Excerpts From A Travelogue: Rex Murnica.

The King’s mounted dragonslayer proxy did tower over the drones there, abandoned and incapacitated so very long ago by water and mud. The machine clay has lost some of its bright red to the dead air of the Husklands, but the stance is still proud, perhaps more so than the memory of its long-dead operator. To most, his failure to retake Garm marks the true end of the dynasty, two hundred years before the last of the old conqueror’s line threw herself in madness from the tower Spear.

The horse drone – immensely exaggerated to match the royal proxy – was built to the measurements of Faith: a brittlebred mare of the line of Promise (who was ridden by the conqueror Tomas Radax on his conquest of the world). Like him she was black as bitumen with the name of God written endlessly in ever-tighter golden spirals across her skin (although some claim that by the rule of Simon Thalattas the old blood had faded and the holy name could no longer be clearly read). It is haunting to see the the clay hold the pose of the animal so many years after the bridle has been taken off: long after her death her proxy still carries him east.

The artist who aims to depict in his art the relative importance of his subjects might employ what scholars call hierarchical proportion: the scribe is drawn twice as large as the worker, the king is drawn twice the size of the scribe. While the art of Murnica was largely naturalistic, their warfare in the later years of the kingdom conformed almost entirely to this convention.

It is amusing to imagine us all being part of every painting in this manner, drawn so small as to be invisible: every man a dab of paint on the portrait of another.