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 01-COSMOLOGY and 07-RELIGIONS 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 09-CULTURE 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 08-PROPHECIES.

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 are all OPEN. The working assumption is that the Founding incorporated surviving Rhydin lineages into the Founding contracts and overwrote what it could not incorporate. What the angels and demons did to Rhydin, and whether they built with the Rhydin that preceded them or over it, is one of the oldest open questions of the bible and is reserved for deep-series material.

Rhydin’s name is preserved in contemporary Sulamiri speech through the tunnel workers’ term the Rhydin levels (the deepest strata of the Steam Tunnels, below the angel-demon infrastructure; see 04-CONTINENT section 1), 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.

OPEN. Everything about pre-Founding Rhydin is open beyond the stonework, the three name-survivals above, and the working assumption that Rhydin predates the angels and demons by a substantial span. Reserved for reveals in later books.

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.

OPEN. The question of whether all angel-demon pairs participated in Founding contracts, or only some. Working assumption: ten pairs are known, of which eighteen are involved in founding human lineages and two stood apart. This is a guess meant to align with Prophecy 8 and the eighteen-guild count, and should not be committed to until a scene requires it.

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 (04-CONTINENT section 7; 10-TECHNOLOGY section 1.5). 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.

OPEN. Duration of the Long Human Centuries. Current assumption is several millennia.

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.

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 (full canon in 09-CULTURE section 5.5), 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 05-GUILDS section 7 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 OPEN at the surface (resolved only in the deep-canon reveal below, which makes it both: a celestial blade that entered Mason hands in the Great War). 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 (deep canon, reserved reveal, books 7-9; adopted from COUNCIL/hollow-council and the Cosmogony-and-Pantheon council). 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 (the third tier of 01-COSMOLOGY), 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 (see 14-KAIJU-AND-HOLLOW section 2A.2, the severance route). 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 04-CONTINENT.

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: 05-GUILDS sections 1 and 1A, 04A-HOUSES section 5.

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 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

OPEN. A concrete calendar of ages is not yet set. When dates are required, use the following working anchors:

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.

10. Cross-References

The cosmogony underlying all of this: see 01-COSMOLOGY.
The eighteen guilds that emerged from the Senate: see 05-GUILDS.
Zar Valareth’s possible return and the Heralds of the Sunborn: see 05-GUILDS section 4.
The prophecy concerning the twenty-two-year celestial event and the Maw: see 08-PROPHECIES.
The Great-War-era Kane Stoneheart and his role in destabilizing the slave territories: see 11-CHARACTERS Masons section and 19-CHARACTER-PROFILES/callum.
Aldasen ruin, the Maw, and the West Sea: see 04-CONTINENT.
The eight gods as distorted memories of founding-era angel-demon pairs: see 07-RELIGIONS.

11. Open Questions (History)

The specific number and identity of the original angel-demon pairs who made founding contracts.
Duration of the Long Human Centuries.
The original names of the three Triarchy kings.
The original mechanism of the mirrors and their present condition in Aldasen’s ruin and at the bottom of the Maw.
How Valekith made the transition from theologian-king to lich, and whether he chose this or had it forced on him.
The fate of Aldasen’s inhabitants beyond “turned to ghouls”: whether any remnant survives who remembers the old city accurately.
The question of whether the Senate’s initial count was eighteen from the beginning, or stabilized at eighteen after fluctuation.
The question of whether any guild has ever been dissolved, and how.
The exact year-count of the Current Age at the start of the main-line series.