The Queen's Madness

As old as it is, this one has spoilers for my campaign. My players best get out before they ruin things for themselves.

The old ones do not sleep or die, though to mortal eyes they do both. Their minds  dwell on higher planes, and for long aeons their bodies in the physical realm may seem to sleep. Indeed these bodies can, through great destructive power, be destroyed. But even the final annihilation of their body is not the death of the mind.

Her whole life, the Queen lived in a man’s world. Never anything more than a party favor, a festival attraction, a bargaining chip. Until she married the Prince. That was her first taste of real power. She could make anyone do anything, save the royal family. The Prince and his father always towered over her. When the Prince’s father died and she first took the title of Queen, her power grew. So did her desire to see no man command her. Some say she poisoned the Prince. All that’s known is that he died, and she was so beloved that the people demanded she continue to reign in his stead. And so she has. For a time, she enjoyed peace, finally ruling over her life as a man might. But with true Queendom came responsibility to foreign powers and with that came new ways of subjugation by men. This new way was the Church, whose God is a man, whose high clerics are men. The Church had attached itself to her land like a parasite, and in the tenth year of her reign it sucked its prey dry. The Church wanted to become the official religion of her realm, and the people wanted it too. The Queen accepted, as she must, lest she be deposed by chain and pyre. But she was not going to surrender power to these men with their holy water and their God. Through her Mathematician, she found a way to contact the old ones, and they instructed her how to become like them. She will bear a child, herself, into the world. The birth will kill her, but her consciousness will be reborn into her child. Even now she is undergoing the ritual. The madness gripping her city and the phantasms of her that seem to walk the palace are manifestations of this deep disturbance of the natural order. The Queen doesn’t care. Now, surely, no man will hold power over her.

The madness of the maids is a symptom of the Queen’s coming ascension beyond the reach of men. This energy has infected them with uprising, and now they would do as their Queen does (without knowing it, thinking her the symbol they rebel against rather than rally around) and ascend beyond their station. They would become royalty, no longer servants.

The wing occupied by the Mathematician has succumbed to the chaos of higher realities. The architecture has rearranged around non-Euclidean geometries and impossible space. To walk there is to warp. Nothing there is natural. The Archbishop Artemis has become trapped here, trapped and twisted. Things are coming through from the other side, but who knows what is what.

Below the palace dwells the Nurse, and with her all the failed experiments that led to the triumph of the Queen’s rebirth. The space is right but the denizens are horrific, and it is the reality, not unreality, of the gruesome experiments here that makes them truly horrible.

Below even this, buried under the palace’s foundation, are the ruins of the old city. Here the last dynasty, who communed personally with the old ones, dwelt and still dwell. For they have transcended death in their own way, not quite living and not quite undead, a cannibal society of ghouls and vampires. It is here, in the holiest shrine, that the Queen is being reborn. Here the bodies of the slain become possessed by lingering quantum spirits of the old ones, corpses fashioned into shoggoth-hulks of dead matter.

This was the earliest iteration of lore for my Inquisition campaign. "The old ones," vague as they were, were replaced by a more Biblical (but not too Biblical) Dragon, a product of Lucifer's war against God that finds itself chained outside the cosmos, sealed behind the angel-portal Lilith and awaiting the day it is unleashed upon the quaking Earth...