The summer festival of Nimium had come upon us so quickly it approached the surreal when dusk came into view. At this level of the city you could easily take in the spectral light, which would eventually announce itself in full darkness. All around there were casks of any manner of drink, and an equal number of merchants screaming for us to take a liking to some bauble. Everything was free in this part of the city on the night of Nimium, yet tradition often has its subtleties.

We are encouraged to donate our weight in gold coins to anything we pluck off the side of the road that takes our eye. This can become a dangerous affair when there is any manner of mind-altering things lying about for use. It had always been foolish, there were no prices posted yet to pay too little was a horrific offense.

I dreamt romantically about not being wealthy, though I certainly would not like to live such a fanciful thought out. Having my father's wealth has cursed me with the fact that I don’t really need to consider much at all. So while I may dream about many things, I really do not think about anything quite seriously. Actions do not mean anything anymore, a thought occurs, you act upon it. The idea of consequence only holds weight over those who can't afford its toll.

And truly, this was not a night where consequences tugged at the edge of any man’s mind. Just over the stands there were guiltless and freely chuckling men hanging over the ivied wall. They held sacks of spores and gazed slack at the towers above. They weren't particularly concerned with the consequence of anything, only what shape the next masked nobleman would take. One of the giddy men had already taken a tumble earlier when a macabre mask had floated on by.

Many of the face-coverings donned by noblemen and merchants were worth as much as a horse drawn carriage. Some of the more ornate ones were worked upon since the day following the last festival. Craftsmen bought homes; fed their children from making these works. I had one fashioned by a notable craftsman, I had wanted it to be an exact likeness of my face. It would have been taken as a humorous satire of the old tradition. Strong jawed, beautifully burnished red hair, and a sensible aquiline nose. Yes, an aquiline nose, that is what a woman I had met many festivals ago had said about a nose like mine. I was the picture of sharp edges and masculine definition all around. Yet alas this “expert” craftsmen must have been working with some vile combination of chemicals. The mask had shown something closer to a hopeless deformed child of the Moans.

The man must have been some sort of trickster or amatuer, even though he had come recommended to me quite highly. Whatever the matter, it was necessary to carry on without a mask. in any event it would make me seem as if I was above it all. No need to hide your face to debauch amongst all the others. I am carrying out my vices barefaced all the same. I had only enjoyed a small amount to drink, though I was focusing too much on the cobblestones and laughing too freely at my company’s bland joke.

“Bevyn, you lean over anymore you might tilt off the edge of the continent.” I pivoted sharply on the heel and there was an insufferably drunken grin gashed into Dremm’s hideous face. He was a sagging human, he consistently looked like his bones were never made to support his various folds and soft outlinings. His skeleton was likely in a dire state of discomfort at all hours of the day, especially when Dremm had been drinking ale, which was frequent. He was brazenly trying to debase me in front of Iona but it did not bother me as much as I’m sure he hoped.

“Well I would be as sober as you, if I had all of your fat to soak up these pints of ale my heavy friend.” Dremm chuckled nervously at this and glanced over at Iona who gave a violent snort. He offered no response because he knew his place amongst our circle, of that I am sure. His father was obscenely rich, but if that was true the scholars would have to draft a new word for the wealth my father held.

Iona chided us for being somewhat cruel to one another in her tranquil voice. She was foreign born, something normally that I would have been disgusted by in a partner. Yet her beauty was so overwhelming she could have been one of the Elisus and I would have been infatuated by her. She did not outwardly appear to be interested in me, but that fact was attributed to her not being as in tune with our customs. Her eyes had flitted away from our drink-tinted faces where ahead the column of merrymakers were beginning to tighten. They swelled and congregated around the foot of the palace's beginnings.

The scents filtering into our faces was that of a corrupt feast, the fragrance of a hundred expensive wines and honey-brewed mead. With any inhalant imaginable casting a dusky secretion over the night’s wind. Bags of mind-altering fruits were being shaken around in a manic rhythm that only someone whose mind sat in another world could achieve. The dark heat was akin to a pottery kiln warmed entirely by the breath of passerby. It would have been repulsive if I had not had anything to drink, spirits have a way of drawing out the unpleasant jagged edges of our senses.

Beyond this grimey film of air there laid the bed of the castle doors, and in front of it erected a mammoth wooden statue. It nearly brushed the parapet of the entrance, a structure designed to prevent even siege towers from overcoming its scale. The true beginning of Nimium was near. The rabble are all almost suspended in time with their gaze bolted to the base of the wooden goliath. Verdant reeds and drier strips of wood were interlaced to form a robe of sorts at the bottom of the model. Rising up into an oppressive figurine who glowered down at all of the noblemen. This only made the moments leading up to this wooden creatures immolation more enjoyable. Annually the masks, the styles, the noblemen all may change - but the statue never did.

Every changing of the seasons, there he stood built-up waiting to be slowly gnawed upon by the oil-fed fire. His still gaze while initially livening the crowd had caused many now to go silent, and this was the time without fail that the royal envoy would appear. The crowd likely was being monitored, as when the din slowly ebbed out of the courtyard the gates began to shudder. Its own weight led the metal to seem as if it were visibly humming upon its splitting. Bursting forth was an arrow of guardsmen clad in the same cobalt-sheened metal as the monumental gate. The weight of their boots embracing the cobblestone together likely should have cracked the street in half for all its noise. Blabbering drunk noble men jolted backwards as the battalion progressed further.

The metallic troops were followed by a man with the most ornate mask that I had glimpsed tonight, inlaid with gemstones completely lined down a hawks beak. The masked grin beneath the protruding nose was also filled sparelessly with obscene riches. Suddenly I felt very naked - that is until I saw the ministry member flanking him. He bore no mask save for the customary headgear of the Interior Ministry.

A decidedly uncomfortable looking strip of stone fastened upon the brow. It had always been laughable, it looked like a visor made of pumice, the headgear certainly could not have served much purpose. He was so still in the face he may as well have been sleeping if his eyes were not open to the width of metal bolts. The minister bizarrely brushed his hand across the back of the other man's shoulder, and the man started as if a sickle had rended his skin.

Upon jolting forward he removed his mask, and as I had suspected, it was the High King of Malamus. The crowd let out a collective gasp, as it was customary to feign surprise when the King removed his false visage on this night. He smiled with a contentedness only those of us with enough money could possibly manage, and began a satisfied and drawn out breath.

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“Well, what beautiful creatures I see tonight bathed in the torchlight.” He had a habit of speaking in what he thought were poetic sentences, but only displayed the barest understanding of the art. Nonetheless he appeared satisfied at every turn of his words.

“A most jovial night is the night of Nimium, baubles and brocades, merriment and mischief.” The crowned man grinned with wine-stained teeth, it appeared even royalty could not escape such a vice.

“No one is want for food or drink I certainly hope, for the burning in effigy is about to begin! Every eve of this bountiful occasion the wooden feature seems to brush its splintered head amongst the clouds and even higher by the years! But let us not forget what the stacks of ligneous limbs rest upon; my dear nobles and coin counters!” There was a bewildered glancing around at each attendant, myself included.

A quiet muttering ensued, with the hesitance to admit confusion amongst peers. “Of course I am talking about those noble creatures that inhabited this plain before time had thought of entering the doorway of our day, the Elisus!” A half-step of silence invaded the space sharply. Then suddenly there was raucous laughter that peeled away into the dank city air, fluttering down into the lower tiers of the rounded kingdom. “Please my friends, forgive me a king's attempt at humor, it is simply hard to find at court.”

“Minister Corrum, while I do dabble in the art of wordsmithing, you have a much greater clarity in language, you may take over from here, I will spare you all my musings for another day.” The minister appeared to have grimaced beneath his stone, an expression I thought was odd in men who were supposed to be quite cured of emotion. Across Corrum’s face there was a gull's shadow of disgust, almost concealed in the form of its size, but certainly bared out for some to see. He stepped forth past the King's envoy, and began to speak,

“On this night we are in our rare state of a joyous vigil, not often do we burn a thing in effigy or breathe words concerning someone dead, and believe it wise to drink and whore until the winter sun lays on our sills. This night is a rare indulgence indeed, that should be the way of things, indulgence made common ceases to be itself..” The royal relations surrounding the king began to glance worriedly around. Minister Corrum trailed off and cleared his throat for a moment. Nearly every event I had witnessed the Minister attempted to turn into a wrathful sermon that approached discomfort.

“Our enjoyment this night is always to be held as a gift, a gift afforded to us by those that had slain the heretical creature that looms above us at a horrendous height.”

Leering over worryingly at the height of a million stacked pewter pints was the likeness of See’act, the sheer heart of misfortune, if misfortune lived here with us tonight in flesh. Thousands of winters ago or thousands of drunken feasts ago - my preferred measure of time- he inhabited an unrecognizable world that was still unquestionably on this spit of land. “When parts of the land were still sleeping in the sea, when the mountains were born and then scrubbed down by so many days, others had walked the dirt freely like we do now. They worshipped like heathens, not answering to any god but the million creatures that inhabited the forests, the stars and deep. See’act was the father of those worshippers who propped up the city that lays beneath our foundations, so he will stand every year for us and light our new city in his glow ”.

The cheering was a slurry of joy and vehement cursing, muddied by sudden rousing trumpets far above on a battlement. Through the cacophony the sound of moving metal came as the soldiers bisected, and a lone man appeared. One of the Elisus, or at least a descendant separated by many miles of time.

It was a great honor to be part of the ceremony, one was randomly selected each year through a drawing. They were paid five copper coins all at once. Typically the most an Elisus could make if they had arranged payment at all was one Cowrie per month, the law was not known to yielding in Malamus. It was quite strange in many ways how men were so adept at operating on difference. If you had looked at an Elisus too casually there may have been nothing different at all about them; quite strange indeed. Two almost inconsequential lumps on either side of the forehead was what created a division wider than the Backahast River to the North. Another ridiculous remnant from the past, it was said that the ancestor of this man cowering amongst the soldiers, this ancestor who now stood in effigy above us, had made that river.

The servants and wetnurses told of See’act who brokered a deal with a giant spectral horse, nearing the end of a seemingly interminable war with our ancestors. See’act saddled this horse and led his heathen brethren across the land for hundreds of miles, from the Opaque Sea in the west to where we stand today. The horse’s giant hooves tore a monumental rut into the earth, and the blackened water from the Opaque Sea filtered in.

The width of the benighted water was such that boats had to be made to reach any of the Elisus, an apparently shocking moment for our people who had lived so far from the sea. If such magic ever truly existed, it appeared to be a spectacle worth very little, as wharfs and boats were enough to cross and enslave their people. Iron manacles appeared to be the ultimate remedy for ancient spellwork. It was not magic that won any war, it has always been science, wood and iron, men and grain - my father's words not mine.

There was a sense of pity in me I admit as I watched the man pressed forward with an oil-wetted branch of Thorn Tree. Trembling now amongst all of these smiling faces simply because his people had appeared out of air thousands of years passed. Yet if I were to bemoan circumstances in this city, I would be standing here until this castle decayed into the earth. This night was joyful, joy always out measures pity, pity is an itch across the brow in the face of joy.

Minister Corrum reached out and steadied the Elisus hand in a bizarrely gentle way. The torchbearer had made his way to the brazier at the base of the statue. The wood had been swaying back and forth as if the man holding it had been afflicted by falling sickness or Leafvein. The minister could be seen muttering something to the man, and it could never be known ifthey were words of comfort or insult. The man began to shake even more violently as if there were tremors in his very bloodstream. The wood was lowered with both the men's hands betwixt another. The flame greedily clasped the torch with that unmistakable bloom of noise that can only be oil catching.

The Minister then released the torch, shuffling slowly back. The man looked behind him with a mixture of helplessness and intense branding rage. It was a most peculiar combination. “You must be the one to do it, you know the bindings of tradition all too well.” The Minister smiled in a skilled fashion that was polite in the most unkind way.

The Elisus slowly turned back as though he expected there to be a freshly castle-forged blade rearing at him. Only the statue laid there dormant. The man tossed the torch at its feet, after all that hesitation it was rashness that is the only path. The wood caught in an arcane manner, the last bit of magic in the world emerging. The flames grew toward the upper shin, and the entire statue began to hum within a thin line of air buzzing with some potential.

The humming grew louder and louder still, until it was a ballad of unnatural heat. It defied description, yet nobleman always tried to describe it in ways of the world. The pieces that remained of the Elisus' world were evil, but certainly beyond our understanding. The statue began to shudder as if it were given breath, not simply because the structure began to weaken. It was brimming with some energy that we knew not of.

As the statue began to crumble, the legs falling before the flames could reach the head, the Welp Lights flowed out like snow the size of mother pearls. They were dancing furiously, people hollered with delight at this vestige of sorcery. The Whelp Lights dancing in patterns unknown to the natural world. This was the only time such bizarreness was not frowned upon in this city, I hate to say I enjoyed it. They were nearly blinding when cast against the stark frame of the sky. The eldritch light possessed a near chiming noise, coming into contact with one another and recoling with an otherworldly tune. They already began to recede and grow faint, filtering into the night sky as frozen rain in defiance of time.

They were gone as quickly as they had come. The crowd collectively sighed and looked down at the crumpled pile that had once been great. The torchbearer was now just a crying man at its base. Some more pensive and drunken men stayed for a while, looking longingly at the sky where they were moments ago. The blackened wood had cast a voluminous sheet over the district that they may have been peering through. Yet, all of the onlookers at some point walked back to their grey homes, away from the sobbing man and the ash - finally bored with it all.