To most of the world, he is King Levak. To soldiers and petitioners, Your Majesty. To me, depending upon circumstance and how thoroughly he has tested my patience, he has always been Levak… or simply Lev.
I knew his parents long before I knew him. Etharon and Isoli K’far, the exiled crown prince and princess of Valmark, traveled beside Sartrel, Alren, myself, and the others of the original Company of the White Wing. For ten years we crossed the continent together, until Isoli’s pregnancy with their first child, Isobel, persuaded them to exchange the road for a quiet life in the village simply known as Shad’li. At the time, I firmly believed they had finally escaped the reach of Etharon’s younger brother, King Albric, who had stolen both his throne and the name of his city.
I was wrong.
When reports reached me that Albric had employed pale-aelvar assassins, I returned as quickly as I could. Not quickly enough. Shad’li had already been attacked, and nearly everyone I had once known there was dead. Levak and his twin brother, Kavel, survived only because they had been away from their home. I found two young men standing amid the destruction of everything they had understood their lives to be.
Yet Levak remained, somehow, bright. He was headstrong, kind, outgoing, and possessed of the curious conviction that every problem might be solved by charging directly into it. A typical human trait that I still admire. In Valmark, then known as Westgate, he proved this by deliberately provoking a riot during a slave auction and freeing as many captives as he could reach. Several were of my own people. One was Esriella, who would eventually become his wife, queen, and the one person most capable of tempering his more catastrophic human impulses.
The new Company of the White Wing gathered around us: wanderers, exiles, and wounded souls with nowhere else to go. Unfortunately, unknown to me, the bond between the brothers began to fray. Both fell in love with Esriella, though only Levak’s love was returned. When she chose him, something within Kavel appeared to break. After a bitter quarrel, he abandoned the Company, and the brother Levak had saved from Shad’li became another person he could not protect.
After a while, I told Levak the truth of his family and his claim to Valmark. I have never determined whether this was a blessing or a cruelty. He returned to Westgate almost at once, gathered supporters, and began a guerrilla war against Albric’s forces. With every village that joined him and every fighter he sent into danger, some portion of the young man I knew withdrew behind the face of a leader. Levak became colder in public, more calculating, and increasingly careful about when he permitted himself to show any feeling publicly at all. Leadership required him to order others toward deaths he would gladly have accepted in their place, and that necessity seemed to wound him more deeply than any blade.
Fortunately, Esriella remained beside him. On quiet nights, beyond the hearing of soldiers and councillors, I occasionally heard the old Levak laughing within their tent. It reassured me that the young man had not disappeared entirely. He had merely hidden himself where only she was permitted to find him.
When we finally reclaimed the city and restored its name as Valmark, the mask became harder still. Kingship demands that a person become a symbol, and symbols are rarely allowed ordinary grief. The birth of his son Valin changed him again. He grew sterner even in private, more cautious in judgment, and infinitely more afraid… not for himself, but of failing the child who would inherit both his kingdom and the consequences of all he had done to recover it.
I remained in Valmark for nearly ten years, though never continuously. There were obligations elsewhere that would not release me, however dearly I wished to stay. Each time I returned, Levak seemed older than the years should have made him, carrying his crown as though it were another wounded soldier he refused to abandon.
Perhaps that is who Levak has always been: a man forever charging ahead to save whoever stands before him, while quietly leaving pieces of himself behind with everyone he cannot.
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, Magi “the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
