treatise on the histories of the utter islands. written by scholar ajaran triyayi. who has mastered the art of of the dodecahedron.
this is the chapter dedicated to one of the most important figures of whorl.
the invincible blade princess.
The Invincible Blade Princess was, more or less, the greatest being to have ever subjugated the Utter Islands. Skilled in magicks and martial artists, many say she was a mad mahasiddha, others say she was an Archwizard of some renown. Others say she was a reincarnation of a goddess. Whatever it is, the Invincible Blade Princess was the Heavenly Empress of the Heavenly Shennin Empire, the only political entity to have ever consumed and expanded across the entire Utter Islands through power and force.
The Scourge of God, she wielded a blade known as Ultima Ego. She bounded and united the disparate Shennin tribes and cities under her power through a mix of populism and sheer charisma, which she had in droves. Men groveled at her feet. It came to a point that even artistic depictions of her were banned; only a blade or a silhouette would be appropriate to depict her Majesty.
During the final days of the Heavenly Empire, when the various Liberation Armies coalesced into a single Revolution Force led by, among others, Kafeng Masangwa and Fuzi Ekajaya, she ascended to the Lotus Throne to finally embed herself into the reality of the world. She was to rewrite the code of the Universe into having her as the ultimate Will, becoming in essence, the True Goddess.
She was stopped. Of course she was.
Her Empire crumbled quickly afterwards. The abolishing of the Heavenly Empire led to the Decades of Carnage: almost a hundred years of revolutionary jockeying for power against fascistic forces, royalist forces, traditionalist forces, liberal forces, anarchist forces, and communist forces (though the latter two only split into two different forces once the majority of revolutionary armies had won).
The Invincible Blade Princess, even centuries later, would be known as the Blade of Heaven. She was the great equalizer, the great unifier, the Demon Queen, the Violent Chakravartin.
Some say life beneath her wasn’t that bad. That due to her, there was a modicum of peace achieved in the Utter Islands. That fighting under her Lawkeeping Army and studying her Invincible Blade Law created powerful knights and warriors that loved what they were doing. That wizards and witches and mystics were able to create new magicks. That scientists and machinists were given space and funding to create greater and greater advancements in machinery and thought. Of course, when viewed through a historical lens, one sees that most of these “advancements” were all guided in one direction: her eventual ascension to the Lotus Throne.
Speaking about the Invincible Blade Princess nowadays has the same gravitas as talking about a genocidal autocratic dictator… which she was! But in the end of the world where any ideology has once again resurfaced, some royalist and monarchist fascists have been making headway in revisionist efforts. They believe the Invincible Blade Princess will return…
her lover
The Invincible Blade Princess’ name has been more or less scrubbed from history, for one reason or another.
What you don’t know is that the IBP has had an intense personal connection with Kafeng Masangwa, the leader of the Revolution, figurehead of Mystico-Materialist Communist thought. It is said that both IBP and Masangwa went to the same early universities and even lived together for a short time. Some have said that they were nothing more than intensely close friends, to the point that Masangwa was only regaling her socioeconomic theory to IBP. Others have said that they were, in truth, intense lovers who were willing to fight for each others’ ideals.
Both Masangwa and IBP came from upper middle class families, though IBP had royal blood and was connected to the Shennin Royal Family. It is said that they eventually split due to a minor altercation—an aggrieved Masangwa lashing out at one of IBP’s ideological holes and reactionary takes. IBP took this as a personal affront and returned to the royal city of Shen. There, she would participate in royal politics and would eventually be made a potential heir to the Royal Throne by the Council of Ministers that oversaw the Mandate of Heaven.
Even after IBP was crowned as Shennin queen and began her conquest of the known world, Masangwa kept in touch with her. They sent each other missives and letters. They even saw each other again at times. But it was clear that they were beginning to stray further apart. In one letter to Ekajaya, Masangwa blames herself for the Invincible Blade Princess, stating that “if I had been slower, more patient, kinder, I would have been able to prevent the blade of Ultima Ego.”
It of course, came to a head when Masangwa’s hand was forced, and she had to join revolutionary groups to fight back against the oppression of the Heavenly Empire that arose. The Heavenly Empire was built upon the alignment of the Mandate of Heaven, and thus intensely feudal. Masangwan scholar Waiyang Changzi offered that it was the ultimate level of feudalism, and was the closest any entity has ever gotten to truly sitting on the Lotus Throne and changing the trajectory of the world system.
In one of Kafeng Masangwa’s letters published post-mortem, under the consent of Ekajaya, it is said that the final encounter atop the Kij Dakmala had “ended in tears, and with no possibility of ideological, nor personal, reconciliation. It was the logical end of our contradictions. What violence this must be, that I am forced to choose! But choice is all we ever have. And having to choose is always an act of decapitation, of bisection, of segmentation. I killed myself in that mountaintop. I committed suicide as I drove The Ruthless Critique of All That Exists deep into her crown chakra.
She is nothing but a wound in my chest, when she once was my heart.”
her real name
The Invincible Blade Princess was born Marici Kidadjojo (Mareechee Kidahjoyo), to the wealthy Kidadjojo family of the Pearlescences. As a child, she grew up in relative wealth, and went to the best schools for her time: Hoitian Monastery in the island of Sugang in the Pearlescences, and then eventually the Mahamantra Temple University in Mun-occupied Selorong. There, learning the Highest Mysteries (a degree one would have to prove they were capable of joining through decades of study and an abhisheka/ritual initiation by a recognized master), she would meet Kafeng Masangwa, who came from a Lower Middle Class family but had a similar fire for learning the mysteries of the world.
Kidadjojo comes from “Kida,” one of the royal houses (and some say the eldest of the royal houses) of Shen. the -djojo (pronounced joyo) was added as a way for the royal family to integrate after the first Shennin Civil War that forced old nationalist royalties to disperse and migrate across the Utter Islands. The Kidadjojo family was notorious for being a gang of merchant princes, operating like a mafia with intense familial connections and a propensity for violence to keep all within them in line.
Unlike Kafeng, who had experienced both middle class comforts and proletarian troubles, Marici did not have a grand plan for revolution or for conquest for humanity. She was doing as her father and her mother had forced her to do, to be a perfect princess and empress. She had the potential to become the next Mandate Holder if she followed her baba and her mama’s instructions to a T.
All of this was flipped when she met Kafeng. Kafeng Masangwa held the same amount of charisma that Marici did, though Kafeng was a pricklier person more prone to outrageous outbursts, as she did not particularly care for the current state of the world and wanted it to move past kings. Marici fell completely for Kafeng, body, mind, spirituality. Marici even ghosted her father and mother for a few years studying in Selorong due to her devotion to Kafeng—which was, perhaps even worse so, completely reciprocated with “equal or greater intensity” by Masangwa. It was said that Kafeng only had revolutionary ardor due to her “incredible capacity to love, which matched Metom’s Furnace in its human-creating qualities.”
In one of Marici’s letters to Kafeng in 11483, Marici wrote about how infatuated she still was, and how:
“I would’ve split the heavens and the earth, and moved the mountains, and churned the seas for whatever Kafa wished of me. Her thoughts engulfed me like flame. Her ideas lit within me sparks. I would walk down my own path of proletariat liberation… but she did not completely understand the true material realities of Shen. The peasantry were in no position to awaken Class Consciousness. It would have to be a cultural revolution from the top-down. I will have to sit as a Dictator… I knew this to be true. And Kafa will hate me for it and she will slander my name and she will curse my soul with her tongue of fire and I will cry and thank her because she loves me yet if she does such a thing. I am reactionary to her, I am skewered through by royalist thought, and I am sorry Kafa. You are right and I am wrong. I pray you die to one of my missiles so that I will not have to kill you with my hands and my eyes and my heart.”
Marici affectionally called Masangwa “Kafa.” Kafeng affectionately called Marici “Cici.”
The fight that split Kafeng and Marici was said to have been a disagreement as to the liberation of Shen from its Emperor.
Kafeng advocated for complete grassroots overthrow. Start from the peasants but lead not with a messianic figure in mind, but with the eventually goal of placing the workers and peasants as the Emperor, to achieve the final Mandate of Heaven.
Marici, who in truth was a bit more knowledgeable of Shen’s material conditions but not by much, as she lived as a blueblood and as a diaspora in the Pearlescences, advocated for her stepping into the ministerial politicks of Shen to change it from within the laws, and create the conditions for class consciousness through a Dictatorship. To this, Kafeng told her an idealist and a traitor, because her own place as an aristocrat will betray revolutionary interests. But to Marici, this was the only way.
When Marici attained the Mandate of Heaven and became the Heavenly Empress, it was eventually found out by mystics that she was a reincarnation of Neguowang, the First Mother, progenitor of all humanity in Central Shennin Mythology. Thus her regnal name became Huangdi Jingang Ren Kongssu, which would translate directly as “Vajra Blade Princess.” As she was the Daughter of Heaven, her regnal name only contained “Princess” instead of Empress.
She would go on a war path, uniting the Utter Islands through superior magick and martial art. She would change the next centuries of the world. She managed to conquer the entire archipelago in a span of 30 years, after becoming Empress by the ripe age of 21. By the end of it, she appended her regnal title as “Tian Huangdi”, the Heaven Empress.While certainly an impressive feat, her great charisma and the blessing of the 12 Holy Beasts helped in the part. It was a confluence of fates, the ultimate expression of the idea of feudalism.
Of course, all of it must come crashing down, as dictated by Masangwa’s Blade Dialectic.
50 years later it would be found out that Marici had written a thousand letters that were never sent to Kafeng Masangwa, which even Kafeng would not be able to see as she soon died 11 years after the First World Revolution. All of them were almost epistolary: talking to Kafeng as she would have when they were younger, interspersed with guilt-ridden confessions of various genocidal atrocities that they did.
In 11521, the year where she would attempt to sit upon the Lotus Throne and become Chakravartin, she composed her final letter. The letter spoke of how she wished Masangwa would die, and that she had been right all along, and that Masangwa had always been a “bitch who thought too highly of herself.” It ended, however, with the words: “My heart aches at the very thought of you, and my life will never grow larger around it. I sit upon the ceiling of the world with the nations of Wandering at my feet and the only thing I want now is for you to come and slit my throat. That will be my final pleasure, my ultimate desire, my atonement, the consummation of my love. I hope that you hate me, because you have not spoken to me in 20 years. I hope that you hate me so that I can hate you too.”