The Civic Cult of the Free City I

The Integrated Revolutionary Committee of the Free City maintains a civic cult, rooted in the religion of Vanmi, the highly-syncretic faith developed by the Ndata-mbanyiti diaspora.

The focus of this civic cult is a deity called Mboloké, with a much reduced focus on his many children. Mboloké is depicted as a sphinx made out of stone and iron and is said to stalk through the city and eat the brains of those citizens who catch his fancy.  His portfolio includes solitude, filth, ugliness, midden heaps, prisons, armies, labor, alienation, fog, ghost rock, poverty, love, money, pavement, trees, visions, omens, hallucinations, miracles, ecstacies, dreams, adorations, illuminations, religions, breakthroughs, crucifixions, epiphanies, despairs, minds, new loves, suicide, and (most importantly) the Free City itself, and it is whispered that his voice can be heard in the sounds of screaming children, boy-soldiers sobbing, and the weeping of old men in the plazas.  He lives under stairways.

Roads of Mboloké include:

• The Nightmare of Himself
• Mboloké Swecra:  Mboloké Original One
• The Loveless
• Mboloké t'Aigul:  Mboloké of the Brass Tower
• Mental  Mboloké
• The Heavy Judger of Men
• The Congress of Sorrows
• Mboloké Ho'oh ???:  Whose Buildings Are Judgments
• The Vast Stone of War
• The Stunned Colonizers
• The Clockwork Mind
• Whose Blood is Running Money
• Whose Fingers Are Ten Armies
• Whose Breast is a Cannibal Dynamo
• Whose Ear is a Smoking Tomb
• Whose Eyes Are a Thousand Blind Windows
• Whose Towers Stand in the Long Streets Like Endless Gods
• Whose Labor Dreams and Chokes in the Fog
• Crowned With Chimneys and Antennae
• Whose Love is Endless Ghost Rock and Stone
• Usurious Lightning Soul
• Whose Poverty is the Specter of Genius
• Whose Fate is a Sexless Cloud
• The Mind
• In Whom I Sit Lonely
• In Whom I Dream Angels
• Who Entered My Soul Early
• Bodiless Consciousness
• Who Frightened Me Out of My Natural Ecstasy
• Whom I Abandon
• Light Streaming Out of the Sky
• Skeleton Treasury
• Blind Lord
• Demonic Overseer
• Spectral Nation
• Invincible Madhouse
• Granite Cock
• Monstrous Bomb
• Gone Down the River
• The Whole Boatload of Sensitive Bullshit
• Ten Years' Animal Screams and Suicides
• Mad Generation
• Down on the Rocks of Time
• Real Holy Laughter in the River
• Of the Wild Eyes
• Of the Holy Yells
• Bidding Farewell
• Waving
• Carrying Flowers
• Into the Street

According to Free City Vanmi lore, the world began as nothing but chaos with a single egg found in its centre. From that egg,  Mboloké Swecra is said to have hatched and begun to form the world.  Mboloké Swecra then created kel-Gaid, kel-Kiap, and kel-Nitarig, the small monster gods of time, space, and reversals, as well as the lake trio, Tirpsem, Eixu, and Fleza, said to be the embodiments of emotion, knowledge and willpower respectively. From there, these small monster gods created the world and Mboloké Swecra fell into a deep slumber, to awaken only upon the victory of the Free City in the Second Free City War.

According to one Free City Vanmi legend, the Brass Tower once stood as a home for Mboloké t'Aigul back in Ndata-mbanye. At one point, the Brass Tower was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, only to be quenched by the rains that followed soon after. Three nameless small monster gods were said to have died with the tower’s destruction but were resurrected by Mboloké Ho'oh as Wokiar, Yetné, and Enucius—the roaming legendary dogs who are said to have taken on the three characteristics of the tower’s destruction (electric, fire, water), as well as the legendary birds Onucitra, Sertlom, and Sodpaz.  It is said that upon the Brass Tower’s destruction, Mboloké t'Aigul left to find a new home, eventually finding the land that would one day be the Free City, while Mboloké Ho'oh flew off in search of someone pure-hearted enough to be taught how to capture and train the small monster gods.