The seven Princes of Vice

The canonical map

#	Vice	Prince	Bound Seal	Patron city	Kindred Black Mineral
#1	VicePride	PrinceLuzhar	Bound SealI — Solar Range	Patron cityKarzhar	Kindred Black MineralBlack Aurica
#2	ViceLust	PrinceAsmoteth	Bound SealII — Twilight Range	Patron cityAsmotheri	Kindred Black MineralBlack Carmine
#3	ViceGluttony	PrinceBelzebar	Bound SealIII — Southern Range	Patron cityBelkar	Kindred Black MineralBlack Manna
#4	ViceEnvy	PrinceLeviath	Bound SealIV — Open Sea	Patron cityLeviakol	Kindred Black MineralPestilent Salt
#5	ViceSloth	PrinceBelifor	Bound SealV — Septentrional Massif	Patron cityBelikatra	Kindred Black MineralBlack Ice
#6	ViceGreed	PrinceMammen	Bound SealVI — Insular Archipelago	Patron cityMammon-Ur	Kindred Black MineralDense Aurica
#7	ViceWrath	PrinceSathnar	Bound SealVII — Deep East	Patron citySathkar	Kindred Black MineralPestilent Iron

One Prince per Seal. No overlap. See The seven Seals for the geography of each.

1. Luzhar — the Proud

Vice: Pride. Root: Lucifer, the fallen bearer of light.
Function: Emperor of Hell by right. Politically diminished since the Theomachy — he commands less than the title says, and he knows it.
Domain: pride, unbounded ambition, refusal of subordination, monuments raised to oneself, self-idolatry.
Patron city: Karzhar, political capital of the Heptarchy. White, of marble salvaged from the Veherenic ruins, and without a wall — Luzhar forbade a wall as a sign of Pride. His throne exists and stands empty. See Karzhar.
Seal: I — the Solar Range. He claims Mount Choir, the highest peak on the continent, as an earthly throne. He passes over the range at altitude from time to time; the contemplative monks see him before he is gone. He does not fight in the field.
Appearance: a tall humanoid figure, a face too beautiful, burnt wings hanging behind, a weightless crown floating above the head. When he speaks, mirrors break within thirty paces.
Sigil: a six-pointed star inverted, with a central eye. Old gold on black.
Flaw: he cannot receive genuine subordination. He trusts nobody beneath him. Plant a rumour that a vassal has been favoured too far and Luzhar punishes the vassal — creating the revenge that will cost him.

2. Asmoteth — the Voluptuous

Vice: Lust. Root: Asmodeus.
Function: Prince of the courts of the flesh. Patron of incubi and succubi, and of the passions that eat the will. The Spina folklore operates under him.
Domain: seduction, loss of control, blinding passion, betrayal in love, corrupted marriage, obsession.
Patron city: Asmotheri, cultural capital of the Heptarchy. Pact salons, temple-brothels. The population is largely female — but the city's real cult is that of the Four Mothers, who owe him nothing. A permanent friction.
Seal: II — the Twilight Range. He does not fight in the open: he infiltrates. The functional vampirism of the region, the strigoi, the drudes and the wolf-men are manifestations of his subjects. Which is why Seal II is handled by quarantine and not by conquest.
Appearance: a triple figure — three faces over one body, each speaking a different language at once. All three beautiful. A sweet-rotten smell.
Sigil: a rose with a central thorn. Wine red on black.
Flaw: he cannot bear repeated refusal. A hero who resists twice, with absolute clarity, leaves Asmoteth enraged to the point of becoming predictable. Resisting is not easy: he attacks the physical, the emotional and the symbolic at the same time.

3. Belzebar — the Devourer

Vice: Gluttony. Root: Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.
Function: Prince of gluttony. Patron of swarms, of plagues, of hunger turned into frenzy, and of the ghul.
Domain: gluttony, unappeasable hunger, parasitism, destructive consumption, the feast that ends in massacre.
Patron city: Belkar, an endless market-banquet. Fields of dark cereal consumed only within. It was the target of the Order's last offensive — the Winter of Belkar, 1884, which died on the steppe before arriving. See The fifteen battles.
Seal: III — the Southern Range. The only Seal whose demons came out incarnate in living lava, when the Volkar split in 1783. He builds trap-feasts: places that look like a prosperous village and devour the traveller.
Appearance: a human figure of perfect beauty and visible appetite, surrounded by flies. When he draws close, the swarm forms a second face behind the first. The voice is an organised buzzing. A smell of putrefied sugar.
Sigil: three flies in a circle. Green-yellow on black.
Flaw: he devours indiscriminately, allies included. When he goes hungry — which only happens beside consecrated ground — he turns frantic and stupid. Troops that hold consecrated ground for days force Belzebar into a mistake.

4. Leviath — the Envious

Vice: Envy. Root: Leviathan, serpent of the primordial sea.
Function: Prince of cosmic envy. The theologians call him the most miserable of the seven, because envy is the only vice that gives the vicious no pleasure — only his own pain, added to another's.
Domain: resentment, slander, sabotage, the wish that another should lose, pleasure in another's suffering with no gain of one's own.
Patron city: Leviakol, a port on the Tenebrum Sea. Its people speak in a hiss. It was there that the pact fleet burned inside its own harbour on the Night of Red Sails, 1879 — and it has not been rebuilt in eleven years.
Seal: IV — the Open Sea, the only underwater one. He moves in deep water and rises periodically, causing the canonical storms. Once a decade he surfaces entire — the Vigil of the Pit — and the combined fleet puts out to contain him. It costs a great deal. They never kill him.
Appearance: a massive sea serpent; or, when he chooses a human shape, a beautiful man with eyes too large and a mouth too small, slow gestures, a flat voice. A smell of low tide.
Sigil: a serpent biting itself at the wrong angle. Rotten green on black.
Flaw: he cannot see his own victory. Even winning, he feels he has lost, because others gained things he did not notice. He can be tricked into sabotaging himself: convince him another Prince profited more and he will attack the ally instead of the enemy.

5. Belifor — the Sleeper

Vice: Sloth (acedia). Root: Belphegor, demon of the inventions that spare labour.
Function: Prince of torpor. Patron of the ice demons, of paralysis and of melancholies with no cure. Also of the tempting inventions — machines that replace holy effort and weaken the soul of whoever uses them.
Domain: torpor, medieval acedia, hopelessness, spiritual numbness, the shrug, paralysis before a moral choice, boredom that kills.
Patron city: Belikatra, city of idleness and organised tedium, half-buried under permanent snow. The cult of Sloth takes the form of ritual paralysis. Mortality by spontaneous sleep is high.
Seal: V — the Septentrional Massif. It brought winter three months early when it broke in 1782 — the Early Winter, which killed some 1.9 million by famine. He leaves whole villages asleep: populations lying down at home, dead of torpor, with no wound on them.
Appearance: a reclining figure, exceedingly beautiful and exceedingly slow, with heavy eyelids. A low, dragging voice. A smell of dust and spent wax.
Sigil: an ice flower — a crystalline hexagram with the petals turned inward. Blue-grey on black.
Flaw: he is the easiest to ignore and the hardest to remove. He rarely attacks; he corrodes by presence. He disperses under intense activity — a public feast, a forced march, continuous collective prayer. But when the community tires, he comes back stronger.

6. Mammen — the Miser

Vice: Greed. Root: Mammon.
Function: Prince of the infernal economies. Patron of the market in souls, of pact contracts and of interest on demonic debt. The richest and the most calculating of the seven.
Domain: possession, withholding, usury, hoarding without use, betrayal for money, enslavement by debt.
Patron city: Mammon-Ur, economic capital of the Heptarchy. Fortress vaults, pact banks, a weekly auction of Black Mineral and of souls. It trades clandestinely with Velinian and Brytonian agents across the Tenebrum Sea.
Seal: VI — the Insular Archipelago, the last to break, in 1786, months before the Archangels came down. Mammen barely had time to get out — and adapted to the only ground left to him: the contract. He is not violent; he is insidious. His subjects work inside exchanges, banks and law offices. That is why the Brytonian front sees almost no fighting and why the Insular Inquisition does its work on a trading floor.
Appearance: a thin, elegant figure dressed in a thousand layers of expensive cloth, pockets spilling coins that ring on the floor and vanish before they land. His hands are always closed. Yellow eyes.
Sigil: a bitten coin — a metal circle with tooth marks. Corrupted gold on black.
Characteristic subjects: the Pale Collectors, entities that call in pact debts. In Brithon, a Collector does not pursue: he files.
Flaw: he only gives in order to receive more. He can be forced to hand something over if convinced he will gain by it. Pacts with Mammen always escalate, and a clever hero can corner him on a ladder of pacts until it breaks him. Missing a single rung costs a soul.

7. Sathnar — the Wrathful

Vice: Wrath. Root: Sathanas.
Function: Prince of wrath. Patron of the forge demons, of direct war and of ancient hatred. An uneasy ally of the fallen Watchers — especially Azzal, who taught men the forge. They contest the patronage of the pact-bound soldiery.
Domain: revenge, pure hatred, endless war, pleasure in blood, justified fury that devours justice.
Patron city: Sathkar, forge-city on the eastern front against Vykhradia. Forges perpetually lit, red smoke visible at night for kilometres. It is also where the nine fallen Watchers physically dwell, in separate towers. They do not come out. But they are there.
Seal: VII — the Deep East, the epicentre. It broke beneath Ivandir on 17-18 October 1780 and opened the war. The only Seal from which the Watchers emerged alive and articulate, able to teach the Veherenic survivors to purify Black Mineral and to make a formal pact. See The Cataclysm of Ivandir.
Appearance: a man of hard beauty, cinnabar red, curved horns, a sword of Black Mineral always in hand. A voice like a structured roar. A smell of burnt iron.
Sigil: a triple flame with a blade at the centre. Blood red on black.
Flaw: he cannot wait. He attacks before he thinks. One insulting sentence delivered by a messenger is enough to make him march alone with the vanguard into a prepared position. He can be killed by patience.

Structural notes

The Heptarchy as an inverted mirror

The seven cities form the Pact Heptarchy — a confederation with the same arithmetic as the seven States of the Clerical Order. The structural mirroring is deliberate: seven against seven, Karzhar against Aurum Roma, the Crowned of the Flesh against the Crowned Cardinals, a daily black mass against a daily mass.

The difference that counts: the Order has one One, recognised by Heaven, and the Heptarchy has an empty throne.

Political fragmentation

The seven do not obey Luzhar in practice, and three factions obey nobody at all: the fallen Watchers at Sathkar, the Four Mothers — the Domus Filiarum, older than the whole hierarchy — and several of the seventy-two Kings, autonomous since the Cataclysm.

Hell is as fragmented as the Curia, and for the same reasons.

Hell stalled too

In the Stagnation the Princes do not advance, the Kings reveal nothing new and the Watchers whisper less each year. The annual tribute of pledged souls settled at around twenty-four thousand and has been falling for a decade.

"You say Heaven is tired of us. We say Hell is tired of us. The sentence is geometrically symmetrical. Perhaps it is the same thing." — pact-bound deposition under exorcism, 1890