Aurumel Mask

In Aurumel culture, there is perhaps no symbol more meaningful than one’s mask. The mask not only marks your station in society, quite visibly identifying you as a member of a particular house or guild, but also ensures that you carry with you the prestige or shame of your ancestral line. Finally, it creates a statement of continuity that conceals individual achievement in lieu of the greater exaltation of one’s house or guild.

Laborers often wear heavy iron or solid wooden masks that are simple and well made. Even the faces of slaves are covered with hoods of cloth and secured with chain. The cloth’s color is often tied to the guild or house that owns the slave, while the chain and lock provide less symbolic security.

Perhaps the most unusual manifestation of this practice is the Master’s Mask. This is a custom that allows the work of multiple generations to be completed, albeit symbolically, by the master that initiated the project. If a glorious sculpture takes three hundred years to complete, the mask s passed through a succession of artists who then continue their lives and work as if they were that original genius. In many cases, this crosses lines of gender and age. The mask may bestow a mother’s life upon a son’s body, for example. The son assumes the name and identity of his mother, all in service to the work, and his mother’s lasting legacy. There are some masters who have “lived” for well over a thousand years, carried on the backs of dozens of Aurumel bodies. It is in this way that a single work of craft, especially a grand work taking generations to complete — be it a statue, a monument, or even an airship — can provide an Aurumel artisan immortality.