[ WP ] Write your favorite part to a story you 've always wanted to write , but never got around to .

Johan Cicero was a scion of house Gottrop, born after the fall of France, and when even Grand Castile was fading before the imperial green. He was a sad youth, isolated from below by his imperial birth and from above by his demanding and unsympathetic father. Only one light ever entered his life. 
 
 When he was seventeen or so, nearly of age, he accompanied his father on a state visit to the last free state of any significance in Europe, the old kingdom of Sweden, where he met the young Queen Katarina. Foisted onto the throne at a young age by the untimely death of her father, the Queen of Swedes was acutely aware of the responsibility placed upon her, and acutely aware that she was neither qualified nor prepared. The old emperor had hoped to cow her with his visit, but failed. 
 
 In the Queen, young Cicero found a kindred spirit at last, and seized upon it as a drowning man seizes upon a rescuer. The Queen, however, did no such thing. The Empire was to her the ultimate evil, the cancer which had consumed the world, the death lurking ahead for free Sweden, which no force left on the earth could dare oppose. Even before the death of her father she had come to terms with these facts, and resolved that Sweden would die unbowed and unflinching. Cicero was to her merely an emissary of that onrushing doom, and she allowed him no compromise of the death-mask of proud defiance she had forged. 
 
 Cicero was overwrought. He petitioned his father for a guarantee of Swedish freedom, and was met with incredulous distain. Abandoning all cares for anything else in the world, he played every card in his possession against his father, and revealed the truth of the situation. He was sent back to Bordeaux, and confined to imperial estates for the rest of his father ’ s life. 
 
 Katarina would not yield to the Emperor, so the Emperor made plain his final threat. The old king had died on his orders, placing a defenseless girl on the throne, and such a girl should value her own safety enough to bend to the inevitable. The Queen refused. The Emperor attempted to make good on his threat, but as the Swedes learned what their Queen had done, her legend grew and the difficulties facing agents of the Diet increased. When all recourse in that line at last failed, the Emperor came with his armies and overran Finland. The Swedes fought to the last, but conceded when the last free armies were destroyed. Rump Sweden lived on, as the Emperor was called south to dying Castile. In a pair of short years, the old Gottrop died himself. 
 
 The Emperor Johan Cicero, called out from his internal exile, made haste to Sweden and threw himself at the feet of the Queen Katarina. He begged her for marriage, promising her that their line would rule Sweden and the Empire equally for all eternity. He promised her everything, even offering to abandon the Gottrop name, delivering any children to her dynasty. 
 
 The Queen Katarina saw only another Emperor, here to see Sweden consumed. Even should his promises prove true, she thought, for how many generations would a Grand King of all Europe truly remember Sweden as anything other than a minor province? 
 
 The Queen grieved for the Swedish dead in Finland, she grieved for her father, and she grieved for the freedom of her homeland. And so she shunned Cicero, and despised him, and would accept nothing from him short of the breaking of the Empire. 
 
 And Cicero begged, and pleaded, and groveled until his own advisors felt compelled to look away, for there was something in him of the blood of his fathers, and of the dozen generations who had bled in France and England and Lost Castile to bring peace to Europe, and even in the grief and blindness of his love he could not bear to break the Empire. 
 
 And so Katarina shunned him, and walked away from him on his knees. 
 
 The Emperor Johan Cicero returned from Stockholm a changed man. A darkness hung over him for three days in Prague, and then the commands began. The armies of the Empire were marshalled to complete the conquest of their continent. 
 
 When the thousand ships of all the Empire ’ s ports passed the Oresund, the Swedes called forth the last of their ships, and lost them. When the Czechs landed in Skane, and the Lombardians landed in Vastergotland, and the Prussians came overland from lost Finland, the Swedes called forth the last of their generals and armies, and lost them. And when the Imperial Guard itself broke the gates of Stockholm and marched into the palace of the Nordic kings, and the Emperor Johan Cicero emerged from their ranks as the city burned all around, he did not find the Queen Katarina on the throne. The Guard did not find her when it searched the palace, nor after it sealed the city and searched room by room. Nor did the Prussians find her in Norrland, nor the Czechs in Skane, nor was she ever again heard of in Sweden or any of the lands of the Empire, so that the Emperor Johan was forced to leave unsatisfied, and to live out his life alone in Prague and Bordeaux and Barcelona. 
 
 There are some who say that the Queen was smuggled out of the palace even as the city fell, and hidden away among common folk. There are some who say that a certain common maid on a certain street in Stockholm bears an uncanny resemblance to her. There are some who say that the love her people felt for her was so powerful that no reward could ever prevent that maid from being allowed to disappear when the imperial guardsmen arrived to investigate the rumors. There are some who say that the last Queen of Sweden spent her life among her people, as a living reminder of the days when their land was free. 
 
 There are some who say that occasionally the Queen Kristina could be spotted in the streets of Stockholm when a friend or correspondent of the Emperor was near. The Emperor, for his part, left a month after the fall and never set foot in Sweden again. 
 
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 The important thing to understand about this story is that it ’ s all true. The events unfolded as described above in a game called Europa Universalis 3. Johan Cicero Gotrrop lived to a very old age, and oversaw the near conquest of the remnant of Castile, though he was unable to finish the job. Under his reign the true enemy of the Empire finally shifted to become Muscovy, which had expanded to all the proportions of the true Russian Empire and could field an army larger than that of the reformed Holy Roman Empire, of which Johan was the Emperor. That Empire had reformed from a Bohemia which had asserted its dominance over the empire under two Emperor-Kings of the Bathory dynasty, Stephen and Friedrich. The unified empire had immediately fallen into unending wars with France, ended only by the total grinding conquest of said country. Grand Castile, a unified Spain analog that had formed of its own accord while all this was happening and had colonized most of the world, was at the time a terrifying threat, which the empire decided to deal with the same way it had dealt with France – by meeting it head on. It was about this time that Johan Cicero was born, as heir to the Empire. The very young Queen of Sweden did refuse all attempts at royal marriages, and, well, Cicero ’ s personality grew from there, up to and including the final conquest of Sweden. 

