The Kurillian Table · Tiressian Empire · Standard-Bearer Rites
Standard-Bearer’s Ceremonial Spiced Wine
“We carry what cannot fall. We drink once, together, and then we do not rest.”
The Standard-Bearers
The Standard-Bearers are the Tiressian Empire’s most sacred military unit — a ceremonial and magical corps whose duty is to defend the imperial banners in battle and to carry them at all significant rites. Their role is not merely symbolic. The banners themselves are warded objects, charged through decades of Glyph and Radiance magic, bound to the empire’s identity in ways that Tiressian military doctrine considers tactically significant and theologically non-negotiable. A banner lost in battle is not merely a morale event. It is a wound in the empire’s coherent identity.
Before any significant campaign departure, state ceremony, or banner consecration, the Standard-Bearers conduct a private rite that concludes with the sharing of this spiced wine. It is consumed once, in silence, in equal portions, by every member of the unit present. The wine is not elaborate — the spices are precise, the proportions fixed — but it is made with the empire’s best red wine, and it is never rushed. The Standard-Bearers are not permitted to speak after they drink it until the banner has been formally taken up and the rite concluded. The silence is the declaration.
Outside of formal rites, this wine has become the standard-bearer of Tiressian military toasts more broadly — served at officers’ dinners, promotion ceremonies, and the quiet gatherings of veteran legions who have served together long enough to have earned each other’s silence. The recipe is publicly known. The context that makes it sacred is not transferable.
Recipe
Standard-Bearer’s Ceremonial Spiced Wine
Serves
6–8
Prep
5 minutes
Cook
20 min + steeping
Ingredients
- 1 bottle (750ml) dry red wine — the best available
- 1 cup pomegranate juice
- 2 tablespoons honey
- 3 cinnamon sticks
- 6 whole cloves
- 4 cardamom pods, lightly crushed
- 2 star anise
- 3 strips orange peel (no white pith)
- 1 strip lemon peel
- 1 teaspoon black pepper, whole
- ½ teaspoon dried thyme
Instructions
- Combine wine, pomegranate juice, and honey in a heavy-based saucepan. Stir to begin dissolving the honey.
- Add cinnamon sticks, cloves, cardamom, star anise, orange peel, lemon peel, black pepper, and thyme.
- Heat over medium-low until the mixture steams. Do not boil. The wine must be treated with respect.
- Reduce to lowest heat and steep for 20 minutes. The wine will deepen in colour and the spices will become fully integrated.
- Taste. Add more honey if needed — the wine should be warming and slightly sweet, never cloying. The pepper should be present but not dominant.
- Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a clean vessel or directly into serving cups.
- Serve in plain ceramic cups — not the finest goblets, not the plainest field cups. Somewhere between. The Standard-Bearers do not perform for an audience.
- Each person receives an equal measure. The cups are raised together. No toast is spoken. The wine is drunk in silence.
Variations
Without Pomegranate: Use a full bottle of red wine and increase honey to 3 tablespoons — the pomegranate came with Suryani river-traders and was adopted into the recipe approximately a century ago. The older version is considered more austere and is still preferred by conservative Standard-Bearer companies.
Officers’ Table Version: Serve warm rather than hot, in slightly larger portions, at post-campaign officers’ dinners where the silence is optional but the equal portions are not.
Non-Alcoholic: Replace wine and pomegranate juice with dark grape juice and pomegranate juice in equal parts. Used at rites that include younger Standard-Bearers still in their preparatory service years.
Kurillian Notes
The Tiressian Empire has a great many ceremonial wines across its festivals and military traditions. This is the only one drunk in silence. The distinction is not incidental. Other wines accompany celebration, commemoration, negotiation, or oath. This one accompanies the moment before action — when everything has been decided and nothing has yet happened and the weight of what is about to be carried settles fully onto the shoulders of the people in the room. The silence is the most honest response to that weight that Tiressian tradition has found.
Leave a Reply