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And The Stars Flicker Low
Lord of Death
Creature of the Perfected Principle of Consumption
In the North East of Creation the Winter Solstice has a special significance and is celebrated, commemorated with feasting and sacrifice. Towns and cities gathered within their great stone halls while the storms rage without and the dark draws near. Raising cups of strong beer before a roaring fire, their brows splattered with boar's blood. Drinking to the spirits of the land and begging their blessing on this, the longest night of the year. These grotesque displays are heresy to the Immaculate, an obscene heterodoxy. But these cold lands, these broken coasts and iron seas, have always been slow to accept subjugation and slower still to abandon tradition. It is a practice born of necessity: remembrance is the oldest form of devotion and in that snowy hell all too often it is faith alone that saves, faith alone that spares. The ancient stories can not, must not, be forgotten. So sing the song, strike the steps of the dance, listen now to the tale of Suncrow and the Genocide Grammar. Understand, as the last light dims and the speaker starts, as black clouds sweep across the sky and the whole world turns blue: the details may change but this was never their fault. It was never within their control. This was never their sin.
In the era before this let us say there lived two young men, citizens of the directorate, denizens of the Shogunate. Two lives in the unceasing multitudes. One born of the sun, godblooded with solar fire in his veins. The scion of a Golden Lord perhaps, a Lawgiver who eluded the purges, or one of the dieties of flame or fertility that ascended to manage the affairs of a derelict Incarna. It doesn't matter, every story shifts to suit the teller's needs. Let us suffice to say he was dutiful, loyal, and loved by all for his virtue, his valor, his prowess. The other a face in the crowd, blurred out and barely glimpsed at the fringes, forgotten in a moment. A single drop in the seething sea of humanity, known by only a few, loved by only one. Can you imagine how tightly he clung to that love? Desperately, mutely, in agonized silence and trembling awe. Scratching at his own skin in the stillness of the early morning, as if he could tear something beautiful out of his body, something worth the one gift the world had given him.
It's not a new story. We've been here a thousand times before. Station, obligation, and the bitter taste of broken things. A brain like shattered glass grinding against itself and the fear of losing what little you have. There are reasons, there are always reasons, why people hold their tongues and strangle their heart's potential. Hunger pangs are a special kind of pain.
Strike the hour, now the Contagion walks! Its body ten million plague-dead. Its breath pestilence itself. With every step it shakes the earth. In the impression of its footprints something black and wretched bubbles up, a spring from alien depths. In some versions of the story the other is unwillingly abandoned, his dear friend lifted to heaven by Celestial Lions as he cries out, reaching over their gleaming shoulders. In some he is betrayed, cut loose with the rest of a diseased, dying world, as his love turns his back on his outstretched hand. Different contexts, different stories, the only constant is his end. Drowning on his own bloody breath as he lies alone, buried beneath blankets. Closing his eyes to dream of arms around his chest.
He falls. He falls all the way down, borne on a river of weeping souls and naked, freshly shorn spirits still ignorant of their own ends. He lands at the very bottom of the world, a broken thing. Unburied, unmourned, unwanted, unloved. He tried to crawl, dragging himself through the Labyrinth muck, through the filth, like he could scale the sides of the pit itself. Like he could find his way out and climb all the way back to Heaven, to the home of the gods, to where his sun sat waiting, weeping. Can you understand the things that found him instead? The nightmares that burrowed into him, the contaminants collecting over his skin in an oil slick. There are fractures as the Ages flip, residual errors as the Loom resets. Compiling, compounding upon themselves as static values drift, minor deviations magnifying into greater distortions, the divine equations spitting out garbage data. Floating upon the sea of chaos the great world-station shudders, compromised bulkheads and protective fields buckling under the pressure without, subsumed by the cancer within. The immaculate design has been corrupted! Witnesses the corpses and superstructure unwinding, slow-unspooling in great banners of ash and sparkling dust. Witness the malignancy that hisses and spits, flowing on strange gravities. He became a malignancy. He drunk of the black waters and bathed in the waste heat of rotting galaxies. As he starved he ate of the shadowed cities, fallen into the Labyrinth like meteors. Anything to not be alone. Anything to not be empty. Anything to not be forgotten.
Can you imagine the kind of thing he became?
In the deep there is a great chamber where golden kings sit in repose, surrounded by their treasures and their slaves. An amphitheater of skeletons and silence, the barrows above cored out from below. Rank upon rank of thrones descending tier by tier to a pit, a pool as large as any lake. Something within stirs, staring up at the grand painting splashed across the massive domed ceiling. A night sky disfigured beyond recognition. A tainted, filthy Heaven half overgrown with glistening tendrils.
Mark him: constrained by golden armor molten and fused to the body beneath, golden fangs as much muzzle as a maw; crowned in seven tines, seven horns bursting from his brow. Mark him, a liquid shadow, black waters- no, something thicker than water, something worse than shadow, something pulsing and visceral slick twisted in the deep-chested shape of a dragon. Mark him and his great ragged wings, with each beat the stars above gutter, dancing like a candle in a hurricane gale; washed out and distorted by the dead sun halo that hangs behind him.
And The Stars Flicker Low would fell the poles to bring Heaven lower. He would claw down Yu Shan's gates just to see his beloved again. He would drop all Creation into the abyss just to wrap his wings around it, coil himself about it, tail touched the tip of his snout so he would never be alone again. So that he could sleep and dream of an eternity of care and devotion.
And The Stars Flicker Low as Liege: His murmurs twist and stain the world: a shout would shatter your skull into a bouquet of writhing tentacles, a roar would ruin you beyond all repair. Written words and directed visions drip with cephalopod ink, the very air around him shuddering with the strain of holding back the feverdream fractures. The most he can manage is a whisper and even those crawl through the cracks of the world like living things. Squirming out of dreams and death rattles and long rusted Shogunate prayer-wires. Pouring themselves into your ear to impart orders and direction.
Out of the many and varied Deathlords As The Stars Flicker Low is one of those more fascinated by the living world, content to gather followers and found great cults purely for their own sake, in much the same way a child constructs castles out of toy blocks and imagines themselves an emperor. For this reason he detests the depredations of the Lover and her Tear Drinker tribes while glaring at the Mask of Winters with something like sullen envy. He has within his grasp a full Circle of Abyssal Exaltations and urges his chosen to involve themselves heavily in the affairs of the North East. He is a generous patron, within his body are entire kingdoms captured in nightmare skeins, manses and demenses and lost treasures torn from the Labyrinth and swallowed whole. He plucks them free and grafts them into the fabric of the Underworld as gifts to the loyal. Above all he craves the love of the beloved and the adoration of the adored, and only, grudgingly, tolerates the stealthy and sly if they have appropriately impressive legends about them.
Samjok-o, Grand Duke of Sundowner Winds and the Summer Solstice
Diety of the Sixth Rank
Bureau of Seasons/North-East Directorate
His offices are of fire and fertility, heat and the Summer harvest. His is the longest day of the year, given over almost wholly to the sun's golden rays. The night shrinking upon itself, the tides of darkness running out to sea,. All its creatures retreating to their sunken havens; cowering as their victims cower, praying for the swift passage of time, for survival til nightfall. He is one of a bevy of lesser gods who have found themselves shouldering something of the Sol Invictus's mantle and thus is honored and respected beyond his station, a recognition of the solemn charge that lays upon him. Yet where there should be passion, a fierce, roaring flame there are only ashes and so many embers. The man himself is dispassionate verging on perpetually disinterested. A salaryman, no stranger to sleeping at his desk, to the kind of self-sacrifice the slow ascent up the hierarchy demands. Mortals drain cups of mead and slaughter calves on his feastday and he carefully records the amount of Ambrosia earned, skimming no more than is appropriate. Soldiers pray for his blessing as blades of dry grass are crushed under booted feet and the opposing battle line nears, mothers and fathers for conception as the sun slips below the horizon and they draw the door shut behind them. He surveys the work of his underlings, those younger, hungrier gods that staff his division, and checks them for errors. Allowing no more deceit than is deserved. Forwarding reports to his superiors where they lay largely unread.
It doesn't really matter. He drags others up with him on that long, plodding climb up the flanks of Heaven's hierarchy and so others are content to see him rise even higher. Impeccable webs of contacts and favors and professional friendships spiderweb out with him at the center, threading through the Bureau of Seasons, the Aerial Legions, and the gods of the North-East.
But still...for all his success they still whisper about him. Human born, bastard of some shamefaced worthy who rescued him from a ruined North. His mother entombed in the mausoleums of Gens Adamhach. His father unknown. Human born, mortal half fed to the fires of apotheosis, soul running like candlewax in the forge's heat. He does what is demanded, what is obligated with only the barest hint of false enthusiasm. Skin back the layers: at night he drinks until the flames that roll off his tongue burn blue with the fumes. At night he finds lovers who care not to dally with the dawn. It's a kind of anesthesia, a sort of chemical numbing. Not quite happiness but an absence of pain as he rises and washes, readying himself for another day at the office. And in the end who can begrudge him that? There are far worse vices in the halls of Heaven after all. And he is a reserve officer of the Aerial Legion himself, called to muster many times as the Age of Sorrows wears on. Who would deny a veteran his occasional escape? The temporary obliteration of so many terrible memories? It'd be a cruel soul indeed.
The truth is Samjok-o works with no end goal in mind. He desires the Games only in the abstract sense, offering him some measure of final relief, a way to be freed of the guilt for surviving the Contagion, the Crusade, where so many others died. For being spared when almost everyone else loved he loved perished in such pain. A way for it to end without admitting defeat. It's inevitable that he hears the old stories now and then, something so very like his tale told in the depths of howling winter. They and only they crack and fracture that cold mask. Driving him sometimes to rise and stands at the window of his office, talons tap tap tapping against the pane of crystal as he looks out over the Yu-Shan skyline. The past is a dead land. Let it lie.
Panoply and Sanctum: Samjok-o's features are hidden behind a complex crow mask of wood and golden lacquer. A dozen separate segments mimicking the expressions below, the false face affixed with seven softly glowing nails embedded in his skull. Feathers in shades of scarlet and orange are threaded through backswept blonde hair, the eyes that peer out from the holes of the mask a poisonous yellow. His body is a soldier's body, tanned by sunlight, shaped by years of practiced archery and left bare by the colorful waist wrap that is his sole article of clothing. His treasures are three: a great bow of Igdrazil Ash, the darts it hurls carrying with them the hot, dry winds that are his dominion, scorching the world with Summer's wrath. The ritual tattoos that lovingly trace the harder lines of his anatomy, outlining the muscle in crimson and copper. Shrouding him in heat and bringing forth plenty around him. And lastly the mask itself which gives him authority over vast flights of the three legged suncrow elementals. Commanding them as servants and levies.
The Grand Duke's sanctum is a vast aerie. Constant winds bringing cool air through the high vaulted halls. Shifting paints depicting a sky at dusk across the ceiling, all lovely blacks and rich reds. The man himself rarely resides here, leaving the estate instead to the care of his large and once dispossessed staff. It's his one concession to having a heart.
