Tyranny of Steel

While Berengar and Linde were preparing for the possibility of another war, the Byzantine Princess had an important guest visit her. Though At the moment, Honoria was entertaining herself in the courtyard with her pet Eagle Heraclius, utterly unaware that her fiance was about to see her.

Since Honoria was five, she raised the eastern imperial eagle as her pet, and it was quite honestly her only friend. She was the only daughter of the current Byzantine Emperor, and to say her relationship with her brothers was strained could be considered an understatement.

Since a young age, she had been heavily sheltered by her parents, to the point where she had never even left the palace or its grounds. The only men she had met outside of her family were either her father ’s subordinates or the various suitors that had heard of her legendary beauty and traveled a long way to meet her.

Despite this, she found every man who attempted to gain her hand in marriage to be genuinely insufferable. Thus she had rejected them all ruthlessly, to the point where she was now fifteen and close to the age of marriage without a fiance. That is until relatively recently where her father had, against her wishes, engaged her to the Crown Prince of France.

Honoria wore a pretty smile and giggled as she played with her pet eagle. Its majestic wingspan revealed itself as it took off into the sky and hovered in the air, like a watchful guardian of its friend and master. However, seeing an unknown man approach Honoria ’s vicinity, the eagle instantly dived down and got in the man ’s path.

This man was Aubry de Valois, the Crown Prince of France and Honoria ’s fiance. He had traveled a great distance to meet the gorgeous young princess whom he was engaged to. However, the moment Honoria saw the man in front of her, a frown instantly spread across her exquisite face, and she merely snubbed the man.

Aubry was by no means a masculine man, even though he was said to be a talented warrior. The young man was overtly feminine not just in his facial features but also in the shape of his body. He was petite, slender, lean, and had the skin of a woman. He had long center-parted dirty blonde hair that went down to his waist and emerald green eyes. If one did not know his identity, they might mistake him for a woman upon first glance.

This was one of the reasons Honoria was not fond of the man; another was that he was a well-known pillow biter. Despite the Catholic Church ’s and society as a whole ’s intolerance for homosexuality, it still existed. Sometimes, there were instances of men like Aubry who, despite being infamous for such proclivities, held high positions and were not subjected to the harassment of the Church.

Seeing his fiance in front of him and an eagle blocking his path, Aubry put on a pretty smile as he maintained his distance, the sight of which instantly disgusted Honoria to the core of her being. Afterward, Aubry spoke in a voice so feminine it was virtually indistinguishable from a woman ’s.