History of Sulamir and Merretia

The ages of the world as remembered, as written, and as suspected. This document sequences what happened, not what is metaphysically true. The cosmology (what is metaphysically true) sits behind the history and sometimes explains it. See and for that layer.

Calendar note. Sulamir’s year is 812 days of four seasons, each season seven months, each month twenty-eight days, plus one extra week unbound to any month for symmetry. See for the full calendar.

1. The Ages at a Glance

Age	Rough character	Currently remembered?
Pre-Founding Rhydin	Ancient human settlement on the upthrust, before angels and demons arrived.	Not remembered. Survives in buried stone.
The Founding	Angels, demons, and humans build the world.	Mythologized.
The Long Human Centuries	Humans alone, in the withdrawal’s wake, slowly building civilization.	Patchily remembered.
The Triarchy	Three kings of War, Diplomacy, and Theocracy.	Remembered, though rosy.
The Consolidation	Valekith takes the Theocracy, then the monarchy, then something worse.	Remembered with horror.
The Lich Wars	Valekith becomes Zar Valareth. Aldasen falls.	Remembered with dread.
The Senate Era	No king. A senate rules.	This is when the world we now live in begins.
The Current Age	The Council of Eighteen Guilds. Cold war between the guilds.	We are here.

Prophecy 3 references “the 5th age.” The ages above are five, counting the Founding as the first. The Current Age reads in some scriptures as the 5th; in others, as a transitional anteroom to a 6th that has not begun. See.

2. Pre-Founding Rhydin

Before the angels and demons came to Merretia there was already a human settlement on the upthrust where Sulamir would later rise: Rhydin. No surviving record names Rhydin’s people, languages, rulers, religions, or sciences. Its existence is known from the stone: layered masonry at the bottom of the Steam Tunnel system, sealed chambers, collapsed thoroughfares, and occasional intact rooms of purpose unclear. The Rhydin stonework predates every angel-demon structure in the deep infrastructure and predates every technique humans are known to have used in the historical record. How old Rhydin was when the Founding began, what kind of civilization it maintained, and what happened to its people when the angels and demons arrived, no record preserves. What is generally assumed is that the Founding incorporated surviving Rhydin lineages into its contracts and overwrote what it could not. Whether the angels and demons built with the Rhydin that preceded them or over it is one of the oldest questions the deep stone still keeps.

Rhydin’s name is preserved in contemporary Sulamiri speech through the tunnel workers’ term the Rhydin levels, through the tavern called the Red Dragon that has stood on the same site since pre-Founding times, and through the scattered proper names in the oldest province inscriptions that match no Founding Tongue root. The name Rhydin itself is of unknown etymology; scholars who study the Founding Tongue agree that Rhydin does not belong to it and carries no decomposition into Sul/Am/-ir or any other morpheme in the surviving corpus. This is one of the pieces of evidence that Rhydin preceded the Founding, rather than arising alongside it.

2.5 The Founding

Humans, angels, and demons worked together to build the civilization of Merretia. Two great city-states rose: Sulamir in the center-south and Aldasen in the north. Sulamir was the seat of industry, infrastructure, and commerce. Aldasen was the seat of preservation, magic, and deeper lore; it was called “the city under the mountain.”

The angels and demons of the Founding did not work in isolation. Each pair (one angel, one demon) partnered with a specific human lineage, establishing the founding contracts that would become the basis of noble power. The families who descend from these human lineages are the great houses.

At the end of the Founding, the angels and demons withdrew from direct human contact. The reasons are not remembered. The withdrawal was not sudden and not total: some pairs lingered, some went into dormancy bound into deep infrastructure, some may have departed the world entirely. What remains from that age, physically, is the deep infrastructure of Sulamir (where Oen was raised), the foundations of Aldasen (now ruined), and certain relics scattered across the continent.

Whether all angel-demon pairs participated in the Founding contracts, or only some, is not settled in any surviving record. What is generally told: ten pairs are known, of which eighteen bound themselves into human lineages and two stood apart — a shape that echoes Prophecy 8 and the eighteen-guild count.

The dome over Sulamir (Founding-era origin, locked). Among the load-bearing artifacts built during the Founding is the always-on energy dome that covers Sulamir to this day. The dome was built by the angel-demon pairs working in concert to protect Sulamir’s early population from cosmic-horror incursions that have since faded into mythic register. The original Founding-era purpose was probably defense against kaiju-class threats and conventional warfare from rival civilizations whose names are not preserved in the Sulamiri archive. The dome has operated continuously since the Founding, weakened on a small number of recorded occasions but never fully failed. The Founding-era engineering did not anticipate the Hollow’s eventual widening: the dome stops conventional and kaiju attack but is permeable to Hollow seepage, which is the central metaphysical alarm of the Current Age. The Founding’s surviving infrastructure layer (deep tunnels, Cloud network, magnerail substrate, Center Spire) is contemporary with the dome and is maintained by overlapping practitioner orders today.

3. The Long Human Centuries

After the withdrawal, humans governed themselves for an indeterminate span. Generations came and went. Memory of the angels and demons became religion, became folklore, became scripture, became cultural furniture. The technology of the Founding persisted in fragments: the magnerail, the Cloud network, the Center Spire, the steam tunnels, angel feathers, Rodasan devices. Most of it was operated without understanding. Some of it was forgotten entirely.

The great houses retained prestige across the centuries. Their bloodlines, their charters, their memory of the contracts (accurate or otherwise) made them the continuous element. The specific governments that rose and fell in this span are not relevant to the current era. They were kings, councils, and confederations, and none of them endured.

The Long Human Centuries are generally reckoned to have run several millennia, though no firm count survives.

4. The Triarchy

The last stable government before the current era was the Triarchy. Three kings ruled Sulamir jointly:

The King of War. Military command, defense of the provinces, relations with hostile neighbors.
The King of Diplomacy. Relations with allied city-states, trade, internal conflict arbitration.
The King of Theocracy. Relations with the gods, oversight of the temples, the ceremonial face of Sulamir.

Each king held authority within his domain and deferred to the others within theirs. The Triarchy was regarded, in hindsight, as the golden age of civil cooperation in Sulamir. In practice it was stable rather than brilliant. It lasted because no king had enough power to swallow the other two.

How a king was made, and unmade. The crown was not inherited by blood but earned by election, and the doors were genuinely open: any Sulamiri, of any birth or trade, could stand for a throne, and many rose from the working lodges and the temple schools rather than the noble lines. Each king served a term of six years, and the three thrones were staggered by two, so that every second year the city held an election for one seat — a rolling verdict on the crown that never let all three change at once. There were no term limits: a king who kept the city’s trust could be returned again and again, and a few ruled most of their lives or saw a son or daughter elected after them — but the office was always stood for, never simply passed down, and there was always a mechanism to strip a king shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be governing in bad faith. The system had the flaws every system has — patronage, slow verdicts, elections bought at the edges — but its cardinal virtue was that power stayed dispersed: three crowns checking one another, each answerable to the Senate and the guild leaders below and to the electorate above. (It is worth noting how much more open that vanished order was than the oligarchy that replaced it: under the kings a dock-worker could become a sovereign; under the Council, power belongs to whoever already holds a Banner.)

What the crown was for. Beneath the three portfolios of War, Diplomacy, and Theocracy, the kings shared one deeper office: they were the city’s judgment — its arbiters and its judiciary, the wisdom that settled what money and force could not. The King of Diplomacy arbitrated internal and inter-guild conflict as a named duty, but all three sat in final judgment together, and among the crown’s oldest and least-sung tasks was managing and placating the guilds: hearing their grievances, dividing their spoils, and keeping their rivalries from ever curdling into open war. A king could not out-spend a guild or out-arm one, but a king could judge between them and be obeyed, because the office stood above them all. It is this function, more than any army, whose absence the Current Age still feels — the referee is gone, and the players have been left alone with the board.

The King’s Guard. The crowns kept a sworn guard of their own — not a guild Banner but the city’s own body, answerable to the three thrones rather than to any trade-dynasty. When the Triarchy fell and no new king was crowned, the Guard was left without a master, and its members scattered into the shape of the new age: some took service in the guilds, some won seats in the Senate, some sold their skill as mercenaries or turned to the sea as reavers of the Maw, and some simply left Sulamir. A displaced royal guard is a dangerous thing to leave lying around a wounded city, and the diaspora of that Guard is a thread that still runs, quietly, beneath the Current Age.

The design is older than any of them. The Triarchy’s shape — power split three ways, checked against itself, and earned rather than inherited — was not some later reformer’s clever invention. Its principle descends from the Founding itself (section 2.5): the same angel-and-daemon pairs who raised the city and bound the founding contracts are remembered, in the broad strokes that are all anyone keeps of an age thousands of years gone, as having counselled a government built the way they were built — in balanced pairs and triads, no single will trusted to stand alone, because a bond held in tension is the only arrangement that does not curdle into tyranny. That is why the dispersed crown felt less like a compromise than like the city’s natural form, and why its collapse into one head — first Valekith’s, then the oligarchy’s — reads, to anyone who remembers the shape, as the political echo of the very severance the cosmos itself is warned against. And it fades: the precise lineage of who ruled, and how, and when, grows thinner the further back it runs. Past a few centuries it is legend; past the Triarchy’s own founding it is the fog of deep antiquity, ten thousand years and more, of which the living hold only the broad strokes. That fog is itself a political fact — it is exactly the condition in which a Valekith, or a Council, can quietly rewrite what the old order was ever for.

Aldasen in the north was a sovereign city-state of comparable weight. Aldasen and Sulamir had historically cooperated, and through the Triarchy this cooperation reached its height.

5. Valekith and the Consolidation

A man named Valekith rose within the Theocracy. His position and his gifts and his ambition have passed into a thousand conflicting stories; the essential shape is the same in all of them. He became the theological head of Sulamir, then the King of Theocracy, then, through persuasion and theological argument, convinced the other two kings to consolidate the Triarchy into a single monarchy with himself at the head.

The rationale he offered was clean. Three kings delay each other. Sulamir’s enemies were growing stronger. A single crown would respond faster. The King of War and the King of Diplomacy accepted this, reluctantly, and each ceded authority to Valekith in exchange for guarantees that were not kept.

Valekith used mirrors in the consolidation. The specific mechanism is not remembered. The effect is. Through mirrors he could invade a space, a conversation, or eventually a mind. The mirrors were a technology of the Founding repurposed for something they had not been made for. Aldasen, watching with increasing alarm, took such mirrors as they could and sequestered them. This was one of the first overt acts of resistance against Valekith.

The other overt act of resistance came from the Masons, and from Kane Stoneheart in particular, of the Stoneheart line whose current bearer (Callum Stoneheart) holds the same war-name in the present age. The Kane of the Great-War generation helped slaves gain freedom across the territories Valekith had begun to absorb. The uprising destabilized the region. It also gave Valekith the pretext he had been looking for. He invaded the destabilized territories openly, and from there the conflict escalated toward the catastrophe that followed.

6. The Lich Wars

At some point during the consolidation, Valekith died or made a choice that is not death. He emerged as Zar Valareth (also called Val, Valareth, the Last Zar), a lich, a being of magical persistence beyond biological life, holding the crown.

On the title Zar. Zar is a Founding Tongue sovereignty-word, carried forward from the pre-Triarchy eras when Sulamir had been ruled by single consecrated sovereigns bound to the city’s founding contracts. The word translates roughly as “the one who bears the consecration of the city,” and by Valekith’s era it was an ancient and ceremonial title, no longer in use but remembered in liturgy, oath, and the oldest inscriptions on the Center Spire. When Valekith took it as his lich-name he was not inventing a style; he was reaching back past the Triarchy and past the Senate to a deeper precedent, claiming the consecrated sovereignty the Triarchy had only ever held in trust. He is called the Last Zar because the Senate’s refusal of the crown after his fall (see section 7) ended the title permanently. No one since has worn it, and no guild Leader who wished to survive would accept it. The word Zar in Current Age speech carries the weight of a finished era and a warning: any figure who publicly reaches for the sovereignty it names is understood to be reaching for what Valareth reached for.

Zar Valareth turned the full weight of his power on Aldasen. The city fell. Its inhabitants were transformed into ghouls. The damage reshaped the physical geography: mountains toppled into the ocean, part of the continent sank beneath what is now the West Sea, and the sea itself took the shape that would become the Maw, a dangerous stretch of water off the Aldasen coast where the old city’s mirror-works still sleep at depth.

In response, the great houses and guilds of Sulamir formed an unprecedented alliance. The war that followed was quick, bloody, and ended in victory for the alliance. Most of Sulamir’s adventurers were slain in the conflict. The survivors were exhausted and frightened. For the first time, Sulamir felt vulnerable to the other city-states of Merretia.

Rumored survivor. Zar Valareth was defeated but not conclusively destroyed. That the lich persists, in some form, is one of the private fears of every Leader old enough to remember. The Heralds of the Sunborn, led by one Valareth, may be the confirmation.

The Great War. Sulamiris living in the Current Age refer to the entire arc of Valekith’s consolidation, the Fall of Aldasen, the Lich Wars proper, and their immediate aftermath as the Great War. The term is used colloquially when speakers want to name the whole conflict as one thing, and used formally in guild and house oaths that invoke sacrifices made “in the Great War.” Two orders that had been respected pre-war fell into disgrace during the Great War: the Iosan Serpents and the Heralds of the Sunborn, both of whom bore arms on losing sides of pivotal engagements and emerged as outlawed rather than dissolved. Their outlaw status in the Current Age is inherited from Great War verdicts that were never formally reversed. See for the present state of both orders.

The Masons in the Great War.Kane Stoneheart, of the Stoneheart line, led the Masons through the Great War and is the named figure the guild still honors as its founder in its public register. The ancestor’s role in freeing slaves across the territories Valekith was absorbing, which destabilized those territories and gave Valekith his pretext, is the same act remembered in the Current Age as “what the Masons did before there was a Council.” The current bearer of the Stoneheart line, Callum Stoneheart (publicly known by the same hereditary Mason war-name, Kane), holds the sword Ahntyr, which is attributed to the Great-War-era Kane in Mason tradition and which Callum wears in formal register. The question of whether Ahntyr is a Founding-era blade, a Great War forging, or both at different layers is disputed in Mason tradition. The Kane war-name has been carried by the Stoneheart of the line who reaches Mason-Leader stature in each generation, a tradition the guild treats as ceremonial earning rather than automatic inheritance.

The true origin of Ahntyr and the Kane war-name. Beneath the public memory of the slave-freeing lies the act the Masons no longer tell plainly. The Great-War Kane won Ahntyr from an angel he slew, an Unmaking-tilted celestial of the accessible tier, in the cosmically-fraught years of the lich-king’s war. An angel cannot ordinarily be cut down while its bonded Dream-daemon thrives, so the slaying required the bond to fail: the daemon, seduced by the proto-Hollow doctrine loose in that era (severance is liberation, the same current the lich-king embodied), turned on its own Order-twin, and Kane arrived at a fracture already opening and delivered the blow that finished it. Ahntyr is that angel’s blade, which is why its provenance reads as Founding-era and Great-War at once: a celestial weapon that entered Mason hands by an act of severance. Because Order-flame burns steady and geometric rather than wild, Ahntyr burns clean and does not gutter. The hidden cost is the Sulamir part. To sever a bonded pair widens the Wound by a fraction, because it undoes a mend. So the line whose name means the unbroken bond at the center of the wall was founded, in truth, on a broken bond, and Ahntyr is an artifact born adjacent to the Hollow, buried inside the Masons’ most sacred founding story. This is a series-late revelation; at book one it is unknown to all, including Callum.

The Landa Mountains. A high range whose passes figured decisively in the Great War. Several pivotal engagements are named for Landa passes in oath-keeping registers (“we stood at Landa”). In the Current Age the Landa mountains remain a named region of the continent, with the specific province and guild assignment pending transcription from the continental map. See.

7. The Senate and the Refusal

After the Lich Wars the surviving nobles and guild leaders convened as a single body to govern the recovery. This was the Senate. Its original purpose was transitional: administer the recovery, choose a new monarch, return to the old form of government.

They never chose a new monarch.

The specific reasons are preserved in different versions. The most common tells that they saw what one man had done with the crown, and could not bring themselves to place it on another head. The less flattering version tells that once each senator held a piece of the power, none would surrender it. Probably both are true.

The Senate made itself permanent, but not in one motion and not as one body, and later retellings have blurred two developments into one. First, the surviving guild-dynasty lines, the houses whose founding-contract domains had made them the practical engines of the recovery, began coordinating privately among themselves to hold the continent together, and that coordination crystallized into the secret Council of 18: eighteen hands mirroring the eighteen sectors of Sulamir’s life, built to steer the way a single crown once had, without ever again concentrating that power in one head. Second, and later, the full body of noble houses petitioned for formal representation, and the public Senate of Great Houses settled at roughly thirty-six seats as the visible political register, which the Council allowed to crystallize as a useful screen and the load-bearing public face of continental authority. The Senate is the sovereign an ordinary citizen means by the government; the Council is the body that actually decides, and it is the Council, not the Senate, that is in the deepest technical sense the senate of a king who does not exist. Full architecture: sections 1 and 1A,

Why it held — the conditions for the taking. The Refusal is usually told as prudence, and it was; but it was also a taking, and the two do not contradict. The Senate consolidated legally — a body that writes the rules can always make its own reach lawful — and the ground could not have been readier. The city had just been gutted by what one crowned man became; sentiment for the old ways was at its lowest ebb in living memory, and almost no one rose to defend the throne. The guilds, long accustomed to moving with a wide autonomy the kings had only lightly checked, saw little to fear and much to gain in a world with no sovereign above them, and did not seriously object. And beneath every stated reason ran the plainest one: power, once each hand holds a piece of it, is not a thing hands willingly open. The conditions were perfect, and the change was permanent.

What was lost with the crown. Whatever else the kings had been, they were the one authority that stood above the guilds and could judge between them — the referee that kept commercial rivalry from becoming war (section 4). That office was never refilled. The Council of 18 is a table of the players, not a judge over them: it can broker, and it can gang up, but it cannot rule on itself from above. So the guilds’ rivalry lost its arbiter at the very moment their private Banners made them dangerous, and what filled the vacuum was not peace but the cold, self-policing balance of terror in b. The empty throne (§7.5) is not only an economic fact; it is a missing branch of government — the judiciary that once sat over the whole board.

7.5 Why the guilds, and why armed — the economy of the empty throne

The Refusal explains why no one wears the crown. It does not, by itself, explain why guilds — armed trade-corporations — inherited the governing of a continent. That answer is older than the Refusal and simpler than it looks, and it is worth stating plainly, because nearly every strange feature of the Current Age falls out of it.

Begin with the numbers. A city and continent of tens of millions generate immense wealth, and wealth, left alone, does what it always does: it concentrates in the few who are able to seize and hold it. But held power is only ever held — it is taken back the moment its owner cannot defend it. In most of history that defense is rented from the sovereign: a merchant house pays its taxes and the crown’s soldiers fight its wars. Merretia’s sovereign is a vacancy. After the Last Zar the crown was not merely empty but deliberately refused (section 7), so the wealth-holders could not rent their defense from a king who does not exist. To keep what they held, they had to become their own state.

They already had the means, because they had already armed. The great trade-dynasties survived the Lich Wars the only way anyone did — by fielding forces of their own — and when the fighting ended they did not disarm; they kept the swords, and they kept the ground those swords had held. And here Merretia bends the ordinary logic of private power into something sharper: in a world where an ordinary person can be forged into a superhuman — trained through a discipline, bonded to a focus stone, drilled in an academy — private security does not scale into more guards. It scales into a private cadre of the exceptional: the Banner. A house with enough money and a monopoly worth killing over will, inevitably, recruit and manufacture the most dangerous individuals it can, because those individuals are the deterrent, the insurance, and the knife.

Defending the business means defending where the business lives, and that becomes turf — a province, a district, a people. And whoever holds turf tends it, because a protected, prosperous, loyal population is itself the asset: the way a legendary protector keeps a city, the Red Dragons keep their province. So the guild grows a good hand — infrastructure, courts, medicine, order, genuine care for its own — while the other hand runs espionage, leverage, and quiet elimination against every rival and threat. Both hands serve one master: the guild’s own survival and supremacy. This is not hypocrisy so much as the ordinary two-facedness of any power that both rules a place and competes for it.

That is the whole of it. First you fight to take power; then you fight to keep it — to defend what you hold, prevent what threatens it, and eliminate what you cannot prevent. The eighteen guilds are simply the institutions that won the first fight and never stopped fighting the second, in a world that handed them superhuman weapons and took away the king who might have ordered those weapons put down. The Council of 18 is their truce-in-arms — eighteen powers each too strong to be conquered and too invested to flip the board, governing together precisely because none of them can be allowed to rule alone. The cold war of the Banners is not a failure of that settlement. It is that settlement.

8. The Current Age

This is the age we live in. The Council of Eighteen Guilds holds the government. The great houses retain their wealth and charters. Trade with the continent is stable with occasional tension. Technology improves year over year: the magnerail is expanded, the Cloud network is fortified, artificers invent new devices, steam-powered industry grows, the artificer tradition and the Rodasan craft reach into deeper waters.

The shape of the absence. The crown has been gone for generations, and yet the city has never stopped reaching for it. People look, by instinct, for a single figure to trust — which is part of why the guild Leaders, the Chapter-Masters of their Banners, loom so large in the public imagination: a hungry populace fits a Leader into the king-shaped hole whether the Leader wills it or not. And there are those who want the throne back in earnest — a quiet restorationist sentiment that a wise, answerable crown standing above the guilds would be worth the risk of another Valareth. A few who hold that conviction have even won Senate seats on it. But conviction is one thing and power is another, and the pattern is depressingly reliable: an idealist who reaches the Council’s antechamber learns exactly how much a piece of the present order is worth, and how little a king would leave them, and the fire to restore the crown cools into one more comfortable seat. The absence is felt on every side; the remedy keeps being quietly declined by the very people who campaigned on it. That, too, is the world telling the truth about itself — its people are not villains and not heroes, only human, and a frightened, striving human reaches for what is in front of them.

The worst threats are:

Zar Valareth’s surviving allies. A generation of loyalists scattered when the lich fell, and some have lived long enough to act again.
The criminal underworld. Gangs vie for guild-scale power by any available means, sometimes through proxy, sometimes through direct acquisition of houses or smaller businesses.
The cold war between the guilds. Never declared, never denied, constantly active. Most public crises in the Current Age are proxy events in this ongoing conflict.

At the beginning of the main-line series, a twenty-two-year celestial event is approaching that is prophesied to open the Maw. Multiple guilds have begun sending quiet expeditions. Others claim they have not, while preparing to. Into this brittle season Cyl and Oen come of age.

9. Dating and Notable Anchor Events

A concrete calendar of ages is not fixed; the anchors most often used are:

The Founding. Unknown date. Mythological.
The Withdrawal. The end of the Founding age. Undated, treated as prehistory by all current scholarship.
The Triarchy. Several centuries before the present.
Valekith’s consolidation. Within the Triarchy’s final generation.
The Fall of Aldasen. The single most dated event, used by almost every guild for internal reckoning. Roughly, Aldasen Fell.
The Defeat of Zar Valareth. Within a decade of the Fall.
The Senate’s Refusal. Within a generation of the defeat.
The Stabilization of the Eighteen-Guild Council. Several generations after that.
The Present. Counted from the Stabilization.

A more precise calendar will be set when the first scene requires it.