za3k > archive > lexicon1 > Elector-Prince Rzeszutko

Mionzha Rzes (5206-5289, Real Ordinal Date Standard 45541f-45624) was born in uncertain circumstances to a small village outside historical Hondif in the Principality of Ionzh.

He was elected the 18th Elector-Prince-For-Life of Ionzh in 5240 (RODS 45576a), adopting the honorific name Ponzuknari (Dawning Sun). His first few years of rule reformed the lax system of laws, raising taxes and imposing far harsher legal penalties. Between his personal charisma and scholarly reputation, significant resulting economic boosts, and the removal of several well-known corrupt politicians, his reforms were if not met with approval at least accepted without major complaint.

Two years into his rule, he started to become increasingly obsessed with a splinter sect of Rotorastianism focusing on ritual purity, indeed changing his honorific to Rzeszutko (Ritual Purity). He went into retreat in the Bentways (see Bentways, the) for a year, bathing dozens of times a day and by his own later account, spending every hour in study of fringe religious and scholarly texts. Finally he re-appeared, reporting a prophetic vision from Zan-Taranth that the Ionzhians were the Chosen People, but an unpreventable, cosmos-destroying disaster would come in eight thousand years. His attempts to prevent the disaster are well-documented as the Revisionist Period. He was in poor health for the second half of his reign, after his speech at Traitor's Ridge.

After his death in the Incandescent Temporeactor, his son took on the name and public identity of Elector-Prince Rzeszutko, under the fiction that Rzeszutko was a Wax-Witch, an immortal mythological being which is reformed after its apparent death. By this means, the Rzeszutko dynasty continued for hundreds of years without the risk of popular election.

Excerpt from "The legal status of the present-day Rzeszutko Compound", Mizar-5 Diplomatic Corp