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The pale green sun sits upon the throne of noon like a baleful tyrant. He keeps for himself a place at the crest of the sky, the head of the heavenly table from which he can look down upon his subject. Highest are the greater planetes, whom each he gathers at his side: three in number and his closest confidants. Reflections of his majesty glitter upon their faces like the light of stars in day. Beneath them, lower to the base earth and broader in their girth are the fat ramblers, who meander about the horizon like great marbles, each the size of a hundred mountains. Painted blue, and red, and white, and green, they tumble across the lower sky in some grand cosmic dance that only high scholars understand the meaning of.
The glare of summer brings a baleful heat to the garden where you lay down in the shade. Twice so because this year is the Sun King's Conjugal, where the Night Mother comes round to her lover and he surrounds her with his light. It happens like clockwork every eighth turning of the sun, and for that turning of the seasons the days become half again as bright, the seasons warm and lustrous. Winter becomes spring again, spring turns to summer, and summer becomes a devilish season too hot and humid for decent clothes, until at last fall arrives and the Night Mother slowly drifts away, to return again in eight turnings.
Summer shall remain for two more turnings of the moon yet. The only reason you can bear to be outside is because the devilish season has yet to reach its zenith, and even so you feel as though you may soon melt.
"It's hoooooooooooot..." the voice of a young girl complains. Your voice is that of a girl born eight turnings past, a child of the last Conjugal Summer, born as the season waxed and the heat at last began to wane. Conceived as the Sun King embraced his lover. An auspicious birth.
"Then go back inside," another girl not one turning older than you tells. Another daughter of the palace where you live, born to a maid and content with her lot. Not like you. For one, she takes better to the heat. "It's nice and cool in there, ya wimp."
"No way..." You refuse. After all, this is nothing. If a little heat can make you give up and cower in the palace halls, where icecloth hangs among the tapestries to turn the heat of hellish summer cool, then you have absolutely no chance to...
a) master the blade
b) master magic
c) inherit the throne
d) visit the planetes
e) avenge your mother
<span class="mu-s">None know your father... but he is most likely the emperor. Before she passed, and you became another palace girl, you mother was...</span>
a) his favored concubine
b) his third wife
c) a dancing girl he knocked up
d) the rare woman amongst his guards
e) spoils of the last war he took for his own
