Eulogy for Ser Asura

My beloved Harts of Albion, 

As I write this letter to you it is nigh impossible to avoid staining the page with tears of deep sorrow and heartbreak. My best friend Ser Asura Heartsong is gone, barely a year after the loss of my heart’s flame, Magnus Kapre. I know you all knew Asura at court, but I want to tell you first about the Asura I knew since we were children. 

The first time we met he had been cornered by a group of local boys making fun of him for his horns. I put myself between them and shouted for them to leave, then made sure he was ok. As someone who at the time thought I was an unusual human, when he told me he was, by his reckoning, an unusual halfling, I believed him. I truly think some greater forces at play in the world pulled us together, a fey and an umbral, to keep one another safe. We were inseparable from that moment on. He always wanted to find something greater outside the boundaries of Stretton village. So when we were older and I finally came to court, he was the first person I told when I came back, and invited him along. 

Asura flourished at court. He spread his wings and soared, and I have a lot of thanks to give on his behalf. To my own former group The Reapers, in particular Scarlet and Ser Brandon, who nurtured his dream of knighthood and made him Ser Brandon’s squire, Ser Graf who took up that potential after Ser Brandon’s sabbatical to squire him instead and molded him into a fully fledged Knight of Albion, too many individuals to name who were involved in his ritual to create him as an ancestral, and the Order of Nethras for bolstering him in his development and supporting him through Diev’s return to Nethras during the spring moot this year. If I have not named you it is simply because in truth, everyone at court contributed to his success in some way and I have immense gratitude for all of you. 

If Magnus was the firelight in my heart, leading the way like a beacon, Asura was the wind at my back, fanning the flames of my soul like the beating of a dark-feathered wing, pushing me ever onward. We may not have been bound by blood but he was family. I loved him deeply. I knew his story and I knew his heart. He left in the same way that he lived; full of love for his home and his people, and trying to make sure every Albione had someone standing at their side in any circumstance. He would want you to remember him this way, and to not dwell on the sadness, but to use it to power your actions in the pursuit of Albion’s greatness. Our strength, as we always say, is through unity. Embody that core value the way my brother Asura did, and we have done him proud. 

Fly high, Ser Asura, you big shiny hero. Send me a feather every now and then, won’t you? 

• Rosie