Item Seed: Magna Gladius ex Dumnonia.

Magna Gladius ex Dumnonia – Google Docs

Magna Gladius ex Dumnonia

This iron double-edged greatsword is fairly obviously magical, given that it was just pulled from the bottom of the River Tamar (Plymouth, United Kingdom) by a nine year old girl, yet is still as sharp and sound as the day that it was forged.  It’s a pretty thing, and clearly derived from the Roman aesthetic tradition: but the Celtic motifs are both obvious and well-crafted, and the sword is remarkably light in the hand (presumably).  Magna Gladius ex Dumnonia also has an inscription on it in Latin, which basically states that whoever holds this sword is the rightful ruler of the Kingdom of the Dumnonii.

This makes Magna Gladius ex Dumnonia’s possession by the aforementioned nine year old girl a bit problematical.  Technically, that Kingdom was arguably brought into England via the usual conquests and campaigns and whatnot; certainly the lands of the Dumnonii are now part of Devonshire.  A preliminary dive into the occult archives over who actually inherited the sacred kingship in this particular situation brought back the answer “the Duke of Exeter.” Of course, the last Duke of Exeter was attainted during the Wars of the Roses, and any attempt to straighten out all the magical and/or esoteric ritual correspondences were doomed to failure when Henry VIII came through and upended all the monasteries.  The people at the time had to pick their priorities, and obscure sub-Roman dynastic magic prophecies were at the bottom of the list.

And so, here we are. The team’s mission?  Go have a chat with… the sword?  The girl?  Her parents? Somebody over there can be reasoned with, surely.  The basic problem is that, absent the usual web of feudal obligations and oaths, the kid is effectively Queen of a fairly large chunk of England.  This will play havoc with the Realm’s magical defenses, if it’s not quickly resolved — and this is not the Fifteenth Century, or even the Eighteenth: killing the kid is not an option.  Half of the Realm’s sentient magical guardians would void their oaths to the Crown on the spot.  The optimal solution would be to quietly invest the girl as the Duchess of Exeter, but that’s going to take time, and in the meantime the last thing anybody needs is for her to go off trying to queen it by marching on London.  And yes, she would somehow acquire an army, on the way.  Destiny has a vicious sense of humor like that.

What’s that?  No, the difficulty is not in convincing the Queen of England that there’s a good esoteric reason to make a nine year old girl a Duchess. This current branch of the House of Windsor is fully checked-out on the mystical realities of sacred kingship, which is why Edward VIII (who was not) got deposed so easily in 1936. The difficulty is in keeping her Majesty from using this situation to finally clean out the deadwood from occult bureaucracies that haven’t been audited since the Reform Act of 1867. It’s apparently one of the last things on her bucket list.