Gods' listeners

Their whispers now gone silent

She has always complained about the constant whispering in the back of her head when the rest of the world overwhelmed her. Constant noise, never ending. Can't imagine that.

But now the whispers aren't there anymore, and its making her feel worse than ever. The first minutes she cried of happiness, finally learning what silent was. But the happiness soon changed to loneliness, anxiety, and anguish.

The gods listener that rule our city of Sund are some of the few people in all the world able to listen and understand the gods, but its a constant noise, they don't get to choose when to listen to them. Can't be easy.

Our city has been blessed with having one of them at all the time. When one of them was reaching the end of their life, a new one was born. They have been ruling our city for at least a thousand year, together with representative of each neighbour in Sund, and we call them princesses.

Raising

It's not hard to find new princesses. They get their abilities when they get to adolescence, and it's not a quiet coming, but sudden and jarring. They often get panic attacks, overwhelmed, and some even scream to try drown out the new sounds. They are quickly brought to the older princess.

The old princess will tell the newer one how to deal with the sounds, or at least the tips that made it more manageable, and most importantly, how to understand the gods. Other people from the castle will be teaching them how rule and everything related to them.

I don't really know how gods listeners are dealt with in other places in the world. I don't think they can be found as easily as in Sund.

She's always compared it to being in the middle of a room filled of people talking to each other but not to you. It was hard to understand them all the time if you didn't pay attention to them other than a word here and there, and even when she did pay attention, it still was hard to just listen to certain gods.

She hides it well. Her pain I mean. But as one of her guards, I can see through that smile. The other three do too. Not that she hides it from us, she asks us support and help when she's alone with one of us. It's hard to help her deal with silence, but she claims us being here is enough. Sometimes she asks us that we make constant noises.

The change

Often the older princess want to decide when they die, and they ask the younger one to be with them. I don't know much about what happens in the room as it happens, nor how the older one dies. We aren't allowed to know, only a couple person are allowed to know, both picked by the older one and they have a promise of silence.

A day or two prior to that, many things have to be decided, planned, and organized. Paperwork mostly. After it happens, the younger one picks her new team of guards. It's common that at least one of them come from the older group, but the rest are picked from the soldiers the princess feels more comfortable with or sees more capable. I was one of these, Mireda was from the older team and stayed.

Silenced

I don't think Ereia has mentioned the loss of the whispers, the rest of survivors don't need more reason to panic. I believe it won't matter, maybe will cause an initial panic, but she's well educated and her gut feeling tends to be right, she doesn't like to pay attention to the gods unless they are screaming something bad about the decision. She'll do well taking care of us, the lack of representatives hasn't affected her ability of taking decisions, although she's sometimes annoyed that the two surviving representatives are just hiding in tents doing nothing.