Chlodomer

Born around 495, Chlodomer entered the world as one of four brothers in the first great Frankish dynasty, his father the king who had forged a realm from the wreckage of Rome. Being second meant inheritance without supremacy: a slice of the kingdom, a share of the wars, and the lifelong geometry of sibling rivalry. His story ended in 524, less than thirty years after it began. The details of what filled those years are lost to the gap between his birth and his death, but the gap itself tells the story—a short arc in a violent century, a name that survives mostly as a marker in someone else's l…