The Bells of Romwald - Writing A Different Kind of Submission

Today, something strange happened: I woke this morning with a nagging feeling that something important was happening, and I couldn’t remember what it was.

To be honest, this was a little worrying. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten to post the latest instalment of the little free novella I’m giving away as a Locktober present to the Reddit chastity community, because I woke to a stack of enthusiastic messages. Was it someone’s birthday? It didn’t seem likely, because the date felt a little too sad. I even tentatively combed old diaries trying to make sure it wasn’t the date a friend had been bereaved last year, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t until I was boiling the kettle and staring at a calendar that hangs in my kitchen that it clicked.

Today is the 19^th of October.

Today, in the world of The Ruritanian Pretender, is the anniversary of the raid on Romwald. And I woke up, with part of my brain somehow aware of that, and it made me sad without even knowing why. I find that fascinating.

I talked a little, once before, about the challenges of writing The Ruritanian Pretender, and of writing about Anthony Hope’s exciting, swashbucklingly romantic Ruritania in the 21^st Century, and I talked a little about how I managed to chart a course for the little country that can get it to the point where Rudy gets to kneel for Flavia – but I couldn’t quite manage to write the story of Romwald twice. I said I’d leave it for another time.

I guess my brain remembered, and knew remembrance matters.

I want to share the relevant passage. I normally don't share any of the content of my actual books on this blog, because, well... It would mean putting erotica on the internet. It's fantastic erotica, don't get me wrong - I honestly do write high-calibre smut, especially if what you want is strong character driven femdom - but it feels a bit risky to launch excerpts from my scenes straight out onto the internet without a warning. 

After all, stumbling on one of my more intense scenes could seriously awaken something in someone! How could I ever live with myself if I was responsible for yet another man dropping to his knees making those helpless little noises guys sometimes make, and yet I wasn’t there to see it??

But this passage – it’s not like that. It’s not really like anything else I’ve ever written. It’s when Major Klara Varga is drilling Rudy on knowledge he needs to have to successfully impersonate the prince she and Queen Flavia need him to be, and for once she’s teaching his brain, rather than his body. 

And in fact that pivot - the fact that for once Klara isn't edging Rudy halfway to madness, that she isn't using her fingers or her breasts to make him pay attention but simply her words and the weight of a weary, war-torn world - adds a necessary depth to this moment. Here's the crucial fragment of that 'teaching' scene, where she gets onto recent history:

She nodded at the tablet. “The Elphburgs survived by becoming ceremonial – again, Queen Flavia’s Anglophilia helped there; she insisted that if a constitutional monarchy worked for Britain it would work here. She spent quite some time in London doing research and came back with a whole fleet of proposals. Through the 20s the Monarchy moved to take on a largely ceremonial role, delegating most of its authority to Parliament. The new model was well established when Rudolf V died in 1931. Heart attack at 64.”

She clicked forwards on the timeline.

“Succeeded by Rudolf VI. Very popular man, famously bright red hair. Most of the Elphburgs are natural redheads, of course, as you’ll have had the chance to appreciate – but anyway, Rudolf VI bitterly opposed the rise of fascism. When the Nazis took Austria in the Anschluss he’d already launched a major conscription drive and modernised the army; he even built up a fairly respectable air force for the time. Between that, and the fact Ruritania is largely hemmed in by mountains...

Well, we stayed mostly out of things.”

She coughed a little awkwardly.

“Several Ruritanian banks took in stolen artwork, even some gold. Not our most creditable hour. On the other hand, our position on the Austrian and Czech borders enabled some... exfiltration. Not as much as we’d like, not enough to make a significant difference, I know but... some. If people could get to the border – even to within a day’s run of the border – we did what we could. Shepherds and mountain guides knew the passes, left caches of supplies, offered shelter. The usual thing. And we sacrificed our banks’ integrity to buy blind eyes to what we were doing.”

She shrugged, her grey eyes cold as she stared at him.

“Once, that wasn’t enough. There was a raid, on the monastery at Romwald. Late in ’43. This was after Gran Sasso. The Gestapo knew we were using Romwald as a hub for bringing refugees through the passes. Someone somewhere wanted to make a show of their ruthlessness. They pulled strings, Himmler authorised a limited violation of Ruritanian sovereignty. SAPT didn’t see it coming. We picked up some communications but... the decryption was too slow.”

She looked away, focusing her eyes on the ceiling as she pulled up a black and white photo of an elegant church and its surrounding buildings, clustered on a narrow strip of flatter land among mountain peaks.

“The first anyone in Ruritania knew about it was in the village down at the foot of the valley. The baker said afterwards, he thought he’d heard the abbey bells ringing. But the first the military knew for sure was a phone call – the abbot managed to garble something about paratroopers in the cloister before… Well. We responded – your regiment, responded, Colonel Andras, so you need to know it. A company of the Royal Dragoon Guards was sent out to investigate.”

Rudolf stared at her, his mouth dry.

“They arrived too late,” Major Varga said simply, “some shots were fired, some of the troops were killed, including their commanding officer, Major Seidl. He was trying to lead from the front, the bloody fool. And then as we held back to try to negotiate, the monastery was dynamited. The monks dead. The refugees... gone. And... that was it. King Rudolf made mild representations through the official channels, was rebuffed with a regretful message about a training exercise gone wrong, and that was it. We shifted our focus, used other routes over the mountains. Dropped the interest rates paid on German deposits in the banks. That was what survival looked like. Official Ruritanian Casualties: twenty. Unofficially... a hundred people, maybe? One-fifty? That’s our best estimate. We didn’t have paper records, of course.”

Rudy swallowed.

“We survived,” she said finally. “But not cleanly. Afterwards, as I told you – the monarchy endured. Neutrality had become a habit. A source of strength sometimes, and a source of shame at others. Every new SAPT recruit gets taken up to Romwald, by the way. Once a year, on October 19th. Just ruins now but... beautiful, for all the horror.”

“I...” Rudy began, and she waved him into silence.

“I know. You needn’t say it. And nobody will ever expect you to talk about this,” she said. “But you will remember it. Because you have to understand - the Queen is descended from men who chose survival over defiance. Kings who’d take a slap in the face today, in order to do more good tomorrow. That should make sense to you.”

She didn’t need to say You’re doing the same. He felt it anyway.

“Questions?”

Rudy brushed at his cheek, and shook his head.

“Good.” Klara said, clicking forwards to the next slide as she forced herself to refocus. “Then we’ll move on. Sports teams and major settlements. Do you favour the Strelsau Eagles or the Hofbau Millers?”

 

-- The Ruritanian Pretender, © Anna Voss, Mafeking Press, 2025

I am a little nervous sharing that, because as I say, what I write is in fact very hot femdom, and that isn’t a great example of what makes my work sell (you can get a much better idea from the serial I’m sharing on Reddit, of course, or from buying one of my books!) – but at the same time, I’ve always tried to explain that I write literary femdom, and in many ways that passage helps explain what I mean.

Klara’s character has depth here, depth that comes back later when – well, I’m not going to spoiler my own work – but for anyone sitting around wondering if authors really consider how the words they set down on the page might impact specific interpretations of character motivations, trust me that she doesn’t criticise Major Seidl’s leading from the front just as a casual throwaway remark!

And, more than that, I wanted the story of Romwald to echo something bigger.

Yes, of course, on one level it’s a narrative device, a way to explain how the high-ceremonial, quaint little independent Monarchy of Anthony Hope made it as far as 2025 with a social structure that still supports conveniently lookalike Englishmen dropping straight into the middle of their high politics, despite all the horrors of the mid-20th Century.

But it also shows a core thesis of The Ruritanian Pretender – actually a core thesis of nearly all my work: Submission is not Weakness. Submission is – well, it can be many things. But what I usually discover is that it’s an expression of love, or devotion, or strength. Very, very often, submission is something close to sacred.

In my experience, not enough femdom fiction captures that. There’s a deep, almost reverent trust in submission (as readers of Sense of Submission may have found!). That’s something that I genuinely think is worth capturing, because it can be so powerful, and so important to the people who share it.

That’s worth writing, even if I have to imagine a few horrors along the way.

Although, it’s easy for me to say that. The truth is, even having written it, that line about the baker hearing the bells and not thinking they were important still breaks my heart every time I read it.

If you’d like your heart slightly broken or, better yet, if you’d like to read how a broken-hearted Queen finds happiness, hope, and pleasure by breaking a naive submissive Englishman!, you’d like The Ruritanian Pretender!