GLOGtober '22: Challenge 6: What's In The City of Mounds?

GLOGtober '22

This challenge is courtesy of Archon's Court (no relation).

So: What's In The City of Mounds?

Well there's the mounds of course - spherical piles of grey, grisodate-rich clay scooped up from the banks of the River Sable which flows down from the sheer flanks of the Snapspines and through the reeking Pissmire. The mounds have a great variety to them. There are ones no higher than a man's calf, encircled only by a single ring of limp mushrooms, and there is one as high as any cathedral's steeple, surrounded by oath-carved menhirs and miniature groves of fungi, and there are a good many between these in size and the complexity of their enclosures.

Inside the mounds too there is a great variety in their contents. In one there is a fox-bone stiletto that grants its wielder a great facility with lies and disguises, as well as an insatiable hunger for the tongues of children. In another mound there is a homunculus of distilled hate and bile which contaminates the very air with a berserker-compulsion. In yet another still there is the score for a waltz that forces its dancers to spin and spin until their flesh flies off and they're left as twirling skeletons.

That is the purpose of these mounds of hard-packed and sun-baked clay: they hold curses, and accursed things, things too dangerous to leave out in the world and too risky to destroy.

The City Above

Few are brave enough to walk the winding ways between the mounds. Mounds can crack, mounds can leak, and there is always the fear that sappers have undermined a mound's containment from below.

Therefore the City of Mounds is built on stilts well above the mounds, out of woven reeds, folded leaves, duck feathers and cobwebs. Only the main walkways and government buildings can comfortably hold people of human size, for the City of Mounds is a city of the fey, entrusted with its binding duty by old and unbreakable compact.

Hybsils, satyrs, and blink dogs caper along the City's paths - grigs and sprites flit above them. Of its highest class are the nixies who gather mound-clay from the River Sable beside it.

Visitors are welcomed but never for long, unless they've built a working relationship with the fey for collecting and neutralizing curses. To bring shovels, hammers, or picks within City limits is a horrendous crime, punishable by glitter-sprinkling (a torture almost unimaginably worse than its name might suggest). The only mortals who reside permanently in the City of Mounds are monks of the Maledictum Flagrumi, who remove their left lung to make a cage in their ribs into which they can inhale and imprison evil.

The City Below

The City's mounds are in fact spherical, extending as far below the earth as they do above. This demands protection from burrowing foes. Such is the purpose of the City Below.

It is a network of trapped tunnels between dark and sunken halls. Here reside the unseemly fey, the boggles, spoorns, redcaps, tints, mormos, shellycoats, wirry-cowes, chittifaces, caddies, gringes, tantarrabobs, and all their ilk, entertaining themselves with mean pranks and wild rumpuses.

These fey are often the best hunters of curses the City has. Their ears are naturally pricked by misfortune, and they tend to be suited to handling all manner of nastiness, though as grateful as the mortals rescued by them may be, their help never comes painlessly, or free.

The Order of the Sharpest Cheddar is the premier knightly order of the City of Mounds, headquartered in a warren at its buried heart. Its membership is composed mostly of jermlaines, snyads, mites, gremlins, and their trained rodents. The Order is tasked with spying on the human polities around the City and ensuring that those foolish mortals do not scheme to steal the City's cursed charges. In recent years its leadership has expanded their mission beyond this mandate, deciding that they will not simply address these plots as they arise, but also sabotage their neighbours' capabilities to even attempt to enact them. This has agitated their neighbours to move against the City more than any desire for the power of its contained curses ever did. The Order's coat-of-arms is an orange wheel of cheese with a slice taken out of it atop a cerulean backdrop.

The City Within

With nowhere else to go, the magic of the mounds' cursed contents pools, and becomes ingrown. Things which ought not to begin to dream.

The City Within is made up of these curses' dreams, knit together by the mycorrhizal web of the fungi that surround them. These dreams are far more often than not nightmares, surreal reflections and distortions of their victims, history, and nature.

Inhabitants of the City Within - whether they're sleepers who've linked their souls to the web or ethereal beings able to enter it as we physical creatures might pass through a doorway - are tasked with navigating, manipulating, and harvesting these nightmares. Their imagery and events can be analyzed to reveal secrets of the curses that dream them up. By changing a nightmare's script it can be possible to diffuse the power of or even cleanse a curse entirely - though this is never simple or easy. Finally, a skilled dreamwright can pluck pieces out of a nightmare and make them manifest in reality. These anomalous goods and creatures make up a significant export of the City of Mounds.

The Three Regents

The City of Mounds was founded and ruled for over a century by a queen among the fey, who was wiser than a room full of philosophers and more terrible than a crocodile mid-death roll. The city's largest mound is where she's kept now, and no suitable replacement has yet been found.

Until such a time as one is, the City is ruled by a council of regents. Each handles the day-to-day affairs of their own part of the City independently, and decide on matters that affect the whole place by way of a majority vote. The three regents are:

• Toutatis, regent of the City Above, a clurichaun entrusted with being the City's public face and ambassador to the world beyond. While he is outwardly happy-go-lucky, he's sharp as a tack and stressed near to death by his role, and is seeking a worthy successor.
  
• Dame Carrotcake, regent of the City Below, a calygraunt and grand master of the Order of the Sharpest Cheddar. She is an absolute fey chauvinist, yet at the same time a truly chivalrous knight.
  
• The May-I Mother, regent of the City Within, an annis hag of tremendous age and potency. Several of the items buried in the City's mounds are of her own making. She is pragmatic and cruel, though never excessively so, and she values unraveling the mysteries of the world above all else.