Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: This excerpt examines the subconscious correlations humanity makes between godhood and kingship. Emperors call themselves gods, and gods wear the symbols of rulership. This topic loops back to multiple previous pieces of lore presented from the setting, as the matter of both kingship and godhood returns to the minds of mages repeatedly. After all, what is a mage if not a nascent god?
The unreachable throne is a symbol for the relation between the layman and those perched high above him upon the furthest rungs on the ladder. Resting on overburdened shoulders made to behave like toppled ground, it shifts and falters under the watchful gaze of every wondering onlooker trying to find a deeper, spiritual connection to their purportedly enlightened peers. There’s a grand design to their role, isn’t there? One would simply not be deigned to become an abdicating master by societal whims alone, would they? There has to be More, and this begetted More reached down from behind blinding clouds to make it so.
The Pharoah is a royal abdicant of all the gods. The priest and bishop is one to God. Shamans in all guises and garbs understand the Connection so that others will not have to. Authority is godly, and the ultimate authority is one god or the other. Ruling and doling out Trust and Stamp is not something one grows into, but something which is given as a Right To.
Thus, we turn our eyes to Napir. Napir, as a city, is alien to us; a confounding and passing gestalt of a City hidden in the moon’s eye. Calcite-silver jinxed spires and remigium non-halls registering to the human Mind like traversable haze. Moon-kissed spider lilies outline seeming roads and imagined paths through, and out of the outlines, the mind Insists should be a city. In the eternal distance, down every street you walk, the sound of music neither grows nor ever leaves, and incessantly attempts to eke towards a crescendo that never comes.
This alienness is important to us; the separation of what is imaginably done by human hand and the ever-baffling beyond creates the Royal Disconnect. To the laymen, the world of the Noble and Royal is a strange, imagined thing- the happenings and creatures of the court are akin to illusions, vague shapes enjoying fancy tortes and capon. They are not Us, and thus everything that surrounds and begets their existence is not of Us, or Our hands. The unknown is something unfathomable, rather unfathomably grand, and that makes it Royal.
To our mind’s eye, Napir is Royal. It is Nobility dissolved down to a strangely pure Base, architecturally and deliberately dressed in collective strangeness. The strangeness of Napir, our minds insist, is wrought from something far grander and utterly beyond us that we could never seem to conceivably reach.
Esoteric Musings... 