A NEW CHAPTER IN THE BARATHEON SAGA

This is the end of the Baratheon Saga. I envisioned it at first in third person like the rest of the Saga but this afternoon I had an epiphany that it should be told in first person by a very important character:

Dearest reader, I am typing these words from my office in Zürich. I feel that it is my duty to tell you the end of the Baratheon story, and how it all comes back to the same source.

I am ambiguously grateful to my Uncle Peter and Aunt Lizzie for allowing me to resume my University education here in Switzerland, thanks to them I have become a Primary schoolteacher in history and the proud enlightener of class after class of starry-eyed children. Oh, if they only knew the real stories about her real life that Fräulein Stark has experienced!

What caused my move to Zürich was quite unexpected... after Aunt Lizzie fell off the ledge in our châlet, her widowed husband began making moves on yours truly, saying how much I look like my mother, Kate Stark née Tully, who was his childhood sweetheart. Putting his hands underneath my skirt (I retaliated by wearing trousers for the first time in forever) and worse. So I packed my savings and came to Zürich on my own, with a little black case, and I have to commute Monday through Friday to the little school in the valley where I give my history lessons.

I have discovered that my family is doing somewhat well, somewhat not so well. My Papa, Ned Stark, was captured by the Nazis for trying to save their victims and executed by firing squad. My mother and oldest brother Roy are doing very fine in Värmland - Roy is volunteering in the war in Finland and getting married to one Jane Westerling, a volunteer nurse.

My younger sister Anna, that royal pest, has been employed by the KGB in Leningrad as a secret agent, with Varish, the Comrade of Sturmende, himself as her mentor. Nothing else is known about them, and I am pretty curious about their circumstances.

Stanislaus Baratheon and his wife Elise saw their daughter Irene being taken from them by the Nazis, and they blamed Aleksandra, the Lady in Red who said she would cure Irene of her autism. As a result, the Lady in Red burned down the parish of Sturmende with the two remaining Baratheons inside.

As for the two "Baratheon" children who are actually von Lännister, Elsa and Telramund, they still live in Valencia at one-gender boarding schools. Count Jakob von Lännister volunteered for the Republican side (something unheard of!) in the Civil War and was killed at the Ebro, while his ladylove Brünnhilde von Tarth moved to Valencia and is now working as a secretary for a local bureaucrat.

Laurent Tyrell and his lover Wenzel von Lännister, and the merry widow Margot Tyrell, moved not long ago from Paris to Zürich due to the Nazi occupation, and they work still as bohemian artists. In fact, the young trio now live in a block of flats next to mine! I was elated to finally speak to Margot and to Laurent and to tell them that I murdered Gottfried Baratheon... but it shall be our secret, shan't it?

Last of all, I want to talk about Elisabeth von Lännister. She paid the price for her many sexual dalliances and for her alcoholism by being taken prisoner in the Soviet occupation of Sturmende and losing her hair, her shame, her decorum, and her sanity in the process. She was found dead in the water tank in the Gulag where she was kept.

I myself have resolved not to get married, but to keep my friends close and acknowledge the peace in this country and the fact that I live swaddled in a cocoon of neutrality while the war rages at the door. I get rather well paid as a teacher, I adore my student children's curious questions, and it has been a pleasure to reconnect with the Tyrells (and to know Wenzel von Lännister). This chronicle that started with the Barathéons' leaving France during the Revolution has finally reached the present day, and I hope that you have taken some lessons out of it.

Zürich, November 1949

Sandra Stark.

PS. The other scenes I haven't written, like the deaths of Robert and Rainer, I will write them. This is the end of the plot, but not the end of my writing the Baratheon Saga.