Editing The Arts (section)

==The Arts==

An outbreak of hypnotic dances, injury-causing artworks and disease-ridden poetry has caused hundreds of deaths, as the duel of "honor" between the Flowing Rhythm Clan and the New Artistic Martials mars the Lord's Crossing Bicentennial Celebration of Pasiap. The duel was ended by the unaffiliated Lord Mnemon Darryn of Vuchar, who challenged all comers to find a subject or pentameter that he couldn't work into an epic-form poem. The victorious end result, Night Faeries, is set some decades ago and tells of the nightly march of the Fair Folk through the lands of man. A sweeping cast of satyrs, nymphs, dark sprites, and elves torment the peasant hero, Tomass. Eventually, Thomas is brought before Slaugh, the dark queen of the faerie court, and is about to be enslaved as her consort when he is rescued by '''Leedal Endar'''.

The grand old man of the Imperialist Revival School, '''V'Neef Somat''', has had an unusually quietyear, producing only 16 sculptures, 48 landscapes, 2 portraits of close personal friends, a restricted report titled A Study of Whispers: Investigations through conversation into the Unbroken Rushes, five books containing 16,000 haiku, each reflecting on social harmony during the different seasons, and the usual yearly updates to his collections of legal precedents, key decisions of the Deliberative and official changes to the calligraphy for the Empress' High Realm. He also extensively annotated the critically acknowledged historical work of his former apprentice, Cathak Goffrey, The People of the Monolith. 

His position is being challenged by Captain Tepet Urbensi, unofficial leader of the Curse L'Grande School. Refusing to officially retire and still serving his tenure as a mere scalelord in the 34th Legion, Captain Arnhold is famous for disturbingly evocative depictions of the members of the Wyld Hunt dying at the hands of shining anathema. His series of Jarrack, the Bloody slowly bleeding out among the corpses of over 300 imperial troops, mere steps away from the tomb of his earlier reincarnation, known as “The Greatest Threat”, was especially popular among certain sections of the Dynasty, and especially House Leedal.

Urbensi's dragon-sister, Cynis Falen Chervail, has sponsored turning the semi-autobiographical work of unExalted dynast, Mnemon Ghou'la, The Tales of a Gentleman's Gentleman: Stories from a Brother's Keeper into a prose theatrical performance. This satirical and sly tale of a dynastic scion watching his Exalted brother loose the family fortunes while making his own fortune on the side the work is borderline scandalous, but it is careful always to focus it's criticisms and to end with an almost mockingly metatextual variant on the classical ending, where the exalt saves the family and the upstart suffers for his presumption. Like the book the play derives from, it is incredibly popular among the patrician class, quoted to the point of exhaustion.

Beyond his evocative paintings, Urbensi has shown himself this year to be a master composer and musician with a new Eastern-style opera. His work, Der Tragedaire dre' Pantheus Hereticora, written in Hundred Kingdom five-four-five time, spoken in Wood Tongue and telling the story of the death of a local pantheon at the hands of ignorant Scavenger Lords with a First-Age weapon, is self-described as "a tragic novel writ in music," and is so moving, an instant legend has arisen that he sold his soul to some Eastern devil so that he could compose it.

In writing this piece and performing it for the Empress with the help of sixteen Angyalka, he clearly triumphed over his rival, Cynis Meris Yvandi of the Imperialist Revival School. Yvandi's four-hundred piece orchestra, Symphony Draconis was well-received, but was quickly forgotten after Urbensi's friend, Nellens Hylion, criticized it as lacking everything except technical merit.

Yvandi recovered face somewhat by sponsoring '''Leedal Catala Cordelia's''' lateral move into sepia-colored landscapes as the budding new talent took a short break from her travel-guides to prove her skill at the other Sixteen Inkstained Arts.

In something closer to her traditional works, '''Leedal Catala Cordelia's''' edited the book, Love Songs, by Cathak Zemora's Lost Egg wife, Lady Yakanti Blackstone of Bergovista. This anthology of popular works is dedicated by Cordelia to a mystery lover, and by Blackstone to her former lover, the archon, Rowan of Bergovista. Rowan died while assisting the city militia in attempting to apprehend the still-free murderer, Hamilken. Despite the public disapprobation, Blackstone visits her loves grave in Sijan regularly, and claim that Rowan sometimes speaks new verses to her from the afterlife.

This subtle and heady battle between the Imperial Revival School and the Curse l'Grande School is, as always, completely lost on the peasants and citizenry but, also as always, the movements of the dynasts utterly shape their loves through their entertainers stealing off their betters and dumbing the work down. As such, the marketplace jugglers, the kintraki dancers (traditional face-paint mime show actors) and wandering balladeers seem to vacillate between the newer works set in the East, starring moody tragedies and ironic comedies about glorious and beautiful young things fucking, making mistakes and dying and the last decades staples of warm-hearted pastoral comedies and morality plays.

Meanwhile, several Immaculate monks have co-written a public decree decrying the waste, hubris and disrespect for the Empress found within the masterpiece of Ragara Calel Porthello, current genius of the Juche' School. At Qwan Falls, outside Juche, now stands the single-largest statue in the lands, rising eight-hundred feet from the local lake. Carved in it's entirety from Porthello's own fists, the perfectly lifelike statue is of the legendary Shogun Aelluvian at his most vital, his blade and armor plated in real black jade.

Also, though it barely qualifies as art, the latest in The Battle for the Threshold series by the anonymous Passionate Rose- The Thunder of the Gods- has been released. Along with the Sijanese Romances (including The Dead Travel Fast, Dead But Not Forgotten, and Love Lies Dying); the Glorious & Inimitable Adventures of '''Sikandi''', Scion of Sesus (including Sikandi in the Nameless City, The Armor of Hesiash, Danger in the Skies! and Sikandi & the Blood-Apes of Bythria), these novels are tawdry and of no use to serious scholars. They are, however, beloved by the slowly growing semi-literate classes of the major cities.