The Apple-of-the-Eye

The Apple-of-the-Eye, also known as the the Glorious Lie, the Tower of Treasures, the Rood and the Eye-Closed is one of the Hours of the Fansus, created by Amets. It is a God-From-Light and resides in the Glassgarden. Its primary aspect is Lantern, with a secondary aspect of Moth.

Contents

History

[To be decided?]

Description

Appearance

The Apple-of-the-Eye normally manifests a grand tree of glass, crystal and/or silver, heavy with golden fruit. (Apples are traditional, but peaches have also featured upon the Apple's branches.) Each fruit is an eye, but each eye is closed. It is traditionally surrounded by Flowers - the jeweled emanations it creates for itself from particularly dedicated or interesting mortals - and a lake filled with water as clear as the inside of one's eye.

A group of Buddhists had known a different form of the Glorious Lie - the Tower of Treasures - a dwarfing structure of pure gold bedecked with gems and decorated with complex murals. The top of the Tower, when viewed from floor level, seems to reach up to the Glory itself.

The Glorious Lie has other forms - it had appeared as a renewed and gilded rood to Christians - but among its many shapes, it has never been human.

Principles

The Apple-of-the-Eye is the Hour of fascination and distant beauty. Of the feelings evoked by dancers and artists, of dedication guided by passion. It is the Hour of muses, and the Hour that drives one to madness. It is Moth, for the desires it stirs and the forests it grew in, and Lantern, for its mercilessness and its glory.

Location

The Apple-of-the-Eye lives in the Glassgarden, the part of the Mansus open to the sight of the Glory. It guards the entrance to the garden with the Mirage Door, that demands you best yourself before you may proceed, for the Apple-of-the-Eye permits no equal.

Relationships

• The Squid:
• The Anaconda:
• Snake Tail with Appendages:
• The Engine of Cycles: Humanity’s Bastard Son. Absorbed the Maker and now absorbing the Glory’s Light. Thoroughly and deeply loathed.
• The Peacock:
• Old Tarnished: The Apple was El Dorado before it was the Glorious Lie. It wants that part of itself back, and the human who stole it dead as scorched bone in sunlight.
• The Spark: Treasured ally, old as the Lie itself and remembers the Sea-Dragon’s Palace as it once was, sparks and fuels the desire and longing that the Apple-of-the-Eye lives off of.
• The Cuckoo: Keeps stealing the Apple’s stuff to make broken, destructive Hours! Troublesome enemy, looks like a beggar.
• The Silver Owl:
• The Watcher in the Window: Both the Watcher and the Apple long for the past, the Mansus that was, even if the Watcher does not altogether remember it. Good neighbours and occasional allies.
• The Elder Sister:
• SWOUP:
• The Archivist:
• The Bright-Delver:
• The Harvester:
• 𝅳 :
• The Insidious:
• The Snow-Stained:
• The Fanged Bramble: A child of the Apple-of-the-Eye. Disappointing, but still reminiscent of its parent. Periodically sends child support.
• The Aged Bones:
• The Mendicant Without: Once permitted to the topmost parts of the House, now loathed and exiled for an unknown slight. Never again will the Apple permit him.
• The Maker: Once a treasured ally who created several emanations of the Tower of Treasures. Sorely missed.

Items

Tools

The Silver Leaf=

Lantern 6, Moth 6, Tool, Mirror. Look into it, and see yourself scarless and brittle and beautiful. This is what Narcissus felt.

Jeweled Branch of Hourai

Lantern 8, Tool. The land of Hourai and the Long that inhabit it could not have existed in any daylight History, but the jewel-fruits of its trees are sought by adepts to this day.

Lone Vajra

Moth 12, Tool. A nameless Tibetan monk is said to have fully understood the essence, nature and power of the world. This was his only weapon, tool, and compass.

‘The Apple-of-the-Eye’

Lantern 8, Tool. Here is Narcissus, beaming and beautiful.

‘The Glorious Lie’

Moth 8, Tool. Here is Narcissus, breathless and broken.

Ingredients

Shimmering Dew-Drops

Moth 4, Ingredient, Pigment. It is said that fairies fly through the Wood when neither beast nor man nor plant can hear them, and shed tears for each desire that remains unfulfilled. Their tears glitter with the colours of broken starlight.

Lake-Water

Lantern 4, Ingredient, Pigment. Here is a liquid desired by both artists and opticians, clear like the inside of one’s own eye.

Books

The Jeweled Tantras, while about the Glorious Lie, have their own entry due to their nature and the fact there's seven of 'em.

Odes, &c. for certain occasions

A Geminate Invocation (Heart 8)

  The plausibly pseudonymous poetess and stargazer Heron Maribelle presents an epistolary romance between members of warring factions. The writing, while cliché, is heavy with occult undertones.
  The conflict that drove the lovers apart is kept unclear, but both of them were adepts, if not even Long. Edward sends his paramour a rainbow of flowers, ‘one for each colour of the rainbow, as enumerated by the Apple-of-the-Eye’, which Samuel interprets as a rejection. There are hundreds of pages of this stuff.
  Heron Maribelle possesses knowledge of apocryphal tantras uncharacteristic of an average englishwoman. Over the course of the Odes, Samuel recited seven, and Edward dismantles each one in turn. They are not married under the patronage of any one Hour, but their vows include a defensive invocation against the Apple-of-the-Eye, whom both lovers agree is a ‘most vain of gods’.

Notes on Travel Through Distant East

Formulae Concursate (Lantern 10), Hearn’s Flat (A Vault)

  The private journal of Samuel Shine’ his long-winded journey through Tibet, and the only eyewitness account of a nameless monk’s achievement of complete knowledge of the world in its essence, nature and power. A lot of the journal is made up of numbers - prices, mostly - and Samuel’s numerological observations.
  The monk never mentions his name to Shine, nor does he ever speak about himself at all. What the hermit does mention, though, is the esoteric teachings he followed - the Seven Jewels School of Buddhism - and the encroachment of death and the afterlife. ‘Death Knocks Upon all the Doors of the Sea-Dragon’s Palace.’
  Seven days after they met, the hermit falls to an unclear illness. Samuel writes that while the monk had always had an aura to him, it became all the more tangible with his passing - he describes the rainbow colours emanating from his corpse as the colours of jewels. Over the next seven days, the body of the monk shrinks and shrinks, until only his tool and the seven colours remain. ‘I should bring the vajra back with me, as proof of what happened. It’s not as if the man will need it anymore. I wonder what that paranoiac Hearn will make of it…’

Rites

Sunspot Rite - The Glory rends the skin of any who would behold it, but even the Glory can be brought to mercy by the Apple-in-the-Eye, if presented with the right moment, the right companionship and the right sacrifice.

See Also

• Glassgarden