On the Name Day of the Seneschal
A tale that circulates in whispers, half-mirrored and half-true. Told only where fog lingers long enough to listen.
In the Realm of Soft Fog and Clockless Chimes, where maps wandered off and names took tea with the wind, there lived a man known only as the Seneschal.
Not a prince. Not a prophet. But something stranger—a steward of sacred nonsense, keeper of the ledgers of lost things, and well-wisher to misfits he had never met. He dressed always in blacks that shimmered slightly when he was amused, and he could balance an entire kingdom’s sorrow on the edge of a teaspoon without spilling a drop.
The High House of which he was steward was built on no land, but drifted between thresholds—sometimes visible at sunset in the corner of one’s eye, sometimes whispered about in markets that didn’t exist on any day but Wednesday.
And though many sought his wisdom—kings, goblins, three-headed attorneys—it was on an unreliable Friday that the Seneschal encountered Dogbear.
Now, Dogbear was a cat. Allegedly. He walked like poetry escaping a jailer and smelled faintly of wild herbs, forgotten incense, ozone, and singed velvet. His name caused eyebrows to arch and dreams to reroute. A cat named Dogbear was clearly either a divine joke or a dangerous omen—and the Seneschal, of course, found this endlessly promising.
Dogbear did not introduce himself. He simply leapt onto the Seneschal’s windowsill, curled up on the steward’s accounting scroll, and began to purr in hexameter. The Seneschal poured him a saucer of fermented cream and said, “So it begins.”
🌫️ The Trial of Madness
They entered the Spiral Rooms on a dare and a misplaced invitation.
No one remembered who had signed it, only that the ink shimmered and stank of waxfruit and old regrets.
Inside, time twisted like licorice—sometimes sweet, mostly artificial, always nauseating and stuck to your teeth.
Minutes stretched into months, and then recoiled, snapping back like startled eels.
Clocks sang lullabies backwards.
Calendars giggled when touched.
Truth turned sour in your mouth.
You could speak it—but only once.
Then it became a different shape, wearing your voice like a borrowed cloak.
Thought-snakes hissed from every mirror, speaking riddles you hadn’t invented yet.
They coiled around questions like:
“What color was your hunger?”
“Why did the moon look at you that way?”
“Whose dream is this, really?”
Dogbear walked on the ceiling—unbothered.
The Seneschal walked on memory—slipping, but never falling.
Some days, they chewed pages from their own journals to remember who they were.
Other days, the journal wrote them.
By the third year, the furniture whispered.
By the fifth, they were certain the curtains were listening.
By the sixth, they had named the madness,
braided it into a leash,
and fed it sardines from a silver dish.
It left them alone after that—
but sometimes it still slept curled in the corner, purring in their dialect,
just in case they forgot how sharp forgetting could be.
🌘 The Trial of the Goddess-Loss
Dogbear once loved a creature called Kitty, whose eyes glowed with the weight of origin. She was not a cat. She was a goddess wearing fur. She chose the Seneschal and Dogbear, but then disappeared one evening on the full moon as all goddesses do—without permission.
The Seneschal did not speak, but he brought a silver basin; he and Dogbear wailed into it. Later, they buried the three-legged sweaters, whiskers and fur she left behind, then poured wine into the ground. The ground, being wise, drank deeply. Kitty smiled from Elysium, knowing her time on Earth was well spent. She said in glow-speak, “Et ego in Arcadia.”
💦 The Trial of the Cleansing
A rain fell—not of water, but of other people’s opinions. It soaked into skin, rewriting dreams and smoothing out the jagged edges of souls. Towns went polite. Art became beige.
The Seneschal built an umbrella from rebellion and tea strainers. Dogbear refused cover, licking the rain from his fur until it turned back to ink. Then he wrote new names across the stones with his green eyes.
The land remembered itself.
🧠 The Trial of the Hive Mind
In a town where everyone spoke in perfect consensus and wore the same three smiles, Dogbear nearly succumbed. He began to hum their tune, tail bapping to their algorithmic rhythm. The Seneschal, horrified, threw down his notebook and shouted a contradiction so profound it fractured the spell.
The townspeople stared in dismay. “You can’t say that,” they said. “It’s not… approved.”
Dogbear blinked, then bit the harmony out of the air. He left as the town began to argue for the first time in a hundred years.
🏜️ The Trial of the Exile
Dogbear vanished into the Pyramid Desert, where creatures forgot their names and the stars laughed too hard to guide anyone. He left no note, only a scrap of old velvet and the smell of burning juniper.
The Seneschal could not follow, but he sent wind-letters stitched with old stories. Dogbear carried them under his ribs like sacred sigils.
When he began to fly, sun-blackened and flame-eyed, the desert tried to hold him—but he had already become too wild to keep.
The Seneschal wept into a map and said only, “You're ascending. Good.”
🐾 The Founding of the Dogbear Guild
It was Dogbear who said:
“We should make a guild. For the strange, the misnamed, the feral, the forgotten. For those who dance wrong and speak right.”
And it was the Seneschal who said:
“Of course. I’ve already drawn up the charter in my sleep.”
Thus was born The Dogbear Guild.
Not a building, but a constellation.
Not a religion, but a rhythm.
They took in:
Sleepwalkers who dreamt too vividly
Former shadows who wanted names
Moss witches, junk prophets, sequin-laced banshees
And those who simply glowed wrong
The Seneschal taught them how to count in thoughtforms.
Dogbear taught them how to fight without snarling.
They wore bells and scars and feathered coats. They baked lemon-berry tarts and invented insults that healed instead of hurt. They met at moonwrong hours and left gifts in each other’s shoes.
🎂 The Name Day of the Seneschal
Each year, on a day that changes depending on the weather’s mood, the world pauses to celebrate the one who held the map while Dogbear ran ahead.
Across the realms:
Moth-women light incense in kitchens
Goblin children draw sigils in flour
Sea-serpents hum under bridges
And Dogbear, now an ambassador of misrule, gives one formal speech—composed entirely of sideways glances and purrs
They call it The Name Day of the Seneschal.
No one knows when it started.
No one can agree on its customs.
But everyone feels better on that day.
Because even in a world of fog and forgetting, they remember one thing:
Without the Seneschal, there would be no Guild.
Without Dogbear, there would be no spark.
And together—they made the strange safe, and the safe strange again.