#this au is relatively tame (wait for deirdre's) and i strove to have nothing really change so i posted it first! nothing too crazy happens

[ulircursed]

♡ mananan would've made a better match for ayra i think (sorry andrei) but he didn't arrange a marriage at all so let's just roll with it

from here! holy shit who is this guy changing the hair color changed everything

(the twins are here too! yeah, they get three children bc i do not like to shadow realm one of a pair of twins. they look the same as they do in canon bless u ayra and ur black hair)

but oh god ok in this au, ring reacted faster than all the conspirators and actually advised kurth to bring an entourage to meet mananan at the edge of the ribaut clan before reptor could assassinate the isacchian king. they get their peace treaty and the war ends! in exchange, mananan agrees (is forced to agree) to send ayra to grannvale to marry. because... something something od holy blood. maybe they take shannan too. anyway they are basically political prisoners grannvale is just too polite to say so.

and so she is wed to andrei, as the son of duke ring. at this point in my hc he has been officially declared heir i think. andrei makes no attempt to treat ayra as anything but a political prisoner, knowing that the chances of him having a major blooded child with a minor blood from a whole 'nother crusader are slim to none. at the same time, with ring right there and no conspiracy on the horizon (yet), it's not like andrei will do anything too crazy of his own accord (i've said this before, but while his relationship with ring wasn't good, it also wasn't bad enough that he would've at all wanted to kill his father without an outside reason). so they have a child.

meet black haired 'scipio'

the kid is born with only minor od blood. this is not great for andrei's mental health, and andrei makes his disappointment known to the kid from the moment he is consciously aware of his surroundings. at the same time, political prisoner ayra wasn't exactly encouraged to form a bond with her child so he also doesn't have a mother's support throughout all this

he ends up inheriting his father's self-worth issues wholesale, but worse bc at least father had minor ullr blood??? he has Nothing except the Political Prisoner's Bad Blood. hates himself deeply but tries to keep up a haughty appearance to cover that up. inferiority-superiority complex to the extreme

he will become a master knight in this iteration. gotta prove himself and his nonexistent self-worth u know

a few years later, the twins are also born! they have minor ullr blood and andrei ends up deciding that's worse, the idea that ullr's legacy is being mixed with another crusader's blood. when i say he doesn't have a healthy attitude re: ullr this is what i mean. he ends up liking the twins even less than 'scipio', and edain is aware of this.

ANYWAY back to the lore. a large part of the tellius gen i asks is just figuring out how we even get here ahaha. eventually, the conspirators find a chance during a big event that andrei is expected to bring ayra, and assassinate kurth during that time, blaming the whole thing on ayra but also insinuating that chalphy and yngvi were in on it. they publicly execute ayra and order that mananan and mariccle answer for their family member's crimes or they'll like. kill shannan too.

at this point byron and ring figure out what's going on, and they rescue shannan and get sigurd to smuggle him out of the country using the excuse of political visits to the surrounding nations. the yied desert is no longer a viable route at this point bc reptor and lombard would have troops there to intercept them, so sigurd plans to get to isaach via going through verdane and agustria then getting a ship north to silesse and then to isaach. he leaves with some of his friends, edain included, and edain brings her niece and nephew the twins, thinking that this might make their cover story of innocent visits more convincing if they brought children along (shannan is also along but he's the whole point of the excursion so he has to hide at all times). andrei then kills ring, takes the duchy and throws in his lot with the conspiracy 'for yngvi's sake'. byron also is killed.

everything that happens in canon with sigurd's party happens at this point, even though it's a little bit late. manfroy pulls strings behind the scenes to convince both verdane and agustria that sigurd is here to conquer them instead of basically just. smuggling a small child. and so they run into Problems along the way. he meets deirdre, they have seliph, manfroy comes in with a steel chair, etc etc. anyway the gang is in silesse when they receive news that mananan and mariccle are both dead, isaach has officially fallen, and grannvale knows what sigurd and co are up to and they'd best come back before they're all labeled as traitors. chapter 5 happens and the people/kids who do escape originally still escape.

ok the story took a huge extra few years to get back on track but ultimately everything stays the same, except scipio now has black hair, od blood and hates himself more. sorry.