The Blind Masons

The geography and history of Ouroboros is ever-changing, and it is often true that its Tuesday night denizens cannot recall the state of Monday morning. Obviously, the elf houses hate this. While they sometimes benefit from the overnight disappearance of political enemies, it is just as likely a fallen house may rise to power in the same span it fell, throwing all their schemes into disarray and wasting centuries of work. While hegemony can benefit from chaos, it also demands a certain stability.

Without intervention, there can be no status quo in Ouroboros.

The blind masons intervene.

Sculpting

To make a blind mason, start with a slave.

The elf houses keep a great many slaves, mostly of human stock. Usually these unfortunates are stolen from another Ouroboros in castrati raids, but that is not true of those destined to become blind masons. They must be from our iteration of the city, grounded in the instance of reality they would reinforce.

The flux of the city is such that few question the sudden disappearance of a lover or a child overnight (though remembering them after this does raise eyebrows). And true, most have wandered into or been taken by another Ouroboros. But a rare few citizens who vanish have been taken into the secret pits beneath the elf houses, to be broken and made anew.

This is called the sculpting.

To sculpt a blind mason from human marble, a great deal of chiseling is involved. The artifexes reshape the stolen bodies through the holy medium of pain. The eyes go first, spikes of cold iron driven deep into the brain pan. Usually this kills the subject. The elves have ways, of course, to drag their screaming souls back from the void. After the shock of death and resurrection, the real work begins. Every bone is broken in a thousand places. Every limb amputated, then affixed again, and again, and again. There is more, much more, and many things are done that the elves will never speak of, not even to the Reverend Mother. Deniability is key. If word got out...but word never leaves the sculpting pits.

Of course it is easy to reshape a body: a mind is more resistant.

To bend the human mind into a form that can see our city as it should be, it must first be exposed to all it should not. After the bodies are broken and remade in a new image, the fiendish ocularum are placed upon their ruined skulls. This device grants the sculptee vision into Ouroboros, every Ouroboros. To perceive a million million iterations spread across the temporal curve, the mind shatters into just as many pieces. The torture can last for years, but eventually it ends. The mind longs to return to its reality. Understanding of every possible Ouroboros is instilled, and with it a great fear of the malignant iterations that have deviated so far from our own. None will ever see the things the blind masons have seen, not all of them, not even an infinitesimal fraction of those horrors.

But the mind longs to return, and when it finds home, it knows instinctively. The blind masons awaken, the sculpting is complete, they have seen the infinite Ouroboros and know the differences between home and the Other.

This is only knowledge, however, and the blind masons must enforce it somehow or their words will seem the deranged prophecies of mad oracles. This is why they must devour elves.

It is believed the elves were made, or perhaps only changed, in the event that fractured Ouroboros into infinity. Their blood carries traces of this, strong in some and weak in others. This is why the Reverend Mothers must manage the bloodlines so carefully: the blind masons, ensurers of elvish rule, need the highest concentrations of this strange resonance to gain their power. As the elves were reshaped by the great shattering, so too will the blind masons (fueled by their blood) reshape that very same reality. Those chosen to undergo the ritualized devouring are often unpopular, or downright criminal: harem bandits, castrati-fuckers (how this is done is not widely known), failed challengers to the Reverend Mother, and committers of social faux pas. They are conferred the status of martyrs before being eaten by the greedy mouths of the newly sculpted.

And after this, the sculpting is complete.

Shapers of Reality

But what exactly does all this nonsense mean?

Blind masons walk the streets in twos and threes, shoring up errors in our reality. They can sense that today's market square is not yesterday's, though it may have vanished from the memory of common folk. They remember that there ought be no House of Shurikens and Ammonia, that this is from another city entirely. The blind masons remember reality as it should be, and feel the presence of incursions or more subtle alterations like one might feel a fever.

Then they set about repairing these deviations. How they do this varies from mason to mason, but it is always a highly personal ritual of some kind, something that recalls the reality they were born into: the repetition of a particular lineage, the folk dance of their youth, the carving of sigils learned in school...it could be anything. But it always brings forth the truth and history, unaltered, of our city. Often their fellows cheer them on, or if the aberration is great, pitch in with nursery rhymes and genealogies of their own.

Once the ritual is complete, the affected part of the city (however insubstantial it may have been) returns to "normal". The monsters vanish, the statues of dead gods too, and the market square no longer sells human flesh (unless it was the Square of the Feast, then it absolutely does).

Overall they are a jolly lot. This is unnerving to most, who believe their time in the pits should have broken their spirits. This is false. Sure, their souls were shattered, but they pieced themselves back together with a newfound love of this particular Ouroboros. This is the love of the child for its mother, the child who packed its bags and ran away, making it as far as the street corner before turning back in tears. They cling tightly to the bosom of this Ouroboros, for they greatly fear the infinite other cities, which recall too much their time in the ocularum. As such, they are always glad to mend the world and return it to the comfort of home-as-it-should-be.

Trouble

The procedures presented above are ideals, of course, and theory is often more neat than practice. The truth is, the life of a blind mason is a dangerous one. There is a reason the pits are always full, that the unpopular elves always fear a grisly death at the hands (and teeth) of the masons. Turnover is high in the business of shoring up reality. There are many threats to the work of the masons.

First are the most obvious: violent incursions. An eruption of cavemen, or castrati raiders on a slavetaking mission, or malevolent and intelligent spiders (not like the friendly intelligent ones kept by the elf houses), all pose physical danger to blind masons on-site. Their lame forms cannot defend themselves, so castrati are always nearby when the masons are at work. Many a brave eunuch soldier has fallen in their defense, and animosity between the two parties has always been high. Sadly the castrati have no recourse, as violence against the masons will always be met by swift and brutal death.

Second, there are more existential threats. Reality is sometimes rewritten so quickly that the masons are swept along in the wake of change. Many simply vanish, to be forgotten by all but their fellows, who hold secret memorials in their apartments. Others are irrevocably changed, their powers warped and even, in the worst of cases, turned against us. Many have been the battles between a fallen mason and their former brethren: these are always horrific affairs. The twisted creatures run amok, changing the city willy nilly, faster than even veterans can keep up with. The fallout can take weeks to repair, and sometimes changes are so subtle that the masons miss them.

Last, and most troubling, are the other masons. Our city is far from the only Ouroboros to have come up with the idea, and was probably not the first. They come in all forms, for all purposes. Some have stumbled in, swept up in currents of change, blindly seeking to convert our reality to something resembling theirs (obviously this scales from minor nuisance to horrific catastrophe). Others appear to be sent for sinister purposes, to weaken us for incursion from their side. Many are the forms these deadly agents take, and few resemble our own (though those that do are the most threatening).

Worst of these other masons are those sent from Thor, the great enemy to Ouroboros. Scholars and masons alike suspect it is an Ouroboros that is utterly inimical to the other iterations, a city whose sole purpose is the destruction of its sisters. Some of the worst incursions have resulted from their interference, or so it is suspected. Ultimately there is no proof of its existence, but the blind masons have spoken of the farthest point their ocularum ever took them, a hellscape at once alien and familiar. They speak in hushed tones to eachother of the visions, snatched glimpses of a great and yellow eye. Often it was this sight that hurled them screaming back into our reality, their sculpting complete.

Street Encounters 4

1	Trio of drunken masons, giggling and stumbling over eachother, they've turned the cobbles to slick wet meat, horrified citizens scream and flee and trip facedown in the offal road.
2	Pair of curious masons, inspecting the hawker stalls along the sidewalk, muttering of an incursion somewhere, the vendor furthest from them grows nervous.
3	Lone mason feeling her way along an invisible line as if it were a wall, ah-ha she smirks, found you, and begins to dance a merry jig, invites you to join her, it'll stop last month's murders, put the Reverend Mother back on her throne.
4	Bravos and dandies taunting a mason who turns this way and that, they've taken his hat, they don't see the approaching castrati or sense the impending bloodbath.
5	Masons in strange garb, crystal spikes in their eyes, marching with a purpose, clearing the way with syllables of power.
6	Mason dragging her dead comrade, calling for help, it's too late for them both, a flash of knife claws and razor teeth and she is eviscerated,  her dying words: its skull, its skull, please.
7	Castrati cadre leader arguing with a mason trio, they demand protection, he demands they get out of his way and let him get the slave-train to his Dominatrix or she'll have his hide.
8	A beast, a wrong thing, a monster, walking down the street in company of two masons, they notice nothing amiss, not even when it snatches up a bystander and devours him whole.
9	Grim-faced mason, smeared with blood, one arm gone, stalking an unseen foe. He holds charms in a white-knuckle grip and hums a tune in low tones, tells you to help her find the bastard or clear the street at once.
10	Sounds of a scuffle around the corner, muted cries and elvish swears, turn and see a castrati with blade hilt-deep in a mason's gut, more lie dead around, his fellows watch grimly, they turn to regard you with cruel smiles.