Glossary of Merretia

The load-bearing names of the continent and its city of Sulamir: the words a newcomer meets at the table, defined as the people of Merretia would use them. Terms are grouped by subject and run alphabetical within each group.

Cosmology & the Gods

All light is lent. The universal law that nothing in creation is owned; everything is borrowed against a bond, and every bond comes due. It binds everything without exception, the gods and the Source included.

Angels. Order-tilted beings of the generation below the Gods, geometric and precise, lawful and covenantal in disposition, and not “good” in any simple sense. In their true form a standing lattice of light-bearing structure; often mistaken for automata.

Archon. The highest accessible order of being, a pattern that stands astride the Wound and whose body can be killed but does not stay dead, the class of death-and-return the theologies fear most. The archon of Order expresses all four Order channels at once as pure white; the archon of Chaos, all four Chaos channels as pure black. No living person is publicly known to be one.

The Bondsworn. In Temple liturgy, the pair of mortal souls, one inward and one outward, whose bond is prophesied to heal the divided world; also called the Two Who Will Heal the Sky. Laypeople hear it as a distant metaphor for marriage or community.

The Companion. The second being, made by the Source out of the refusal to be alone; equal in power, distinct in disposition, the principle of relation and togetherness. The bond between the two is the pattern from which all reality descends.

Daemons (demons). Chaos-tilted beings paired to the angels, organic and flowing, generative and unbound, and not “evil” in any simple sense. “Demon” is the frightened mainstream’s mishearing of the older word daemon.

The Eight. The mainstream pantheon worshipped across the eighteen provinces: Embelekor, Yadra, Zathra, Ilogo, Bamoph-bam, Rashel, Michana, and Jawehn. Every Sulamiri knows all eight names, but no two traditions agree on which god rules what; the names came down whole, the meanings did not.

Eshen. The hell of mainstream theology, where the devils are said to dwell and sinners are consigned. Working Sulamiris treat it with almost domestic ease (“I’ll wait in Eshen for ye”), which infuriates the priests.

The Hollow. The shadow of the Wound in the world, the absence of relation itself, a gap through which things enter or leave reality that should not. It grows when bonds of love and oath fail and shrinks when they are kept; routing faith through it is the forbidden tenth discipline, outlawed in every province.

Hollow cults. Rare, hidden, and hunted cults that worship the absence at the center of reality, teaching that the primal bond was a mistake and that severance is liberation. Their rites widen the Wound and cause kaiju outbreaks, and they are held to be the gravest threat to the world.

Kaiju. Monstrous entities that have grown in the Wound or crossed into the world through the Hollow; their existence is a physical symptom of the cosmic rupture.

Mal’akha and Mal’akhaham. The two oldest human bloodlines, descended from the founding contracts: the Mal’akha from lines bound to the angel-half of a founding pair, the Mal’akhaham from the daemon-half. The descent is carried in old contracts, not visible traits, and most who carry it never know until a trained eye names it.

The One. In the Temple’s teaching, the single hidden unity behind the Eight and the devils, of which all the gods are facets; all their powers are real, and none of them ultimate. The Temple does not claim to know what the One is.

The Relational Principle. The load-bearing idea of Merretian metaphysics: reality is held together by the bonds between beings, every layer echoing the original Source-and-Companion pair. Love, oath-keeping, and loyalty are real work on the fabric of reality; cruelty and betrayal damage it and feed the Hollow.

Soul pact. A formal covenant binding part of a person’s soul to another will, with a sole purpose, a return condition, and a cost. A pact-bound person killed at their duty returns to life at a warded anchor, while the pact slowly thins their memory, personality, or appetite.

The Source. The first being, who existed alone for an unmeasured time and, refusing to be alone, made the Companion; the principle of existence itself, the reason there is something rather than nothing. Also called the First, the Origin, the Unnamed.

The Temple of the One. The wealthiest religious institution on the continent and its largest single landholder, employer, and lender, holding one guild seat. It teaches the One behind the many and humility before mystery, running a public pulpit doctrine and an inner register taught only to vetted students.

Teyhiaopom. A small folk religion teaching that the universe is held together by the intimate bond between paired souls, and that devotion to one fully-known person is the highest virtue. Its priests tend an ordinary hearth-fire rather than build temples, and the mainstream faiths regard it as harmless and eccentric.

The Wound. The rupture in the deepest layer of reality left when the bond between the Source and the Companion was partly sundered in pre-history; the primordials remain, but no longer fully hold each other. It cannot be seen directly, and its existence is inferred from the Hollow.

Zar’ir. The Founding-Tongue name for the Gods as a class, “throne-sworn,” the generation of cosmic beings made directly by the Source and the Companion in Order-and-Chaos pairs. Zar’ir is a class-name, not any one god’s name; each God is a Zar’ir.

Magic & the Disciplines

The Binding. The Order discipline of structure, adhesion, seals, oaths, and mending; at its height it governs what binds to what, and can bind even light, sound, or a will. Its color is yellow.

Chaos. The four emergent currents of life and mind (Growing, Knowing, Heart, Dream), generative and unpredictable, the life of reality. Its cost is paid by the self and its colors absorb light. Chaos means creative unpredictability, not disorder.

Color law. The in-world rule, carried on guild regalia and identification papers, that fixes one color to each channel: Order channels glow (yellow, blue, cyan, orange), Chaos channels stain (green, magenta, red, indigo), Unshaped Faith burns gold, and the Hollow shows as a void. White is reserved for the archon of Order and black, the Key, for the archon of Chaos. A practitioner’s eyes flash their channel’s color at the moment of casting.

Conviction. The depth of a practitioner’s belief, which sets how cheaply their faith flows. A working that sits at the center of what a character most believes costs the least; faith is cheapest when it is truest.

The Current. The Order discipline of electricity, light, and magnetism, the most versatile physical force, ranging from a spark to a district-wide surge or a full illusion. Its color is cyan.

Discipline (the nine channels). The nine shapes faith can take, older than humankind and inherited from the angels and daemons, arranged on one spectrum from purest Order to purest Chaos: four Order disciplines, four Chaos disciplines, and Unshaped Faith. Channeling through the Wound is a forbidden tenth.

The Dream. The deepest Chaos discipline, of the unconscious and the mythic: precognition, dreamwalking, prophecy, and becoming a living myth. It borders the Hollow and is the safe, human-mediated form of what the Hollow is in raw. Its color is indigo.

Faith. The substrate of all magic. A practitioner’s power in any discipline is proportional to the depth of their faith, and the shape of their practice is set by what they have trained that faith to do. There are no spells or incantations, only faith run through a channel under focused belief.

Focus stone. The clear crystal every serious practitioner carries; it takes on the color of whatever channel is run through it and amplifies the working, and without one a caster is capped at the smallest effects. Repeated single-discipline use permanently colors a stone, a process called bonding.

Fray. The Chaos cost, the price the self pays: vitality, and the edges of one’s own identity and memory. It does not clear with rest; Chaos does not damage you, it spends you.

The Growing. The Chaos discipline of life: vitality, healing, plants and animals, and at its height new species, greatly extended life, and living architecture grown rather than built. Its color is green.

The Heart. The Chaos discipline of emotion, will, and bond, the most personal and the most dangerous in a crowd: sensing and shaping moods, forging resonance, and binding unbreakable oaths. Its color is red.

The Knowing. The Chaos discipline of mind and memory: perfect recall, reading an object’s history, detecting deception, and brief omniscience within a single domain. Its color is magenta.

Order. The four fundamental forces of the world made into faith-shapes (Binding, Weight, Current, Unmaking), law-bound and deterministic, the bones of reality. Its cost is paid by the body and its colors emit light.

Reaching. A trained connection to a single discipline, granted by a character’s Calling, giving its toolkit of workings up to a set Tier. Most practitioners hold one Reaching for life; a rare few hold two, almost never on the same side of the spectrum.

Standing work. A self-sustaining miracle, a bound flame, a bound sun, a bound shield, made when enough Unshaped Faith is poured into a thing to make it hyper-real and a Binder then fixes it in one form. It needs no upkeep and cannot be unmade, only relocated; the poured-out self is lent, and will one day be called back.

The Stone-Rite. The great equalizer of Sulamiri life: anyone at all, gifted or not, who has bonded to an already-colored focus stone can pour Unshaped Faith through it, the caster supplying the faith and the stone remembering the shape. It gives even the talentless a road to the disciplines, one stone wide.

Strain. The Order cost, the price the body pays: heat, nerve, and spent tissue, the ache of hard labor. It clears completely with a short rest.

Tier. The scale of a working, from 1 to 9. The smallest, at-will effects cost nothing; every working above that costs its Tier out of Strain or Fray. Workings of Tiers 7 to 9 are legendary and story-scale.

Twofold Faith. The rarest thing a practitioner can be, holding a Reaching in both an Order and a Chaos discipline at once, along one of four matched pairings. It demands a faith supple enough to hold two opposed archetypes without tearing.

The Unmaking. The Order discipline of transformation, entropy, fire, and rust; dissolution, and at its height the transmutation of matter itself. Its color is orange.

Unshaped Faith. The ninth practice, faith exercised with no channel-shape at all, sent straight at a target to make it more real, steadier, and more itself. The practice of saints, priests, and mystics; its cost is paid as pieces of the self given outward into the target. Its color is gold.

The Weight. The Order discipline of mass, density, and permanence: shifting an object’s weight, softening falls, levitation, crushing, and at the far edge collapsing matter. Its color is blue.

Zar’ir Adept. The church-trained caste taught a pre-paired, half-strength Order-and-Chaos crossing as doctrine, the only sanctioned form of Twofold Faith. It is named for the Gods, each of whom is a bonded Order-Chaos pair.

Politics & Institutions

The Council of 18. The eighteen senior guild figures who secretly coordinate continental policy behind the public Senate. Officially dismissed as a conspiracy theory, it predates the Senate and makes Sulamir’s deepest decisions.

Fused House. For seventeen of the eighteen guilds, the guild’s ruling line and a province’s ruling House are the same people under two names. A Fused House head carries the guild’s leadership, the province’s dominant Senate seat, and its Council seat as a single bundle.

Great House. A noble line whose head holds a Senate seat for life and governs a province jointly with the other seated Houses; each keeps a city seat inside Sulamir and an ancestral homeland seat out in its province.

Hall of Houses. The Senate’s meeting hall at the political center of Sulamir, near the central axis of the Dome, where the Senate of Great Houses convenes.

Leader, Right Hand, Left Hand. A guild’s three ruling officers: the Leader holds final authority and usually sits on the Council; the Right Hand handles interior matters and the Left Hand exterior matters, the two together called the lieutenants.

The Marshal corps. The inter-provincial enforcement body, the continent’s nearest thing to a federal police, commanded by the Senate and standing outside any single guild’s jurisdiction. In the gravest cases it can even indict a guild Leader, though the stronger guilds constantly lean on its independence.

OCTA. The Office of Containment and Threat Assessment, funded jointly by the eight mainstream temples (“octa” for eight) and empowered across all eighteen provinces to hunt Hollow practitioners, with authority to execute without trial once Hollow practice is confirmed. Its officers, the Readers, can assay a person, stone, site, or body for where the cost of a working fell. A Hollow accusation is also a favored political weapon.

The Old Oath. The secret Council Oath each Council member swears at initiation, binding them to the Council’s coordination, to guarding the fact of its existence, and to their Council vote. It is the parent text from which the public Universal Guild Oath was simplified, “the oath the Trade was cut from.”

The Senate of Great Houses. Sulamir’s public government, a body of roughly three dozen seats each held by the head of a Great House, which issues edicts, levies taxes, ratifies treaties, and raises armies. What an ordinary citizen means by “the government.”

The Senate Oath. The public oath of office every senator swears on taking their seat, sealed in the Founding Tongue and committing them to the defense of the continent, the Senate’s deliberative tradition, and their province; it closes on “My soul for Sulamir’s.”

The Steam System Workers. The multi-generational underground community, formally neither guild nor union, that maintains Sulamir’s electric grid and steam tunnels. The one power no guild commands, since their strike can dim the city to candles within hours.

Trade lodge. The public face of the eighteen guilds as most citizens meet them, craft-and-employment authorities without whose sanction a commoner cannot practice a trade, open a business, train an apprentice, or petition the Senate.

The Universal Guild Oath. The oath every guild member swears at induction (“I swear to uphold the Guild Trade. My life for many, for all, or for one”), the binding vow of working professional life across all eighteen guilds.

The Veil Levy. The continental tax the Senate levies to maintain the Dome over Sulamir, framed as buying continental safety though in practice the homelands pay for a protection they do not receive.

The Zero-Sum Seat. The founding rule fixing the Council permanently at eighteen seats, so that for one guild to gain real power another must lose it. The structural root of the guilds’ endless cold war.

The City & the Continent

Aldasen. The ruined second great city of Merretia, once Sulamir’s allied sibling and a seat of older lore, unmade in deep history by the lich-king Zar Valareth. Its wreck still scars the plain, and part of its region sank beneath the sea.

Azhandia. A distinct eastern-frontier civilization beyond the reach of Sulamir’s guilds, out where the Waste Lands worsen and the Hollow presses hardest. Where Sulamir answered the founding-age dangers with a Dome, Azhandia answered with a great wall, and ordered its whole caste-bound society around holding it.

The Center Spire. The tallest structure in Sulamir, marking the physical and political center of the city and serving as the keystone of the Cloud network and the ceremonial seat of the Council. Almost certainly Founding-era, and older than the use the Council now makes of it.

The Dome. The always-on Founding-era energy shield that has covered Sulamir throughout recorded history, a translucent cyan curve over the vertical city. It turns aside all conventional attack and all nine disciplines; only the Hollow, being an absence rather than a force, slips through.

The eighteen provinces. The eighteen contiguous provinces that tile the continent, each the hereditary territory of one Council guild. The city of Sulamir mirrors them as eighteen culturally distinct districts, or Quarters, one per province.

The Maw. A deep, haunted stretch of the western sea off the Aldasen coast where part of the continent sank, rumored to hold Aldasen’s drowned treasure and lost works. A celestial event recurring roughly every twenty-two years is prophesied to still the Maw and briefly open a way down to the sunken city.

Merretia. The vast continent of the known world, home to some forty-six million people across eighteen provinces from the western Ocean to the eastern Waste Lands, with the megacity of Sulamir as its heart.

The Red Dragon. The oldest continuously inhabited building on the upthrust, a tavern at the seam where street-level Sulamir, the Founding-era works, and the upper Rhydin levels meet. Famed as neutral ground where any rank may drink together under an ancient house-kept peace; the Red Dragons guild took its name from the tavern, not the reverse.

Rhydin. The ancient pre-Founding human settlement that stood on the upthrust before the angels and daemons built Sulamir over and through it. The Rhydin levels are its surviving masonry at the very bottom of the Steam Tunnels, sealed chambers and intact rooms of unknown purpose that even the Steam Workers treat with dread.

The Steam Tunnels. The maze beneath Sulamir that carries both the electric grid and the steam-powered transit, maintained by the Steam System Workers. Its deepest sections date to the Founding and tap the residual heat of the upthrust.

Sulamir. The principal city-state of Merretia and the heart of the continent, a vertical megacity of some thirty-five million under a single Dome, built where the great river system meets the Ocean. In the political sense Sulamir and the eighteen-province continent are one entity; the city is the continent.

Vashkil and Alshera. The two moons. Vashkil is small and fast, crossing the sky several times a night; Alshera is larger to the eye, dimmer, and slow. Their rare daylight alignment is the astronomical signature named in the prophecy of the Maw.

The Waste Lands. The uninhabited, dangerous eastern edge of Merretia, explicitly outside Council territory and watched along a frontier by the four eastern provinces. Whether they are unhealed Founding-era damage or a hunting ground of kaiju is disputed.

Zar Valareth. The lich-king of deep history who unmade the city of Aldasen and turned its people to ghouls, called the Last Zar after the sovereign title of the age before the Council. His defeat preceded the founding of the Senate.

Technology & the Founding Age

Angel feathers. A rare and illegal class of artifact, slim feather-shaped pieces of metal of angelic origin that carry a residual angelic signature and serve as high-efficiency catalysts for the Order disciplines. Some are said to hold a sleeping mind, and the OCTA watches their black market closely.

The buried suns. The primal power source of the whole city: captured stars, each a pulsing cyan core seated in Founding-era vaults beneath the Steam Tunnels. Not batteries but stars held in containment, from which the grid, the magnerail, the Cloud network, and the Dome all ultimately draw.

Buried-sun cell. The swappable, palm-sized charge-store that runs everything portable, from household lamps to airship engines to a Marshal’s coil-arm. A cell holds a finite charge and recharges only at a grid recharge post; cut off from the grid, it goes inert.

The Cloud network. Sulamir’s weather-and-defense shield, a geodesic field held aloft by the city’s tall spires with the Center Spire as its keystone. It blocks unwanted weather, turns most aerial attack, and distorts certain magic; Founding-era in origin, since extended by artificers.

Coil-arm. The standard buried-sun-powered ranged weapon of Marshals and House forces, an artificer-made firearm drawing on a swappable cell. Relic-grade versions, the Vow-Rifles carried by champions and Marshal-Captains, are wrought of oath-metal.

The Founding. The deep-antiquity age when the angels and daemons bonded with humanity, built Sulamir, and raised its deep works: the Dome, the Center Spire, the Cloud network, the magnerail, and the buried suns. Founding-era relics run on principles no living artificer fully understands or can replicate.

The magnerail. Sulamir’s primary transit, an electromagnetic-suspension rail (the Current discipline at industrial scale) running through the vertical city and out to the other provinces. Frictionless and uncannily fast; the inter-provincial line is probably Founding-era.

Oath-metal. A vow-bound metal of Kardun smithcraft, in their tongue drun-vel, not magic but a contract: a vow is spoken into the pour at the forge, and the blade’s temper holds only as long as the wielder keeps it. Reserved for blades, armor, and relic weapons; its iconic form is the Kelvath, the vow-blade, whose etched vow flares warm gold for half a second on the draw.

Shaba Navi. Founding-era hexagonal mirrors held by a hereditary caste of magi, used for long-range communication and sight across distance, and for foldings of space that let a bearer see or reach through a paired mirror face. A full set of six, arranged six-fold, wakes in a way a single mirror does not.

Peoples

Aasimar (the Kindled). The rare Mal’akha whose angel-blood surfaces to the skin as a faint metallic lattice and a felt hum, prone to the Flare, an involuntary discharge of light under extreme emotion.

Dragonborn. A clan sworn in a founding blood-covenant to one named ancestor-dragon; each carries a Second Heart whose excess must be vented through the breath weapon, a safety valve rather than a battle trick.

Fendrik (the gnome-people). A Knowing-daemon lineage of precise, obsessive tinker-minds living on the seam between Order and Chaos, who leak harmless illusion when emotion runs hot and so are quietly distrusted as witnesses.

Halkari (the orc-people). A Great-War Heart-lineage bred for the front and never demobilized, held by the Stand, a sworn oath whose breaking physically weighs on the body. The most oath-precise people in the setting.

Kardun (the dwarf-people). The oldest population on the continent, the pre-Founding Rhydin remnant living in the deep vents beneath Sulamir. Dense, oath-metal-bound master crafters, seized at times by the Old Hunger, an involuntary creative fever that drives a smith into solitary forge-work for months.

Kesevrai (the awakened guardians). Angel-and-daemon-made constructs built during the Founding as living infrastructure for the deep tunnels and vault seals, some of whom woke into personhood. All are prone to Dream-current seizures, tended by their own dream-wardens.

Korrvath (the lycan-people). A deliberately Growing-made war-species that transforms on the fixed cycle of the two moons, held together by a lethal Pack Law.

Oskari (the goliath-people). Weight-angel Mal’akha highlanders, immovable arbiters and pass-wardens whose own skin inscribes new stone-vein patterning at moments of great trial, an autobiography written in stone.

Pivren (the halfling-people). A people congealed out of generations of collective hearth-devotion, carrying an unconscious precognitive luck that works only inside Hearth-Law, their near-absolute code of hospitality and reciprocity.

Sulevri (the elf-people). Order-tilted, coldly serene angel-descended people of the contemplative highlands, master Binders, jurists, and oath-witnesses, whose one uncageable warmth is the Am-thread, a wild un-Bindable attachment.

Tiefling (the Marked). The aasimar’s exact sibling across the divide, the Mal’akhaham whose daemon-blood surfaces; secretly the most rule-bound people on the continent, each held by the Rule, a self-written and absolutely kept private law.

Vashtera (the vampire-people). Daemon-descended blood-takers, never undead and never cursed, whose appetite survives only because it is bound by the Accord, a hunting code stricter than any human court and policed by their own Warden caste.

Vulkathri (the beastfolk). A peacetime Growing-made people grafted with feline, vulpine, or avian vitality for deep-wild scouting, whose “nine lives” are a tracked Growing-debt bound by totem-kinship law.

Yulnesh (the border-folk). A living people settled nearest the Wound who survive by a cyclic rite of deliberate forgetting, shedding memory, name, and self so the Wound finds nothing to take. They are a people, alive, and emphatically not Hollow-things.

Zar’ethis (the dragons). God-seeded beings that hold both cosmic poles alone, the one exception to the rule that all things come in pairs, split into metallic (Order-tilted) and chromatic (Chaos-tilted) and drifting toward one pole across a centuries-long life.

Culture & Language

The 812-day year. The Sulamiri year: four seasons, each of seven months, each of twenty-eight days, plus one extra festival week outside any month or season, called the gap. “I’ll see you in the gap” means on free time, outside ordinary obligation.

The Founding Tongue. The old, no-longer-living language the angel-daemon pairs are held to have spoken at the making of the contracts, surviving in sacred, civic, and cosmological terms, in liturgies, oaths, and house-names. It reads to a trained ear the way an old sacred tongue reads.

The Guild catechism. The call-and-answer oath common to several guilds (“What is your life? My life is not my own…”), which closes on “My soul for Sulamir’s,” a phrase also spoken in moments of public dedication or death.

Register. The formal-versus-common axis of Sulamiri speech. Court and inter-guild talk pulls toward the polished Standard, home and working-class talk toward the local provincial register, and which one a person speaks is itself a social act; class is as audible as province.

Sul, Am, and -ir. Three load-bearing Founding-Tongue morphemes. Sul names the outward aspect (light, ascent, the declared), Am the inward (shadow, depth, the enfolded), and -ir covenant, two things sworn into one. Sulamir compounds all three: “the sworn bond of outward and inward.”

Sul-name and Am-name. The two names almost everyone carries. The Sul-name is the outward name the world may use, in registers, courts, and among strangers; the Am-name is the inward name only family, lovers, and closest kin are given. Which name a speaker uses is itself a statement about the relationship.

Sulamir Standard. The neutral, lightly mannered trade-and-court lingua franca of the capital, the register a Council session runs in and the one newcomers learn fastest, grown mainly out of the host province’s speech.

The Twenty. A cultural number that recurs everywhere in Sulamir: the catechism’s “family” of twenty souls, the priests’ twenty-step bow, the merchants’ twenty-count, the folk-dance’s twenty pairs. Most Sulamiris do not know where the number comes from.

War-name. A third, public register some provinces add between the Sul-name and Am-name, a daily name earned by a specific feat. The northern kenning (Sea-walker, Last-to-leave) is the same idea, an earned outward epithet used as if it were the Sul-name.