father) and Ariel of the Seelie.

There were three options. One was to divorce Faerie from all reality. That, to Brigid, would mean the stagnation and destruction of Faerie. The second was to find another reality to attach itself to, but with the destruction of all reality, it wasn’t clear where one would be found.

The third, and the one that was taken, was to join with the recreation of all reality. That would mean a change to Faerie, that it would now be a part of reality, with possibly a loss, but at least it would survive. And if it would survive, then it could become what it always was, as all stories of Faerie are considered true.

But to become part of reality, a bridge had to be created, and Brigid, who was both Faerie and Amber, was the only one available to do it. (Her cousin Ombra was already in the battle as one of the seven champions.) So, to create the bridge, she had to take into herself all of Faerie. Brigid agreed, and so brought all of the hosts of Faerie into her heart, which she knew was large enough to encompass it. That left only a few of the highest Fae, including her father, the Seelie King.

When everything was taken in, except for the other monarchs of the realms, the gamemaster told me that Brigid’s father held out to her a cold iron knife and told her she knew what she needed to do with it. It was the only way, he said; even though dying by an iron blade meant the True Death for a Faerie, if Faerie was recreated it would be as if it had never happened.

I choked up. Not the character, myself.