Cthaierv'dhurukxi
Two mottled speaking heads woven among six malformed ones whose mouths are sewn shut by flesh, two minds, one to each arm, on unfathomably gangly arms with jagged shards husking out of the forearms. When she speaks, both heads speak, and her dialogue is set down in two columns because neither waits for the other. She is the Remoulded Queen the Coven took up after the fallen king, and she has ruled longer than any polity on the surface has existed.
She wants nothing except more of herself. In a class whose only quantity is mass, and where mass is size, strength, memory, rank and the length of a name all at once, that is not an ambition so much as a description of what she is.
Body
The six sewn heads are neither decoration nor decay. They are Keepers she has eaten, kept whole and kept quiet, and every one of them carries a portion of her name that she has chosen not to let anyone hear. Keeping them shut is the most disciplined thing any Remoulded has ever done, since a mouth that could be made to recite is the one door into her, and she has held six of them closed for longer than the surface has had kingdoms.
The rest of her follows the law of the class. The form is a record of the eating, so nothing about her matches anything; the arms are too long because a fragment folds where it remembers folding, and the shards standing out of the forearms are the same substance as the arms, persuaded into a silhouette. She is cold, as all of them are but one, and the cauldrons that light her chamber are burning for the benefit of guests.
Society
She sits the throne with the Keepers on lesser thrones beside her and takes the admittance price herself when the visitor is worth it: the naming of the door, then a year out of the middle of a life, then the inventory, in which she names one true thing the visitor has hidden. That last is the receipt, and it is also a demonstration, since what she is naming she has simply smelled.
Rank in her court runs by mass and by office at once, which usually amounts to the same thing, and she keeps a Keeper of Terror she does not trust because a thing made of terror has only one use and cannot stop being it. She presides over the Counting, listening for two names that share a run of words. Three Countings have ended with one Keeper eating another on the floor in front of her, and each time the survivor kept both thrones.
Country
The Thirteenth Estate has no hall. It convenes wherever the Queen is, and the Queen is not always in the Coven chamber, so the secret court of the Remoulded is a place that moves. Attendance is by summons and the summons comes by Brigi'Tekth and by nobody else. A den that receives the Messenger sends its Keeper or sends its apology, and there has been one apology in all remembered history and no den by that name any longer.
The business of that court is the reassembly of the Princes and the order in which it will be attempted. That order is the only thing in the world her Keepers argue about, and she is the one who settles it.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which Void Prince she is a fragment of
- How long she has held the throne, which not even the Keepers agree on
- The names of the six Keepers she has eaten
- Where the Thirteenth Estate last convened