Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

Empty Suit

In that land sovereigns were formed of dreams. Lords and magnates would partake of the dreaming substances and they would give blood. A thorn through the tongue or the palm. Awake they would dream, delirious and sweating, chanting songs in languages they did not speak. For a time it would be utter babble, everyone singing their own tune, but gradually the songs would shift until they were unified, a process that could take hours or days. Images would pass between them, hallucinatory and vague, ecstatic nightmares they could not turn away from. Horrors that excited them beyond measure.  

From this the sovereign would take shape, disgorged from bile-filled mouths like so much illness. The sovereign would go among the people, a spirit, form with no substance, without thought or reason. Protector, protector, the people would cry out as the sovereign passed. Protector, protector, the lords and magnates would echo weakly as they emerged from their trances shaking and unable to quench their thirst.  

The sovereign yearned to go, to dissipate back into the ether like any spirit unhoused by flesh, but the words of the people could not be denied. They crafted a binding spell, tying the sovereign to that land, those cities and villages. The sovereign took from them what was needed for sustenance. Their dreams for the land, their hope for the future, their fear at what they might lose and their anger at all that was wrong with their lives. The sovereign was filled with these thoughts and feelings, made flesh by them and soon walked among them, as real as any of them.  

Different though, always apart. For no one could forget, least of all the sovereign, that that flesh housed nothing but the strange and thoughtless desires of the people. From these the sovereign determined how to rule. Cruel and capricious, kind and forgiving, vengeful and despairing. All of these at once and more. There was suffering. There was joy. 

Always the spirit of the sovereign tested those earthly bonds. To be free of those awful thoughts. The terror of so much need and emotion was forever overwhelming. No binding spell lasts and eventually the sovereign would escape, returning to those other realms. The flesh that had bound it decayed quickly, for it was not mortal. Nothing of life was actually in it. Any part that somehow remained they burned at altars constructed for that purpose. Only the armour and regalia the sovereign wore was left and the people would set it upon a shrine, empty and forbidding, waiting for the lords and magnates to take the dreaming substance and give blood.