BenedictIndex | Time Under Chaos | Non-Player Characters | Benedict  Benedict Then there was Benedict, tall and dour, thin; thin of body, thin of face, wide of mind. He wore orange and yellow and brown and reminded me of haystacks and pumpkins and scarecrows and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He had a long strong jaw and hazel eyes and brown hair that never curled. He stood beside a tan horse and leaned upon a lance about which was twined a rope of flowers. He seldom laughed. I liked him. -- Nine Princes in Amber And Benedict, the gods know you grow wiser as time burns its way to entropy, yet you still neglect single examples of the species in your knowledge of people. Perhaps I'll see you smile now this battle's done. Rest, warrior. -- The Courts of Chaos Benedict was the youngest of three children by Oberon and Cymnea. With the deaths of Osric and Finndo in the First Chaosian War, he was Oberon's only living son to remember life in Chaos before Dworkin's rebellion. Following Oberon's annulment of his marriage to Cymnea to pursue Faiella after Eric's birth, Osric and Finndo protested this retroactive attainment and, it is said, conspired to overthrow him by force. Some whisper that Benedict, too, was a partner in this plan. Others maintain he is the reason Oberon discovered it. Regardless, Oberon confronted Osric and Finndo before their plan came to fruition, and both chose to die bravely rather than risk their father's ire. Still, their lives were not bought cheaply, and though they were the only two sons to die on the field that day... they were not the last of Cymnea's sons destined to fall on such a field. As a direct consequence of these events, and later marital satire to follow, Benedict was never fond of discussions of bastardy and succession. While Benedict's involvement in the Cymean purge is unclear, what is clear is that from that day forward he has never indicated any desire to take the throne of Amber. Many assume that Oberon extracted a binding oath on him with the help of the family wizard, Dworkin. Others believe his reluctance to aspire to the throne is a consequence of his own complex notions of honor. Rather than spending his days seeking to take and hold the throne after his immortal father's death, Benedict pursued a monomaniacal study of war in all its forms. Whether it was with a pair of foils on the salle floor, or with fleets of starships sporting nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers, when the odds were even remotely even he could never be beaten. Benedict taught Eric, Corwin, and later Bleys and the Rilgans to fence, and the quality of his students speaks to his own skill with the blade. He held off an entire army of Moonriders above Jones Falls single-handedly. He reached the falls with a small force, but an early arcane onslaught caused bugs to burrow forth from his men's flesh in a fatal manner. Benedict always displayed his own peculiar kind of honor in his conduct with others. Unlike the majority of his brothers and sisters, he clearly felt a sense of noblisse oblige to servants and subjects under his aegis. When he believed his brother had harmed his servants, he chased Corwin half way across the universe to exact retribution. Years earlier, after coming across a shadow of Corwin's Avalon, his regret at Corwin's poor conduct there and apparent sentimentality towards his lost brother led him to take up stewardship of that place as the Guardian of Avalon. When forced to face a former lover, Lintra, in battle, he lost an arm. Many claim this was because of his reluctance to harm one he had once been intimate with, while others claim she came to understand him well enough to device a dirty trick he would fall for. Although it is widely held he died at the (Battle of betraying spookyness), after which his followers carried away his body to some hidden grave lest it be defiled by Chaos, there are other theories as well. Some suggest that Chaosian forces did kill him but wished to conceal the body to prevent his grave from becoming a rallying point. Stories of his last stand, however, universally put his shadows, Hannibal Barca and Leonidas I to shame. Surrounded and outnumbered, accurate casualty figures for the opposing chaosian force are still not available to this day. He led the final charge himself, atop his striped mount, in order to buy Caine and Julian time to escape. (Bleys had already surrendered his force.) |
