Matron King Concept Test

THE UNREACHABLE ISLAND OF THE MATRON KINGS This island nation, glimpsed only rarely on Bluehaven’s horizon (no more than once per year), is inhabited solely by women and surrounded by water so thin and light that approaching vessels sink to their doom as the island itself recedes into the sudden mists. CHAPTER TWO • THE LINTHA FAMILY No one has ever made a landing on the island but for those deposited there by aberrant Wyld storms, and few of those have returned to tell their tale Those returning tell of tall, silverweave-haired women who catch sunlight on their tongues and propa- gate their race by sleeping so that the South wind kisses their bare breasts. Men finding themselves shipwrecked upon the Unreachable Island receive little assistance in repairing their hulls, as the women dwelling there have little interest in sailing — or anything else as far as anyone can divine — living lives of empty abandon. If threatened, they respond only with confusion and refuse to concede to demands. If wooed, they appear flattered, as if they have received such attentions many times before, but do not respond to sexual advances. One woman, who seems to have been pregnant for centuries, stands taller and wiser than the rest. She explains that she was long ago left behind by her hus- band, who had gone off on a journey promising to return in one year. That year went slowly and she spent every day in sorrow, but every morning, she returned to the shore to watch for her husband’s return. When the year finally came to an end, no husband appeared, but she found she was with child. The pregnant woman learned to her dismay that her husband had fallen in love with a witch in a distant land, that he had been unfaithful and that he had fathered a child with her. After the child, a son, was born, the witch turned her husband into stone as a lesson in infidelity. She claims that her heart as well became stone in that moment and that, when she is healed, her husband shall spring forth from her loins. She has made the other women — her wet nurses and maidens — from mud. They have no proper dwellings, but sleep under the night sky on giant lilies in a lagoon at the island’s center. All of the women are simulacra, created and set in motion by brilliant savants at the end of the First Age and given to the monarch of the island as amuse- ments, claiming they could outperform any of his favorite concubines. But the Wyld came and changed the women, ren- dering them partially alive, crude amalgams of automaton and mortal. When the Wyld storm had passed, the king and his concubines had gone and one of the women appeared to be pregnant. The story she tells is true, but it is not the story of her husband, but of a sailor who fell in love with her but was frightened away when she failed to deliver her child after several years.