History

Born the second son, Iwan never had aspirations for his father's title. His youth was spent blissfully (and perhaps just a bit willfully) ignorant of the responsibilities his brother would one day have to shoulder. Instead, much of his youth was spent finding new ways to get into trouble, and out of it once more, always egged on by his sister.

Never did he consider staying in the quiet, idyllic Welsh countryside though; when he was seventeen, and it had become obvious that university would be a waste on him, Iwan instead had a commission purchased by his father, and he was shipped away to learn the ways of war. He took to it well enough, or as well as he had taken to anything before – though his wild ways did have to be beaten from him a bit, to better match the discipline expected of one of Her Majesty's officers.

Iwan's military career began very promising; he was quick to move up the ranks of the Hussars over the course of the first ten years or so of his career. Taking part in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, he served well and suffered no serious injuries or traumas. Things went different a few years later, during the Anglo-Egyptian War. In 1882, during the Battle of Tell El Kebir, a mortar blast knocked Iwan from his horse, killing the poor beast and leaving him rather mangled. He lost his right foot and part of his leg, received notable scarring up the right side of his body, and lost part of his right hand.

It took approximately eight months of convalescence before he was approved to return to combat, and by then he had missed the rest of the war, such as it was. For the next couple of years, he was engaged in the Mahdist War, which culminated in his short-lived participation in the Nile Expedition meant to free Khartoum from its siege.

It was a few years after that, in the fall of 1887, during a damn training exercise of all things, that Iwan suffered another grave injury. While overseeing the training of some Egyptian troops, a gunpowder charge was mishandled, resulting in the explosion of a cannon. Iwan was lucky, though he did not (and does not) think of himself as such; the shrapnel that hit him did relatively little damage, for all that the damage was enough to permanently blind his right eye and leave him bedbound for two weeks with a significant concussion.

With the loss of his vision, Iwan could no longer fulfill his duties as a Hussar. Though he waited some months to see if any of his vision might return, in the end he was given his choices: Become a camp aide of some kind, return to London to join the bureaucratic military staff there, or be retired with honors. A lifetime chained to a desk sounded like nothing short of torture for the young man, and so in the end he was resigned to accept the retirement.

Iwan has since returned to London only recently, a decorated man with no career prospects, no education outside of the military, and no idea what on Earth he's going to do with his war-ravaged self. For now he drinks, he fucks, and he tries to forget the dreams he had of his future.