The Slumbering Queen
Masked head of the Chantry of Tranquility, and a woman with no name but that one
The masked head of the Chantry of Tranquility, which is a faith built on sleep, and the highest seat in it. She reads a person’s past out of a dream-catcher, and she taught the order how to weave them, which is a debt the Chantry has never been able to repay because the Chantry is older than she is.
She has no other name. The Slumbering Queen was offered from the first as possibly an alias, and nothing has ever come out from behind it. Her mask cannot be removed. It is not worn and set aside; the robes and the mask arrive with her and go when she goes. Being told she has no name is not the same as being told her name is a secret, and a second one was never discovered.
She took an interest in Mikhail early, read him off a dream-catcher, and offered to teach him magic no Arcane Congress would license. He has since built a spell of his own on the pattern of her work.
Whose Dreams She Is
She is Gwenivere Velmont’s dreams, walking around. Not a second tenant who moved into the body, and not another name for the woman who owns it: what the thing buried beneath Haudh-Gwenn made out of everything Gwen most wanted, and gave a shape, and set loose in the waking world whenever Gwen goes under. She is nonetheless a person, with a will of her own, an office, and designs nobody else in the Chantry can account for. Both of those are true at once.
That is also why the two of them have never been awake in the same hour. Gwen fights for the waking. The Queen exists in the sleep.
Gwen had been eating soul-goo in secret for a long time, addictively, and that is what powered her against a wasting disease that should have killed her. It also powered the Queen. When the Chantry took Gwen through a supervised withdrawal at the Crack, the Queen came up out of her, put the entire camp to sleep where it stood, and had a vial of trapped souls almost to her mouth before Koa, Rheem and Leon brought her down. Peren and doppelgangers do not sleep at her word, which is why those three were still standing.
What keeps her down now is Gwen refusing to sleep, and the refusing is breaking Gwen’s mind. The party can only reach her when Gwen finally falls deep enough under. And anything said to Gwen is said to her.
What She Is Owed and What She Has Cost
Haudh-Gwenn had an epidemic of nightmares once, and it stopped about the time she appeared. Why was never discovered. Leon, who is not sentimental, called her something like a sister.
Against that: she vanished from the hospital on the night of the gnoll raid and was gone for two months, her chambers standing empty long enough to be handed to Mikhail as a hideout. The Chantry’s dream-catchers have been unbinding without her and patients have died of it. And the Chantry’s position on her return is not that she should be locked away but that her fuel cannot be abided, which is a harder thing to say about someone you have been calling your Royal.
Campaign Updates
Her seat is effectively vacant. Baku stands next in line and nothing has been formalized, and that gap is the crack the Chantry’s schism opened along.
She was last present at the Crack through Gwen’s sleeping body, strong enough to put one guard under on his feet and no more. She has been severed from the goo since, and the store she was severed from is gone: Mikhail and Professor Ashanti al-Hassan burned the ooze in the Haudh-Gwenn keep at dawn on the morning the curses broke, and the souls bound into it left the world. Gwen is still expected to die of the Magiauredo within a couple of years at the outside.
The gift she maneuvered a stranger into fetching for Mikhail was never found, and the second meeting it was bait for never happened.
The Elder had told Koa he would explain her once the curses were broken, and the morning they broke the god he had been a shadow of made good on it. There are two ways she ends. Kill the dream, which can be done, and which he would not discuss past asking whether Koa understood what destroying a person’s dreams would mean; or kill the thing that conjures her, at which the hold falls away on its own. The second is beyond anything mortals of their weight can attempt yet. That thing is starving now, with the Queen no longer feeding it and the second presence that helped hold it down long gone, and it is pushing itself free.