The Empire of Masks is a faerie dominion in the Milderwood of the Dreaming.
Overview[]
Long after the end of the War of the Trees, Dame Marianna the False came out of Arcadia to dwell in the Milderwood. Naturally, accounts vary as to how and why a high Arcadian lady would do such a thing. Perhaps, as her enemies claim, she sought to learn the forbidden fomorian arts above their sleeping bodies. Perhaps, as she herself claims, she was gifted with foreknowledge of Arcadia's doom and fled early to create a sanctuary for the faerie folk.
Barring love and other enchantments, it is doubtful whether the truth will ever be had of this Mistress of the Forest of Lies. Marianna has built herself of her own mad court in the depths of the Wood, half astride the Silver Path and half off it. In this "Empire of Masks," she rules over a chimerical throng and some scattered, deeply Bedlam-ridden changelings, who, like Duke Asterlan, became lost in the Far Dreaming and found their way to the Milderwood. Wearing masks that are, by turns, inhumanly beautiful and monstrously ugly, Marianna's court plays at games of vanity and subterfuge. They are averse to showing their true faces to one another. The idea horrifies them, and being stripped of one's mask is considered the ultimate disgrace and punishment.
Behind the game of masks is a strange and abiding sorrow. Some say Dame Marianna is helping to free the White Fomorians from their imprisonment under the Wood. Others insist that the Masked Court's members are becoming increasingly like the old fomorians, and that, whether or not they become vessels for the actual White, they are walking down the same road. Still others (a minority) argue that Marianna is actually attempting to keep the fomorians securely underground and is hence protecting Arcadia itself.
In any case, the Milderwood appears to be changing again.
References[]
- CTD: Dreams and Nightmares, p. 72-73
