Technology of Sulamir

The machinery that makes the city. Sulamir is a steampunk megacity layered on top of angel-demon-era infrastructure, with artificer-craft filling the gaps between the two. This document lists the principal technologies and flags which are Founding-era, which are modern artificer work, and which are hybrid.

For the discipline theory these technologies tap into, see 02-DISCIPLINES. For the physical geography that houses them, see 04-CONTINENT.

1. The Three Technological Strata

Founding-era. Built by angels and demons in deep antiquity. Usually operates on principles humans do not fully understand. Some relics work forever without visible fuel; some went dark long ago and have never restarted. Concentrated in the deep infrastructure, the Center Spire, and certain sites in Aldasen’s ruin and beyond.

Artificer-era. Built by Sulamiri humans using their own mastery of the disciplines and conventional engineering. The magnerail, most airships, most steam-powered industry, and most consumer devices sit in this stratum. Some artificer-era devices incorporate Founding-era components they have imperfectly understood.

Hybrid. Modifications of Founding-era systems by artificer engineers. The Cloud network is the clearest example: the spires are Founding-era, the shield field is Founding-era, but the control interfaces and expansion modules are artificer work.

1.5 The Dome over Sulamir

The single largest Founding-era artifact in continuous operation. The dome is an always-on energy shield that covers Sulamir-the-city in a translucent cyan curvature visible from the edge of the eight corners on a clear day. It is the architectural fact that distinguishes the protected city from the exposed continental homelands. Full canon: 04-CONTINENT section 7. Operational summary here for the technology register: Founding-era origin, always-on protection against conventional warfare and kaiju, permeable to Hollow seepage (the modern metaphysical alarm), maintained publicly through the Veil Levy continental tax and the senate’s appropriated Binding-discipline practitioner orders, maintained secretly by the Council of 18’s inner-cell practitioners. Entry and exit through formal gates staffed by the Marshal corps; the gates protocol governs all city access. The dome is the load-bearing piece of infrastructure on which Sulamir’s existence as a megacity depends.

Corrected canon (2026-07-14, see 18-ARMORY-AND-WARFARE §6): the Dome blocks all conventional attack and all nine disciplines (it is not a selective filter), and has finite durability — ordinary armies and artillery cannot dent it, but sustained overwhelming assault (a kaiju pummeling it for hours) can break through. The Hollow alone bypasses it untouched, because the Hollow is an absence, not an incoming force. Sulamir is not cut off: the magnerail runs trains to the other continental cities for trade and travel through the gates — the city is the continent’s economic-and-technological powerhouse, not a sealed fortress.

2. The Magnerail

The magnerail is Sulamir’s primary transit system, an electromagnetic suspension rail running both within the city and between the city and its outer provinces (and, via longer lines, to other points on the continent).

Principles. The Current discipline (electromagnetism) pushed to industrial scale. Magnets of extraordinary strength suspend the trains above rails of complementary polarity. Friction is effectively eliminated, which makes the ride fast, quiet, and uncanny to first-time riders.

Vertical use. Sulamir’s vertical structure means the magnerail climbs as well as traverses. Station-changes often take the rider from a low-level platform to a mid-level platform to a sky-level platform in sequence, each platform a different Sulamir. The sensation of the climb is described by riders as “losing your sense of heights”: because the surrounding buildings are so massive, the rider does not register the altitude gain until they see a flying craft passing at eye level.

Charter. The inter-provincial magnerail is held under charter by House Corveliss, Cyl’s family. This makes Corveliss effectively the arterial authority for all long-distance movement in and out of the city. The charter is old (probably Founding-era in origin) and is functionally inseparable from the Alum-sidek Alliance guild, where Cyl serves as Left Hand. See 05-GUILDS.

Intra-province magnerail. Shorter lines within each province are run by guild-adjacent operators and are more politically fragmented.

Origin. The magnerail may be a hybrid system originally installed during the Founding and continuously upgraded since. This would explain the charter’s depth and the rail’s reliability over centuries.

3. The Cloud Network

The Cloud network is Sulamir’s weather and magical defense shield system. It covers the sky above the city as a visible texture, particularly at dawn and dusk, and prevents natural weather from reaching the city in its unmodified form.

Structure. A geodesic shield field held aloft by the tall spires of Sulamir. Each province has at least one contributing spire. The highest spire, the keystone of the network, is the Center Spire. Remove the Center Spire and the network collapses. Remove a provincial spire and the network tears locally, with consequences varying by weather and season.

Function. Blocks unwanted weather. Intercepts most forms of aerial attack. Distorts certain magical effects that cross its boundary. Some scholars believe the network also regulates the movement of certain Hollow-adjacent phenomena, though this is disputed.

Artificer augmentation. The original Cloud network was Founding-era. Artificer additions over the centuries have extended its range, added monitoring systems, and allowed limited weather-shaping (scheduled rain, managed storms). The current system is therefore hybrid.

Politically guarded. House Nhanga, a great house of Sulamir, maintains interests in Cloud-network security. The Guild Council debates expansion and reinforcement at regular intervals.

4. The Center Spire

The Center Spire is the tallest structure in Sulamir, the keystone of the Cloud network, and the ceremonial seat of the Council of Guilds.

Exterior. Gold-toned stone that glows in the morning light. The height gently angles upward. Approaches to the Spire are monumental: metal doors over one hundred feet tall and fifty wide, stairways a quarter-mile across, courtyards swarming with guilds, foreign envoys, noble entourages, and petitioners.

Interior. The doors open into a foyer larger than most cities’ grand halls. A reception desk runs with eighteen stations, each marked with a guild insignia. The working body of the Spire is the Council chamber, a multi-level gallery where the eighteen Leaders conduct business and where the great houses bring their cases.

Access. The Spire is closed to the public. Invitation to the Spire is a mark of significant standing. Most citizens of Sulamir never see its interior.

Founding-era. The Spire is almost certainly original Founding-era construction. Its function as the keystone of the Cloud network predates the current Council’s use of it. The Council meets in what was designed as something else, and no guild Leader is publicly willing to speculate on what.

Prophecy 6. “Then rise in the spire to take their place / Atop the world they shall remake.” The Spire is by far the likeliest referent, and the guild Leaders who know this prophecy regard it with particular suspicion. See 08-PROPHECIES.

5. Airships

A variety of flying craft crisscross the sky above Sulamir in what looks like organized chaos. Types range from small personal runabouts to large cargo vessels. Propulsion varies:

Lift. Most airships use Weight-discipline-augmented lifting bodies (engineered to locally reduce mass) combined with conventional buoyancy (gas cells, lifting surfaces).
Thrust. Conventional propellers for short-range, Current-discipline coils for longer-range, exotic fuels for military vessels.
Navigation. Experienced pilots read the Cloud network’s interior currents intuitively. Novice pilots use artificer-made navigation devices. The pattern of traffic above Sulamir is not formally regulated; pilots maintain informal conventions.

Airship piracy. Rare within the Cloud network (which dampens attacks) and common outside it. Several guilds maintain aerial militias for this reason.

Airships in fiction. See the “airship chase between towers and alleys” scene note for a classic Sulamiri set-piece.

6. Steam Tunnels and the Electric Grid

Beneath Sulamir lies the Steam Tunnel network: the electrical generation and distribution system that powers the entire city. The Tunnels are old; some sections date to the Founding. They are maintained by the lifelong community of Steam System Workers (see 12-ROLES).

Principles. Steam-powered generators driving electromagnetic coils (Current discipline at industrial scale). Local power stations feed the Tunnels, which feed every province’s grid.

Who lives there. Multi-generational Worker families. Oen was raised here. The Worker community is tight, self-policing, and invisible to the surface city above it.

Political weight. A Worker strike can dim Sulamir to candles within hours. The guilds treat Worker relations with public contempt and private dread.

7. Rodasan Devices

Rodasan devices are artificer-crafted tools for undersea and deep-structure work. They are used primarily by expeditionary parties into the Maw and by dock workers on Sulamir’s harbor.

Function. Seafloor manipulation, debris clearance, pressure-tolerant cutting, mapping of underwater features, and limited defense against undersea creatures. The party sent into the Maw to clear the sea floor for access to the sunken city will rely on Rodasan devices for exactly this.

Origin. Artificer-era, though the original Rodasan schematics may trace to Aldasen’s lost magical-engineering traditions. Modern Rodasan devices are considered military-grade and are not freely available.

8. Angel Feathers

A class of artifact: slim pieces of metal, feather-shaped, of angelic origin. Cyl holds at least one, retrieved from an Aldasen raid. They are powerful and rare, and recognition of what one is requires an expert (Mo, in the scene notes, is the one who can identify an angel feather by showing where it came from).

Properties. OPEN. Working assumptions: angel feathers carry residual angelic signatures, can serve as catalysts for the Order disciplines at high efficiency, and can be used to identify the specific pair the feather-angel belonged to. Some feathers may hold sleeping consciousness.

Black market. Angel feathers are illegal to possess without guild dispensation. The black market for them is vigorous and heavily monitored by the OCTA.

9. Shaba Navi

The Shaba Navi are a class of Founding-era mirrors held and used by a specific hereditary caste of magi. In the folk register “shaba navi” is a name for both the mirrors and the practitioners who use them; in careful scholarship the mirrors are shaba navi and their users are the magi of the Shaba Navi.

Form. A full set of Shaba Navi is six hexagonal mirrors, arranged six-fold. A fragmentary set is any configuration short of six. Authenticated live sets are rare. Most scattered mirrors are inert; a full six-fold set wakes the mirrors in a way individual mirrors do not, which is why holders of full sets are tracked by every intelligence body in Sulamir.

Function. The magi use the Shaba Navi for the work their tradition preserves: at minimum, long-range communication between sets, perception across distance, and certain inversions of space that allow the bearer to see or reach through a surface treated as a paired mirror face. Deeper craft is held within the caste and not published. The Shaba Navi are distinguished from the Founding-era mirrors of section 10 below; the two classes are related technology, but the Shaba Navi are the tradition’s intended use, while the section-10 mirrors were Valekith’s repurposing of the underlying principle for invasion.

Cyl’s set. Cyl has a full hexagonal-six set of Shaba Navi, and has used them. The inheritance and training are, alongside her mother’s thoughtplayer teaching, her second deep secret, carried in complete privacy and shared with almost no one. That Cyl both has a set and can wake it places her in a lineage most Sulamiris believe extinct. Full canon in 03-ARCHONS section 3. The route by which the set came to Cyl (maternal inheritance, a separate covenant, or something stranger) is OPEN.

Later loss. “Cyl has lost the mirrors” is a scene note from a later chapter of the series, implying the set is lost or taken at some point. The circumstances are to be written when the scene is staged.

10. Mirrors

A Founding-era technology repurposed by Valekith during his consolidation (see 06-HISTORY section 5). Through mirrors Valekith could invade spaces, conversations, and minds. The specific mechanism is not remembered. The effect is.

Aldasen mirrors. When Aldasen took the mirrors during the resistance to Valekith, the mirrors went to Aldasen. When Aldasen fell, most were lost. Some are believed to be at the bottom of the Maw. Cyl has lost the mirrors is a scene note from a later chapter, implying Cyl came into possession of a cache at some point and has had to reckon with their loss.

Dangers. Mirrors of this class are potentially inversion points for invasion. Any known mirror cache is a high-value strategic object and a cosmic risk.

Current status. The mirrors are believed to be inactive in most scattered locations, with a few active at the Maw’s sunken sites. A live mirror would be a serious find.

11. Kravis Creatures and Other Sea-Horrors

Not technology but worth entering here for completeness, as the creatures interact with Rodasan devices and Maw expeditions.

Kravis. Small, tentacled, individually dangerous. Kravilith. A colony form: many Kravis melded into a single gigantic creature. Has been witnessed in the Maw. Can be defeated by feeding it a vessel, by exposing its brain (Haymond’s Scorpion move has been documented to do this), or by using Rodasan devices to clear the sea floor so an expedition can drop below it. Fire Snakes. Small monsters that can be merged into a larger Salamander form. Predate on sailors and adventurers. Aldeken (Wight / Zombie). The transformed inhabitants of Aldasen. Many are crazed; some retain fragments of speech and, if killed cleanly, have been known to thank their killers.

For the full catalog of creatures, see 14-KAIJU-AND-HOLLOW.

12. Focus Stones

Focus stones are the primary personal channeling implement of Sulamiri practice. Every serious practitioner carries or wears one. A great deal of the visible culture of discipline (practitioner identification, academy graduation, guild ceremony, noble portraiture, the reading of a stranger’s powers at a glance) is built around the colors these stones display.

Function. A focus stone amplifies the bearer’s shaping of faith through a channel, stabilizes that channel against external interference, and renders the channel visible through the stone’s color signature. A practitioner without a focus stone can still practice, but their effects are thinner, less sustained, and less precisely targeted. The stone is not the source of the practitioner’s power; the bearer’s faith is the source. The stone is the lens.

Appearance and behavior. Inert focus stones are transparent crystals. Size and cut vary; most are small enough to wear as a pendant, a ring setting, a palm-held tool, or a brooch. Ceremonial and institutional stones can be larger. When the bearer channels faith through a discipline, the stone takes on that channel’s color for as long as the channel is held. When the bearer stops channeling, the color fades through a brief afterimage period and the stone returns to clarity. Refer to 02-DISCIPLINES Framework section for the full color wheel.

Visual rendering of active stones. Focus stones do not all “color up” the same way. Stones running Order channels (yellow, blue, cyan, orange) look emissive: the color seems lit from within, as though a small flame or plasma were contained inside the crystal, with soft bloom visible at the edges. Stones running Chaos channels (green, red, magenta, indigo) look pigmented: the color seems to saturate the stone from within, like dye suspended in a clear medium, deep and matte with no glow. This distinction is cosmological rather than technical. Order is the additive palette (emitted light, sums to white); Chaos is the subtractive palette (absorbed pigment, sums to black). At the moment of channeling, even an untrained observer can read at a glance which half of the spectrum a practitioner is working in, because an Order stone appears to be a light source and a Chaos stone appears to be a saturation. See 02-DISCIPLINES Framework, Visual Grammar subsection, for the full treatment.

Channel mixing. A practitioner who runs two channels through a single stone produces a muddy intermediate color. Three channels produces something worse, an unstable brown or bruise-colored tint that reads as overreach. Four channels at once through one stone, in any ordinary mortal, is effectively impossible to sustain; the stone will crack or shatter before the color resolves. This is one reason multi-channel practitioners are so rare: their faith is divided, and their stone cannot cleanly carry the division.

Archonic signatures. Cyl and Oen are the two exceptions. Cyl carries a stone that is never clear. At rest it sits at deep pigmented saturation; in full Chaos expression (all four Chaos currents channeled at once) it becomes absolute black, the subtractive sum of all pigment, the Key of classical color theory, a hole in the visual field that drinks both light and ink. Oen carries a stone that is perfectly clear at rest; in full Order expression (all four Order forces channeled at once) it becomes brilliant white, the additive sum of all emitted light, a point of radiance so clean that most viewers instinctively flinch. Absolute black and brilliant radiant white are archonic colors. No other living being produces either. Their meaning is literal: Cyl is the Key, the pigment that cancels every other pigment; Oen is the sum of all light. See 03-ARCHONS sections 3 and 4 for their stones specifically.

Hollow and unshaped Faith. A stone running the Hollow goes voided: not black, but absent, a light-drinking hole in the visual field. A stone running unshaped Faith goes gold. Both are instantly recognizable to trained observers and carry strong social consequence. A voided stone in public is evidence of illegal Hollow practice and invites immediate OCTA response. A gold stone marks a saint or a covenant-holder and typically attracts religious interest, sometimes welcome and sometimes not.

Origin. OPEN. Working possibilities:

Natural formation in specific geological conditions on the continent, mined and cut by specialist lapidaries.
Crafted in the Founding era by angels and demons, with the modern supply drawn from scattered ancient caches and small ongoing production by artificers who understand fragments of the original craft.
Both, with “natural” stones being imperfect and “Founding” stones being flawless.
Stones grown in living symbiosis with a practitioner over years of use, which would explain why a trained adult’s stone often reacts more cleanly than a child’s.

The current working canon is the hybrid: most stones are crafted by guild artificers from natural crystal substrates in a process kept deliberately opaque. A small, rare class of Founding-era stones circulates among the oldest houses and occasionally surfaces in treasure hauls from the Aldasen ruin.

How stones are acquired. A young practitioner traditionally receives their first focus stone at academy entrance, commissioned by their house, their guild, or purchased on careful savings from a reputable artificer. Children of wealth often carry a junior stone from a young age and receive an adult stone upon practitioner certification. An inherited stone (parent to child) is a gesture of personal weight, and some houses keep ancestral stones whose color history across generations is recorded as a private family archive.

Why the archons’ stones are anomalous. Neither stone fits the modern supply chain. Cyl’s absolute-dark stone is not a known commissioned type, and no artificer alive is publicly known to produce stones at that saturation. Oen’s perfectly clear stone could pass as a new, uncommitted child’s stone, which is how the community around him has read it for years. Oen’s age and growing power should by now have pulled the stone toward a color; its continued clarity is the anomaly. Both stones may be Founding-era, placed with the archons at their discovery by parties currently unknown.

Damage and loss. Focus stones can crack, shatter, or be stolen. A cracked stone produces wavering, unreliable channel colors and leaks faith-substrate as it is used, which is both inefficient and potentially hazardous; leaked faith can be sensed by trained adversaries, and in the worst case can be captured and redirected. A shattered stone forces the practitioner to rely on unmediated faith, which is legal but much less efficient. A stolen stone carries the bearer’s last-used color imprint for hours or days before clearing, which is why wealthy practitioners sometimes track theft through their own stone’s color fade as witnessed by servants at distance.

Distinction from other artifacts. Focus stones are not Shaba Navi (section 9), which are dimensional-gateway mirrors held by a separate secret society. They are not angel feathers (section 8), which are residual angelic artifacts. They are not the Founding-era mirrors used by Valekith (section 10), which are a different class entirely. Focus stones are the ordinary, legitimate, widely-carried channeling implement of standard Sulamiri practice. The other three classes are special and rare.

Commercial and civic role. The commissioning, grading, certification, and trade of focus stones is a significant sector of the Sulamiri economy. Lapidary guilds, artificer guilds, and the craft houses all have standing interests. Stone forgeries exist (glass that colors by surface trick rather than by true channel response) and are prosecuted as impersonation of discipline. A reputable artificer’s mark on a stone is a meaningful guarantee. The oldest and most venerable stone-crafting houses guard their methods as trade secrets of centuries’ depth.

12.5 Institutions of Learning

Sulamir University

The principal institution of higher learning in Sulamir. Attended by the children of great houses, the promising apprentices of guilds, and the rare commoner who earns sponsorship. The curriculum spans the theory of the nine discipline-channels, the history of the Founding and the Long Human Centuries, artificer engineering, natural philosophy, the classical languages of the continent, and the civic theory of the eighteen-guild Council. Sulamir University is funded jointly by the great houses and the Council and is politically independent of any single guild, though the Iron Coin, Abyssal Fires, and The Core all maintain formal chairs there. Graduates of the University dominate the Right Hand and Left Hand posts across the Council’s middle-rank guilds. OPEN on the University’s specific campus location within the city, its age, and whether any Founding-era structures are incorporated into its architecture.

13. Cross-References

The discipline theory these technologies implement: 02-DISCIPLINES.
House Corveliss’s magnerail charter: 05-GUILDS (Alum-sidek Alliance).
The Center Spire as seat of the Council: 05-GUILDS, 04-CONTINENT.
The Maw and the Aldasen ruin: 04-CONTINENT section 3.
The mirrors and Valekith’s history: 06-HISTORY section 5.
The angel feather scene and Mo’s identification: 11-CHARACTERS.
Focus stones as channel-lenses, archonic stones, and the color wheel they express: 02-DISCIPLINES Framework, 03-ARCHONS sections 3 and 4.

14. Open Questions (Technology)

The full schematic principle of Founding-era mirrors.
The question of whether any live mirror cache has been found in the Current Age.
Angel feather properties: the question of whether they carry consciousness, and the question of whether they can be used to re-summon the angel they came from.
The nature and function of shaba navi.
The question of whether the Cloud network can be weaponized, and who has attempted this.
The question of whether the Center Spire’s original function is separable from its current one.
The question of whether the deep infrastructure contains active Founding-era machinery Oen has encountered.
The status and inventory of artifacts in the Aldasen ruin that have not yet been recovered.
The origin of focus stones (natural, Founding-era craft, hybrid, or grown in symbiosis). Working canon is hybrid.
The provenance of Cyl’s absolute-black stone and Oen’s perfectly clear stone, which do not fit the modern supply chain and are almost certainly Founding-era.
The question of whether any other pure white or pure black focus stones exist elsewhere in the world, in hands currently unknown.