Pale Mistress

THE PALE MISTRESS

Religion

In the religion of An-Teng, the Pale Mistress is known as the Devourer and the Destroyer. She is everything their master the Golden Lord is not… she is darkness where he is light, destroyer where he is protector, chaotic where he is ordered. Some theologians speak of her as the God of An-Teng’s Destruction, though those with access to the archives of Heaven note no such position exists within the Celestial Bureaucracy.

The people of An-Teng fear the Pale Mistress rather than venerating her. She is seen as the patron of the criminal, the rebel, the person who seeks to rise above their station, the one who longs for revenge no matter the cost to family, the killer who revels in violence. The Tengese rarely pray to the Pale Mistress directly, but like the Golden Lord their society itself is shaped to make her offerings… traditions weigh and guide Tengese response to pain, to chaotic feelings, to choice along paths defined to worship the Mistress. They know she is a necessary part of life, as is what she represents,

The Pale Mistress does not have temples and priests but empty shrines, most often built at crossroads, in empty places abandoned by the living, around the borders of dread Shadowlands.

Appearance

The Pale Mistress is known to walk across An-Teng in material form, destroying those whom she finds. It is said that she can readily found upon the shores of the Shore Land walking through the surf on nights lit by the moon. She is a massive creature, standing 30ft tall, bloated and grotesque, breasts and clawed hands hanging nearly to the ground. Her coarse hair, silver-white, lies matted across her face, concealing all except her massive maw, filled with sharp teeth and drooling foul ichors.

But her form is sometimes mutable, perhaps by her whims and perhaps by some unknown plan: sometimes she appears as a pale elephant, gaping wounds gangrenous where it once had tusks. Sometimes she appears as a pallid monkey, silver-white fur pushed to shed by growing blisters. Sometimes she is seen as a wounded and sickly hound, alone on the road as if abandoned by its master. And sometimes she appears as a pale Tengese woman clad in torn robes, blindness revealed by the silver cloth wrapped about her eyes, strange scars to be seen tracing up from the hems of her clothes. Whatever her form, her hair remains silver-white… white hair is seen as an ill omen in An-Teng because of this.

Worship

The Tengese offer direct prayers to the Pale Mistress under three circumstances. The first is when they are afraid: they pray to her so that she will stay away from their families and villages, and keep chaos and disorder away with her. The second is when they feel driven to break the bonds of their tradition and society: she is called on to afflict terrible illnesses upon rivals and oppressors, to render straying lovers blind and barren, to devour those above in the line of succession. She sometimes seems to answer such prayers and sometimes not, but those who pray to her get some satisfaction from their act of cruel rebellion.

The third prayer offered to the Pale Mistress is a more complex ritual, calling upon her to descend and destroy ghosts and undead creatures who threaten the Tengese. This she seems to do with eager glee, devouring them whole.

Those whose prayers for ill upon others are granted, and those dead she devours, are thought to have their souls forever taken from the light of the Golden Lord and the cycle of reincarnation, instead joining the Pale Mistress as Kaleyi, strange skeletal monkey spirits who follow the Mistress as she walks, chittering to the sound of unseen iron gongs.

Sanctum

The coast of An-Teng is riddled with sea caves that riddle interconnected along its entire length. Hidden entrances behind rocky outcrops or below water allow access within, though those who do face doom indeed, for within resides the Pale Mistress and her Kaleyi attendants.

The Challenge of Chaos

In the First Age, the Solar Exalt Shining Righteous Word An-Teng had been remade, reshaped, its very nature defined and codified as the first step on the road to a peace that would span all Creation for all time. But the matter was incomplete… while the majority accepted a placid existence, large numbers seemed to resist… they did not accept their role, they attempted to rise above their stations or to decry the actions of their betters. They engaged in crime, in violence, in rebellion, and where one person took such a path more seemed to follow. That could not be allowed.

So Shining Righteous Word searched for a solution. He spoke long with his fellow Solar Exalts, and with Lytek God of Exaltations, and many told him that his difficulties were inherent to humanity, a spark of potential that simply could not be bred or charmed out of the population. Another solution would be needed.

Shining Righteous Word turned then to the Sidereal Exalted. Caretakers of Fate and advisors to those who ruled, surely their methods could be used to identify aberrant minds and potential so it could be pushed out. Sidereal mathematicians accepted the commission with confidence, calculating a predictive formula to identify those who would reject the ordered society the Solar had built. Righteous Word employed the formula to guide purges… but the results were imperfect. The explanations from the Sidereals were many and varied… margins of errors and difficulties caused by Solar vacationers foremost amongst them (some even suggesting the presence of the creator himself was root cause of the issue!). Righteous Word had little interest in mathematical theories or excuses: his advisors had failed to deliver on their promises. From that time on, in meetings of the Exalted Host in Meru and dinners with Solar tourists visiting his domain, Shining Righteous Word was there to laugh down every bit of Sidereal advice to the Solar Exalted… their vaunted powers could not even correctly govern a single country, they had no relevance to the actions of the superior Solar Exalts! An-Teng’s status as vacation destination meant Righteous Word had much opportunity to speak on such matters with his peers, a fact that became an increasing threat to the positions of Sidereal viziers as the First Age wore on.

Righteous Word then began to delve into more esoteric theories. His Lunar mate, who had been made into a partner in his pantheon and champion in the pruning of An-Teng, spoke that chaos and savagery were a part of Creation, and perhaps his course of driving them out was the wrong one. Hearing such words, Righteous Word experienced a revelation.

The Silver Bride

The Lunar mate of Shining Righteous Word was Pale Blossom, a girl born in An-Teng as it was in the first throes of transformation into the Solar’s peaceful paradise. Having taken sick as a newborn, Blossom was left cursed by blindness and a sickly constitution. There was little support for such a girl from her family, but she tried her best to assist and learn what she could about how to survive without sight.

Her Exaltation took her when she became lost one year as her family fled their village during a vicious attack from a neighbouring tribe … she was abandoned, falling into a river to be swept away, deposited deep in the jungle. Though few had considered a blind, ill girl to have much hope, she clung to life, navigating as best she could through the wilderness even as hunger gnawed and predators began to stalk. She continued to push on, even as her last strength faded, and it was then that she was surrounded by silver light and taken into the embrace of Luna.

A native of An-Teng, Pale Blossom was at first a fervent supporter of her Solar husband’s vision for peace and order… the suffering of her own life had come due to lack of social bonds and outbreaks of violence, and sitting amongst the Exalted Host she could see the pain inflicted on the land when foolish mortals rose in occasional rebellion against the righteous rule of the Chosen. She occupied a place in her husband’s pantheon, perhaps subordinate but perhaps vital, Luna to his Sol. Righteous Word came to believe that in order to defeat chaos in his society, he needed to co-opt it, and Pale Blossom increasingly became the theological vehicle for such efforts, which achieved some but not total success… she was the refuge for those who felt wronged by tradition and society, for those in pain who sought succour, and prayer to her would see wrongs corrected and pains eased.

But this valve for chaos too proved imperfect in the eyes of Righteous Word. Chaos still seemed to persist, and so he sought solutions of more extreme nature. Faulty Sidereal formulae were employed and adapted by Solar intellect, and Pale Blossom was tasked with ‘pruning’ An-Teng of those identified as potential agents of disorder… through evoking fear in them, and then as centuries wore on increasingly by way of murder. Pale Blossom accepted such a role first as a necessity, and then as the will of her mate, but grew increasingly vocal in disagreement as time wore on. Disorder was harmful when dominant, but it was a part of life after all, and perfect order was not the proper way of things. As the Lunar Exalted themselves blended order to chaos and in so doing strengthened Creation, Righteous Word ought embrace some uncontrolled elements if he was to make an ideal society.

Righteous Word nodded and paid little attentions to the mewlings of a subordinate, for what wisdom could the Chosen of Luna possibly offer the true masters of Creation? No, the ideal society required order that was absolutely perfect. And, if the traditions imposed were perfect, the population bred carefully to expunge the rebel mind, and the right behaviours encouraged both with reward and punishment for failure, there needed to be a reason chaos continued to arise. The answer seized by word was the soul.

The soul, after all, was free of his breeding programs and his social influence, flying off to reincarnate upon death without chance at correction or occasionally taking shape as ghostly reflection. The bulk of the populace was obedient and pliant, so the bulk of souls too must be fit for life, but a minority were perhaps not… chaotic souls continually reincarnating back into the children of his perfect society and bringing their chaos with them. Perfection would not be complete, Creation would not have the peace he so desired, so long as such souls continued to be reborn. They needed to be stopped.

The study of Necromancy had already made great strides, but Righteous Word was for from Creation’s greatest expert. Yet, he had long studied the manipulation of the spirit, had mastered the craft with the binding of the god Goukaen into the geomancy of the Pinnacle of Mercy. With religion he could convince even the chaotic amongst the Tengese that their souls would be ghosts upon demise, and once in that shape he could sieze them and chain them away from ever returning to newborn bodies. Creation would slowly be cleansed, until only orderly souls remained.

When approached about this grand plan, Pale Blossom did not agree to play her part: the plan was abhorrent, mad, surely Righteous Word could see the flaws in such a vision. When he refused to see reason, she turned to outsiders, but found no succour… Righteous Word was owed great favours by Swan Dragon, divine censor of the South, and no gods would speak against the Solar. Most of the elders in the Solar Deliberative knew Righteous Word and were grateful for the domain of perfect peace he offered them for relaxation… so long as his experiment was confined to An-Teng, they offered not condemnation but support for a project that would make their vacationing even more perfect. Some amongst the Sidereal Exalted spoke out, for they were not friends with Righteous Word, but most kept silent in public, able to offer Pale Blossom only private words of support else risk losing their remaining influence in Meru. Only amongst the Lunar Exalted did Blossom find much agreement, but their was little they could do against the decisions of their Solar spouses.

Returning from her efforts, Pale Blossom found her husband absorbed with the work of reshaping captured souls so they might be kept from reincarnation, their desperate prayers to their Gold and Silver gods echoing through the sea caves in which she had shaped her private residence, now transformed into a charnel house. Pale Blossom could not allow this horror to be, and so she moved against her husband. The bond between them strained at her mind, the power of an elder Solar Exalt in battle was undeniable, but Pale Blossom two was of the Exalted and would not be turned away.

The two fought amongst the sea caves, an epic struggle between great beings which left both strained and injured. But Righteous Word was not alone, and as they at last burst to the surface through the surf, his ally Daring Flame, greatest archer of the First Age, let loose an arrow from his mighty bow, lit with his great power, striking down Pale Blossom.

When Pale Blossom regained herself, she knew that she was lessened… the world was dark and cold, the glow of Luna gone from her heart. And yet the prayers of An-Teng’s people to their Pale Mistress still echoed in her mind. She was dead, but had not passed on, and bound by her former husband to the task she had died fighting against.

She survived the Usurpation, for as An-Teng requires a Golden Lord it requires a Pale Mistress, and though she had no love of Sidereal or Dragonblooded she cackled as they smashed the armies of Shining Righteous Word and sometimes joined the Usurpers on the field… she was accepted thereafter without challenge.

The Pale Mistress cannot speak, and so cannot convey to the remaining Lunar Exalted what occurred to her… her shard passed on as it ought, becoming the mad Lunar child Raksi, and the Chosen of Luna had little time to think her anything but dead until they were forced to flee to Creation’s edges. The time of present chaos has seen some begin to return, and the consequences should truth be uncovered are unknown.

The Truth of What Is

The Pale Mistress is a ghost like no other in Creation, for her nature is shaped by bonds imposed upon her by the Solar who was then the Golden Lord. She has been bound to An-Teng, unable to leave by her very nature… and her bond is to the concept of the land, so as it has shrunk over the millennia so too has her range. Her power is immense next to that of most ghosts, save the greatest of their number and the Deathlords, but she has no place in the politics of the Underworld for her bond to An-Teng is a bond to a land of Creation… she is unable to pass into the Underworld, nor into Shadowlands when they are aligned with that place at night… that barrier denies her the place to which her nature is now attuned, and even denies her chance to move on into Lethe or Oblivion. When the Unconquered Sun sits in the sky, she hides amidst the darkness of the Shore Land’s sea caves. As with any ghost, she is unable to regain Essence in Creation, and since she is unable to leave Creation her only source of essence are the prayers of the Tengese. Her nature also bars her from being able to enter temples or consecrated grounds of the Golden Lord.

Not a god, the Pale Mistress remains recipient of great prayer, and is able to hear clearly and locate the source through Spinal Orascience Nodes implanted while she lived and fused into her corpus as grave goods.

The Pale Mistress devours those whose prayers she answers, and devours ghosts whom she is called to expel. Forged into her very being, this act of consuming transforms the victim soul into a Kaleyi ghost-spirit. Perhaps the Pale Mistress revels in this at times, but it is a compulsion not a choice... some Underworld savants have thought the Night Mother Dolls found occasionally in the Underworld originate from the hands of the Pale Mistress, sorrowful memorials to the children whose souls she has transformed into monkey-spirits.