Empress

Empress is the absolute ruler of the Blazing-World, a sovereign whose authority reaches from the organization of knowledge and religious life to the command of armies across worlds. Her arc turns on a striking conjunction: she seeks answers with persistent intellectual curiosity and insists that faith should be cultivated through persuasion, yet she also makes conquest the instrument of political order. Her passage from one world to another brings that tension into sharp focus, as a professed rescue of her native country ends in the subjection of its rivals to the King of Esfi.

Sovereignty and the Ordering of Society

After receiving sovereign power over the Blazing-World, Empress investigates its government and religion. Its political leaders defend monarchy by comparing a state with a body that ought to have one head, and by linking one Emperor’s authority to the people’s worship of one God. The priests likewise describe a single shared religion, expressed through prayers shaped to different needs rather than through competing forms of worship. Their account reveals unity as a principle of both state and faith, not merely a practical arrangement.

That orderly system also rests on exclusion. Women have no place in the public congregations: the priests say they pray privately at home because women and men together might distract worshippers. Women and children are also barred from public employment, while priests and governors are made eunuchs to prevent marriage and the influence of families. Empress questions these arrangements directly, asking why women lack a congregation of their own and why they should be treated as a political danger when they hold no office. The exchange places her own female sovereignty against institutions that deny women public religious and civic authority.

Empress also supports the specialized societies of her diverse subjects, encouraging their study and founding schools and learned organizations. But patronage does not mean unlimited license. When Logicians defend disputation as necessary to Natural Philosophy, she refuses to dissolve their society but confines its debates to its schools, warning that they could disturb religion, law, and government. Her rule values learning while setting boundaries around forms of inquiry she judges destabilizing.

Conversion, Persuasion, and Spiritual Inquiry

After hearing the priests’ account, Empress considers their religion deficient and resolves to convert the people to her own faith. She establishes churches and creates a women’s congregation, placing herself at its head and teaching its members. The women become devout and zealous, and her preaching helps win affection across the population. Yet her success brings a new anxiety: she fears that people may tire of religious truth and return to their own desires. To secure belief, she devises a striking spectacle using a Fire-stone and a Star-stone, turning material wonders into religious emblems. The accompanying account stresses that she seeks to sustain belief without force or bloodshed and regards persuasion and love as more lasting than fear.

Her desire to understand the world she left behind leads her to summon the Immaterial Spirits. She questions them about the spirits’ presence in the air, their material vehicles, their speech and knowledge, and the limits of what created beings can know. Their replies complicate any simple claim to supernatural authority: the spirits explain that they move through corporeal vehicles, lack universal knowledge, and can forget unrecorded events. When they discuss the Cabbala, they distinguish varieties of interpretation and do not claim certainty about divine mysteries. Empress’s questioning is persistent, but the dialogue repeatedly marks the limits of natural and created knowledge.

The limits become personal when Empress announces that she wants to make a Jewish Cabbala. The Spirits abruptly disappear, and she falls into a trance. On recovering, she imagines that her request may have caused them to be punished and sent into the earth’s darkest regions; her distress concerns not only their disappearance but the possibility that she has brought suffering upon them. She orders the Fly-men and Worm-men to search for the Spirits. Later, when she consults the Duchess’s Soul about the project, the Duchess warns that the Spirits are fallible and cannot possess absolute knowledge or know the Creator’s mysteries unless divinely inspired. She advises Empress to abandon mystical interpretation in favor of what can be learned through sense and reason. The episode checks the sovereign’s confidence in inquiry without extinguishing her desire to know.

Return to the Native Country

Empress eventually discovers a passage from the Blazing-World to her native world and chooses to intervene when she learns that other nations threaten its naval power. Before approaching the enemy, she sends Fish-men and Bird-men to reconnoiter. At night, they carry burning Fire-stones over the sea and through the air, making both appear to blaze; those who see the display believe the Last Day has arrived and fall to prayer. At dawn, the lights go out, revealing the Blazing-World’s ships, which appear to move without sails or weapons. Painted dark, the gold vessels conceal their material and leave the opposing fleet bewildered and unable to act.

Empress then sends a letter to the native country’s general and commanders, offering assistance and asking them to state when they want it. Their council cannot quickly agree on a reply, and she grows angry enough to consider returning home without helping. The Duchess urges patience, explaining that large councils are slow because their members hold different opinions and prolong discussion. Empress’s irritation exposes the contrast between her decisive command and the deliberative politics of the country she means to save.

She finally appears above the water in garments of light and tells the assembled countrymen that she was born in their kingdom. Although she is now Empress of a whole world, she says she has left her tranquillity, riches, and pleasure to prevent their ruin. She promises to destroy their enemies and make them the most powerful nation in that world, asking in return for grateful acknowledgment of her power, love, and loyalty. Her subjects receive the offer with thanks, but their interpretations of her differ: some call her an angel or goddess, while others suspect sorcery or diabolical deception. The spectacle establishes her authority while leaving its meaning unsettled among those who witness it.

Conquest and the World Tributary Order

When the fleets are to fight, Empress returns in imperial robes set with diamonds and carbuncles, carrying a single-carbuncle shield and a single-diamond spear. Her Fish-men, protected by diamond cases, approach enemy ships before uncovering and wetting the Fire-stones; the fires reach the ships’ gunpowder, and the hostile navies are destroyed. The native country’s people acclaim her as a deliverer. She does not, however, return to the Blazing-World after this victory: she remains until the rest of the world has been forced to submit to her native country.

The King of Esfi, sovereign of that country, reports that hostile naval forces still obstruct the trade of his dominions. Empress answers that she will burn or sink ships that refuse to pay tribute and sends neighboring trading nations a demand to pay the King. When they reject it, she orders their ships destroyed. They eventually submit, leaving the King master of the seas and, through the importance of maritime commerce, master of the world. The sequence transforms assistance into a system of imposed tribute: the power that protects one country’s trade disables the trade of its neighbors and compels their political submission.

The arrangement provokes resistance. The neighboring nations join forces again, and Empress sends the Fish-men to destroy what remains of their naval power, forcing them once more to submit. Nations able to live without foreign trade, and those whose commerce is conducted by land, refuse the tribute. Empress threatens to burn their towns and cities and, when they reject her demand, orders Bird-men and Worm-men to attack. She directs them to begin with smaller towns, since she is reluctant to cause more destruction than necessary, while warning that continued resistance will bring greater ruin. The campaign proceeds by planned escalation: the Bear-men use Telescopes to identify the towns, and the attackers are instructed where to strike. Her stated restraint modifies the scale of violence, not its purpose of compelling obedience.

Imperial Display and Return

Having saved her native country and made it the absolute monarchy of that world, Empress becomes an object of fascination to its princes. She invites them to assemble their ships in a broad circle on the open sea, where her fleet can close the ring and present her to them. Her Star-stone-adorned appearance leads spectators to regard her as a celestial being or an uncreated goddess, linking beauty and supernatural spectacle to the authority already demonstrated by military victory.

At the darkest hour, she stages an entertainment with the Fire-stones, first making air and sea blaze and then extinguishing the lights so that she alone appears in her garments of light. Bird-men carry her into the air; afterward, Fish-men sing from the sea and Bird-men answer from above, as if the two realms were conversing in song. At daybreak she visits the King of Esfi, assures him that her assistance remains available, and tells the assembled rulers to pay him tribute. She then enters her own ship; the fleet sinks beneath the sea and remains submerged until it reaches the Blazing-World. The disappearance concludes her public demonstration with another assertion of power over the visible and invisible movements of her fleet.

Back at the imperial palace, Empress is joyfully reunited with the Emperor, whose love for her is returned in equal measure. The Duchess’s Soul asks why, despite having enough wealth to enrich the world, Empress did not enrich her family. Empress answers that she loves both her native country and her family, but believes that abundant gold and riches make people mad and lead them to destroy one another. The explanation complicates her immense accumulation of imperial power: she withholds private enrichment because she distrusts wealth’s effects, even as she has built the King of Esfi’s supremacy through conquest and tribute.