The Cake Queen and The Candy King
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Overview
The Cake Queen and The Candy King are the co-rulers of The Greater Sugar Court, one of the Concordant Courts of Arcadia. Together, they explore a Bright inflection of the Strange Essences of Relation and Substance, seeking meaning through joyful experience. They rule in harmony, their fabled relationship that of wholesome romantic partnership and mutual admiration.
Cake Queen Overview
Milseach (Feytongue \ˈmilʃɑk\ for sweetness), the Cake Queen, is the Fey God of the Shortenings and was the ruler of The Greater Court prior to The Concordance. Her original Court explored the Strange Essence of Relation, seeking meaning through shared experience and social connection. She was obsessed with acts of hospitality.
Among mortals, Milseach is widely thought to be a sort of God of home and hearth. Many mortal Orisons find their way to her through arts of hosting: cooking, decoration. Only rarely do mortals learn of the true nature of her philosophy, once embraced by the shared experience, there is no leaving: hospitality is not optional.
Candy King Overview
Siucran (Feytongue \ˈʃukrɑn\ for sugary), the Candy King, is the Fey God of the Gnomes and was the ruler of The Sugar Court prior to The Concordance. His original Court explored the Strange Essence of Substance, seeking meaning through artistry and mastery. He was obsessed with the experience of satisfaction when obsessing over something.
Among mortals, Siucran is thought of as a sort of tempter, with mythic names like The Taffy Man. Children rhymes warn against accepting candy from strangers because of Siucran, largely because he will never say no to one more, and may insist even when one is full. His whimsical candy motif causes him to be sometimes blamed for the Strange child abduction The Never Queen performs.
History
Origin and Ascension
Milseach
Before Arcadia, Milseach was an Elf of Pelithos, c. NIR 650. She was not well known, but is remembered in histories as a guiding hand in community leadership. Some stories remember her as a demarch, others as the matron of an orphanage, others as an innkeeper, others as a community organizer. All stories share one detail: she was a magnet for harmonious gatherings. Groups lingered in her company, events went more smoothly under her guiding hand. Over time, this quality began to attract attention from beyond Pelithos. Fey Orisons passing through her region lingered near her home. Dream-creatures nested at the edges of her sleep. Her dreams filled with long tables set for guests who never arrived, hearth-fires that burned without warmth until someone sat beside them, and roads that ended at empty inns waiting to be opened.
One night, Milseach did not wake where she had fallen asleep, she woke in a park. These somnolent displacements became more frequent, and her dreams about empty community spaces grew more vivid. Eventually, she awoke instead in Arcadia, seated at a table beneath unfamiliar stars, with the lingering certainty that she had been needed, summoned by the realm through dream.
Drawn to the ideals of the Soft Court, Milseach became a Kindly One for several centuries, learning the language of mercy and abundance. Yet she found their philosophy incomplete. Mercy meant little unless it was shared. Abundance meant nothing unless it brought people together. She left the Court and founded a tavern and inn known as The Second Slice, which quickly became one of the most important gathering places in Arcadia.
Siucran
Siucran was born an Elf in Pelithos, c. NIR 750. His life before Arcadia was unremarkable by heroic standards. He apprenticed to a glassblower and gem-cutter in a modest river town, learning how to polish crystal lenses, repair instruments, and set small decorative stones. He was diligent rather than brilliant, patient rather than inspired. What set him apart was not ambition, but a quiet satisfaction in doing things properly, taking pleasure in the process of learning. Indeed, his appetite for skills was his most noteworthy trait. He worked tirelessly and quickly became a master craftsman in several trades. In NIR 870 he journeyed to Arcadia, where he heard entirely new crafts were possible with substances that defied logic, he migrated out of professional curiosity. After becoming Sidhe, he continued much as he had before - ravenously mastering crafts and working with different materials. Over time he realized that mastery mattered more than anyone realized in Strange craft. He ascended c. NIR 930, the fastest ascension in Arcadian history. Those Fey journeymen who wished to learn his philosophy of meaning through excellence became the Gnomes.
After the War of Erasure created the Bright and Bleak inflections, The Crystal Court was relegated to the Bright inflection of Substance. Siucran was changed by the War, becoming more obsessed with the sense of fleeting satisfaction after his crafts were complete. He renamed his Court The Sugar Court, though it was still populated by Gnomes.
The Concordance
Siucran was the third monarch drawn into the idea of The Concordance, approached by The Cartographer Queen and The Hearth King after they learned they would need four Fey Gods to perform the ritual. Siucran understood the proposal in practical terms: a problem of structure, stress, and failure modes. The philosophical framework had already been outlined by Neasa and Nuada, but it was Siucran who believed it could be built. He committed himself not out of fear, but out of a craftsman’s instinct — if meaning could be stabilized through union, then it required precision, redundancy, and time. Over the following centuries, he refined the ritual’s material requirements, designing symbolic architectures, Strange anchors, and resonance matrices that could hold multiple philosophies without collapse.
Siucran brought Milseach into the Concordance, though not through argument or doctrine. By that time, he had fallen deeply in love with her — drawn to the warmth of her gatherings and the way she held fractured Fey together without demanding agreement. Milseach did not share the War-born trauma that drove the others, but she understood the value immediately: anything that brought people, and their philosophies, closer together was good in her estimation. While Siucran labored to make the Concordance possible, Milseach labored to make it bearable — hosting neutral gatherings, maintaining fragile alliances, and ensuring that the collaborators did not drift apart during the long centuries of preparation. When the Concordance was finally enacted, it was not only a feat of philosophy and craft, but the quiet culmination of devotion — to stability, to community, and to one another.
Even though the consequences were unexpected, being a labor of love for both monarchs, Siucran and Milseach were even more satisfied by the results.
Description
Milseach
In her anthropomorphic form, Milseach appears as a bright-eyed woman, short and plump, in a regal dress that appears as an elaborately decorated cake. She wears a whipped cream wig.
Her surreal form is known as the Iced Giant. This is a towering, lumbering layer-cake dripping with icing, well over 10m in height.
Siucran
In his anthropomorphic form, Siucran appears as a short and skinny gnome. His expression is friendly, but slightly unsettling. His eyes are too wide, and his grin too wide. He moves rapidly with a nervous energy. He wears regal clothing with elaborate candy motifs: gumdrop buttons, spun sugar ruffles, peppermint broach. His wears a peppermint crown and has a glass rod with bubbling soda inside.
The Sugarstorm, his surreal form, is a churning, hovering cyclone of multicolored sugar dust and candy shards. Inside its vortex are glimpses of too-wide eyes, disembodied grins, and candy-colored hands that grasp and flit like hummingbirds. It sings with the laughter of children slowed down to a crawl. The storm can easily cover a city block.
Personality
Milseach is known to be a relaxed, friendly, and languid creature, like a someone enjoying a sleepy sugar crash. She is generous of spirit, but her ideas of how to express generosity often do not align with the values of others.
Siucran is known to be a nervous and excitable creature, as if on an endless sugar rush or caffeine high. His mannerisms are full of rapid, twitchy movements, laughter, and amazed expressions. He is overwhelmingly friendly and almost unsettling in his joy. He is confused and perturbed by attitudes that are less than ecstatic, and uses humor to combat any form of unhappiness.
Strange Philosophy
- Meaning through pleasure and joy
- Obsessed with hospitality, sweets, and mastery