Old things from old blog

Childsborne Coronet
Half-again big as a human’s head crown of small bones bound with reddenblack iron. In black heatless flame and embossed on the inwardside band of the crown are the words “EXARCH AETR”. The flame is inextinguishable.

Imbues you with the Passion: “Children are objects to be used and exploited.”

Purpose: To command children - to separate them from their flesh-parents and to unite them

• Minor: Imbues in all children who see you a Passion of love towards you and of hatred towards their flesh-parents. After a week without seeing you, it wears off. Its Rank is equal to the Rank of your Passion.
• Significant: Produces a Delusion in all children of yourself as a shining, benevolent fathermother-figure - soft edges and warm lights. Its intensity is equal to the intensity of your Passion.
• Major: The development of all children subject to the effects of the crown is arrested permanently - they will die when they would have had they aged normally.

Impressions: When you touch the crown, you see (Roll 1d4):

1. Several thousand broken children littering a battlefield. They cry and scream pathetically. Carrion birds circle and the sky is wet with tears.
2. At the borders of a settlement, carts of food are brought forth from the left and children wearing blindfolds from the right. The settlers look thin and very tired.
3. A house, and then a man falls backwards out the door. A girl around age 7 leaps onto his chest and beats him round the head til he stops moving. Not once does he hit back. She sees you there and runs into your arms.
4. Children dancing in half-light around a man wearing the crown. He is howling and sobbing. He commanded them to do this.

THE BEARER OF THE CROWN - IN THE BLACK FOREST OF LUNACY

Beneath the illusion he is a small, ugly man with long gangly limbs, broken fingernails and a mask carved of wood. He will not remove the mask. He commands the children in elaborate plays dramatising small moments of disappointment and rejection from his childhood in oblique symbolism. Naked children in bright colours tumble cross stone floors in dust and torch-crackle, and one painted black with charcoal weeps alone in a corner. A young boy pretends to be trampled - thin wiry girls with high shoulders on stilts leaping to and fro, burning with play and significance. He is tormented by sexual desire for them which he refuses to act on. He demands they wear masks at all times. A child with downcast head stands at the edge of pit teeming with tiny girls, brunettes with freckles some, showered with petals. Wilted flower in left hand and crucifix broken in right, and a wilted dove taxidermied to a mask through which wings he sees always. He has a particular love for the leading-role boys, who are lavished with fruit-honey feasts gathered from the above. Time no longer matters to the children - they are steeped in the eternal time of play and ritual. It tends to be night.