I spent thirty-one years being shown into rooms because of what I was wearing, and I have watched three better people be shown out of the same rooms for the same reason.
What follows is how the institutions of this world are put together, what each of them wants, and how to recognise one at forty paces in bad light. None of it is decoration. A Crown coat spends material and maintenance to make inherited authority look effortless. A Windlass storm panel shows where it can be replaced and how its closures work. Both facts are legible on the garment. Both are worth knowing before you decide whom to ask for help.
In a city with two governments, a collar is a jurisdiction.
Comparative folio study
Continuity, and serviceability.
Two institutions share one city. Both look competent. They are arguing different cases, and they are arguing them in cloth before anybody opens their mouth.
Seductive continuity
The Nine Crowns
Long, uninterrupted, tailored. High wind collar. Exact at shoulder and waist.
Fasteners hidden. The garment is meant to look as though it was not fastened at all.
Rank carried in small mosaic-like pieces at collar and cuff, layering nine older heraldic systems under imperial additions.
Rider derivation is structural: asymmetrical harness closures, weighted split tails, reinforced seat and thigh.
Attachment points for equipment the service stopped issuing a generation ago, kept because removing them would be an admission.
Immaculate is the standard. Expensive cloth is re-cut, cuffs repaired, faded lining maintained, and obsolete honours kept in service.
Working swatches
Dominant cloth
Ink blue#17202A
Light structural
Bone#D8CCB8
Working neutral
Soot#292A2A
Restricted signal
Faded carmine#7B3537
Hardware and rank
Aged gilt#9A7844
Visible serviceability
The Kaerys successor authority
Short modular work coat over quilted layers. Every panel is a replaceable part.
A replaceable windward storm panel, closed into the weather and opened for indoor duty.
Closures exposed and comprehensible. You can see how it fastens, which means you can see how to get somebody out of it.
Yard, union, and civic marks applied where the work happened rather than where a designer would put them.
Repair is public. A patched shoulder is evidence that somebody inspected it.
The storm panel can be replaced, and its closures can be understood by inspection. Repair is a service record rather than a shame.
The Crown hides restricted colour inside a long, exact line inherited from mounted service. Kaerys shortens the coat, exposes repair, and makes the pale storm panel replaceable. Both look competent enough that allegiance cannot be read from tailoring alone.
Boundary This recurring pair establishes institutional contrast, not named people or universal uniforms. Other successor states require their own design language; exact rank, fasteners, headgear, and insignia remain unsettled.
Four centuries old. Ninety years a world power. Eight years in collapse.
Nine older kingdoms, unified four hundred years ago under House Vaelorin. Its public claim is not conquest but consent: that each dragon freely chose a rider. The heraldry says so. The coronation says so. The words cut over the doors at Aurevane say so, and they are four centuries old and still legible because somebody is paid to keep them that way. Repetition is not proof.
Steam gave the Crowns a scheduled crossing ninety years ago, and for three generations they were the only thing that mattered anywhere. They ran the routes, set the tariffs, garrisoned the ports, and decided what the sky was for. Then quick crystal made self-contained, fuel-free route flight possible, the subject territories worked out that they could fly without asking, and the war followed.
The Crowns still hold a capital. They still issue commissions, honours, and warrants. They no longer decide anything past their own coastline.
Wants
To still be what it was.
Holds
The Ilyrion coast and the capital at Aurevane. The Ramparts and the high docks at Kaerys. Warrants that are honoured on one side of a painted line.
How to recognise one
Line
Long and uninterrupted, cut close at shoulder and waist, with a high wind collar and fasteners you cannot see.
Rank
Small mosaic-like pieces at collar and cuff. Nine older heraldic systems sit underneath, with imperial additions layered over them, and a practised eye can date a collar to the decade.
Rider lineage
Rider derivation is built in rather than applied: asymmetrical harness closures, weighted split tails, reinforced seat and thigh, gloves, and obsolete attachment points maintained long after their equipment disappeared.
Colour
Ink blue, bone, and small areas of aged gilt. The carmine lives inside the coat, and you see it when the wearer moves.
Condition
The decline shows at arm’s length and not before. Re-cut cloth, repaired cuffs, faded lining, sun-bleached braid, and honours maintained after the system that issued them stopped working.
The Nine Crowns · working swatches
Dominant cloth
Ink blue#17202A
Light structural
Bone#D8CCB8
Working neutral
Soot#292A2A
Restricted signal
Faded carmine#7B3537
Hardware and rank
Aged gilt#9A7844
The dragon stalls at Aurevane are still staffed. Fresh straw, swept stone, fittings polished this morning, and a ledger kept in a good hand recording nothing. The standing order has never been cancelled.
Its former subjects do not call it the Nine Crowns. They call it the Leash.
In former imperial territory, a title or commission granted by the Crown is a leash-name. The honour carries no legal force outside Ilyrion. People still put them on their doors.
Aurevane is eight days overland from the coast, ceremonial, enormous, and quietly broke. The ceremony is the part that has been maintained.
Ink-blue split tailoring exposes continuous heavy protection while faded carmine stays inside movement surfaces. Low riding soles, a structural waist, quiet repair, and restrained mosaic authority keep rider ancestry legible in air service.
Boundary Protection class, palette, material language, and working silhouette only. The person, helmet, hardware, tessera pattern, exact coverage, and every seam remain illustrative.
Eight years after the refusals, Aurevane’s dragon stalls are empty and still staffed. One keeper renews the straw while another polishes a fitting beside the blank daily ledger. No order has cancelled the work.
Boundary The maintained institution and uncancelled work are established. No dragon anatomy, belief, return, bond, stall count, exact architecture, or keeper motive is claimed.
The surveyor’s note
Vantage
A permitted visitor rail opposite the principal bay, returned to over several mornings.
Before, after
Fresh straw had just arrived. The keepers moved on to inspect the next empty bay and complete the same record.
I have reworked this more than the architecture deserves. Perfect continuation after the work stops without explanation is difficult to draw without making it look like grief. The keepers never performed grief for me.
Bring to session zero
The nine older kingdoms are named in the coronation and almost nowhere else. If one matters to your history, bring it as a proposal.
Name a Crown honour your family still displays, and say what it was originally awarded for.
Name one of the nine older kingdoms and describe the heraldic system it kept underneath the imperial additions.
Decide whether your family’s commission was earned, bought, or awarded to somebody else and inherited sideways.
Eight years old. Holds what it was standing on when the shooting stopped.
The armistice never required the Crown garrison to leave, so it did not leave. The successor authority runs what it happened to be holding when the firing stopped. Neither side can remove the other without restarting a war neither can afford, and eight years of that has produced an arrangement that was never signed and is used daily.
It holds the Yards, the low docks, the Lamp Quarter, and most of the housing where people actually live. It issues its own coin and its own warrants. Its constituency is shipwrights, unions, salvage crews, and the half of the city that makes the other half possible.
Its provisional name is part of the truth. People say the Windlass authority because no permanent constitution or sovereign title survived agreement. A working civic service exists where a settled state does not.
Wants
Recognition, and the routes it already holds.
Holds
The Yards. The low docks. The Lamp Quarter. Half of Sixteen Locks, badly.
How to recognise one
Line
A short modular work coat over quilted layers. It is assembled rather than tailored, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Panel
A replaceable windward storm panel, closed into the weather and opened for indoor duty. Chalk canvas, because chalk canvas is what the yards buy by the roll.
Closures
Exposed and comprehensible. You can see how it fastens, which means you can see how to get somebody out of it in a hurry.
Marks
Yard, union, and civic marks, applied where the work happened. They are records, not decoration, and they are read as records.
Colour
Iron grey, chalk, unbleached canvas, oxidised metal. Signal ochre appears only at safety, jurisdiction, inspection, and moving-machine points, which is the reason it still means something.
The Kaerys successor authority · working swatches
Dominant cloth
Iron grey#4C5052
Light structural
Chalk#C8C0AE
Working neutral
Unbleached canvas#A99D87
Restricted signal
Signal ochre#A86E20
Hardware and rank
Oxidised metal#68716C
The uniform looks legitimate and contemporary rather than rebellious. That was decided deliberately, by people who had watched what happens to governments that look improvised.
A patched shoulder here reads as evidence that somebody inspected the coat and signed for the repair.
Both currencies circulate. The rate is chalked on a board outside the changer’s window and rewritten over yesterday’s ghost, sometimes twice in a day.
A short iron-grey coat, quilted working layers, modular plates, chalk weather protection, and restricted ochre read as clean civic issue rather than scavenged kit. Worn parts are meant to come off in a yard.
Boundary Medium protection, serviceability, palette, and clean issue are established. The comparison plate, not this sheet, governs the asymmetrical storm panel; person, helmet, hardware, and exact coverage remain illustrative.
Bring to session zero
This is a civic uniform, which means it carries marks, and marks belong to somebody.
Name your yard, your union, or your civic office, and describe the mark it puts on the things it has passed.
Decide what your storm panel was last replaced for: weather, machinery, or somebody’s hand.
Decide whether you have ever been asked to enforce a warrant on the other side of a painted line, and what you did about it.
The former imperial territories are not one thing and do not act as one. They fought together as the loose Open Routes Coalition, then fragmented after the armistice. Some successors are governments with a treasury and a post. Some are chartered companies that were granted a route and simply kept it. Some are garrisons that stopped being paid and did not stop being armed. What they share is that they hold routes they took and intend to go on holding them.
I have set foot in four of them and could not generalise honestly from four. What follows is a shape, not a description.
Wants
To hold the routes they took.
Holds
Whatever they were standing on, and whatever they have taken since.
How to recognise one
Legitimacy
Each of them argues for itself differently — inheritance, election, purchase, occupation, or unbroken continuity of service. The argument is usually visible in what they put on a building.
Materials
Local substrate and local industry. A state built on a quarry does not dress like a state built on a foundry, and both will tell you why theirs is the serious one.
Payroll
Whether the garrison is paid is the single most useful thing to establish about a successor state, and it is rarely written down anywhere you can read.
Bring to session zero
This is the emptiest page in the chapter and the one with the most room in it. If your character comes from an unnamed successor state, bring its shape as a session-zero proposal.
Name a successor state, say what it holds, and say how it argues that holding is legitimate.
Decide what it wears, working from its own substrate and industry rather than from Kaerys’s.
Decide whether it pays its garrison, and what happened the last time it was late.
Decide what it calls the Nine Crowns when the room is friendly, and what it calls them when the room is not.
Refining concerns. They do not call themselves companies.
The houses own the process that turns a person’s best skill into working crystal, and everything downstream of it: the fleets it made possible, the instruments in the hospitals, the ledger engines that underwrite the shipping, the translation instruments in the embassies.
They financed both sides of the war. They now hold the debt of every government that fought it. Kings answer to underwriters. Calling that a conspiracy overstates it — the loans, obligations, and payments happened in public even when the complete ledgers did not.
House Halloway is the one most people in Kaerys have dealt with directly. It runs a legitimate refining concern and a legitimate salvage subsidiary, and it runs both of them well.
Wants
Repayment, supply, and the conditions that guarantee both.
Holds
Debt. Refining. The pooled money that funds the only institution the two governments of Kaerys operate together.
Working visual hypothesis
Halloway’s palette and clothing direction remain provisional design language. They are not yet a settled way to identify every clerk, foreman, office, or station.
Register
Calm public-service clothing. Durable, approachable, and clean without being clinical. It is designed to be unremarkable in a waiting room.
Role
Distinguished by construction rather than by luxury. You can tell a Halloway clerk from a Halloway foreman without either of them being better dressed than the other.
Colour
Soft civic green, warm bone, walnut, black ink, and restrained nickel at the fittings.
The houses · working swatches
Dominant cloth
Civic green#4B5B48
Light structural
Warm bone#D6CDBA
Working neutral
Walnut#55402E
Hardware
Restrained nickel#8C918E
Their wayfinding is genuinely good. Their benches are comfortable. When somebody is hurt at one of their stations they are treated properly and quickly.
That is worth stating plainly, because it is true, and because it is a large part of why abolition has not succeeded.
A house honours its agreements scrupulously. The money arrives on time, every month, for the whole term.
The Hall is funded by a pooled levy from several houses. No single house owns the public facade or supplies all of its staff.
Bring to session zero
Several houses operate out of Kaerys. One is named. Bring another as a session-zero proposal if your history needs it.
Name a house and say what it is known for refining.
Decide whether your family has ever taken a house’s money, and on what terms.
Decide what your character thinks when they walk into a well-run waiting room.
Second rung of the ladder. Now in every port that has traffic.
Three and a half centuries ago the great bearers made real cargo possible for the first time, and the cultures that followed the migration became the only people who could cross the Belt. That migration was the longest journey anything made in this world. Within the last decade it changed course.
Routes held for three centuries shifted, collapsed, or went somewhere the callers could not follow. A way of life is ending in real time, and the people it belonged to are in ports they did not choose, carrying knowledge that currently has no buyer.
Wants
Their route back, or an explanation.
Holds
Skill. Meetsend Row. The tether fields, which are still maintained.
How to recognise one
Architecture
Made of routes. Portable structures, tether fields, layered textiles, and settlements arranged around the stages of a journey rather than around a centre.
Equipment
Harness grammar everywhere, including in households that have not had a bearer in a decade. Route line becomes laundry rigging. Weather instruments become repair tools. The knots are still tied correctly.
Marking
There is a fair question about what these cultures put on a banner, and the honest answer is that a banner is the wrong object. What gets marked is a stage — a route marker, a knot, a pennant on a tether field that says which part of the journey this is. A family device would be answering a question these cultures were not asking.
Their settlements are named for stages of the route. Thirdwater. Meetsend. The Long Turning. Lastwater. Sixth Rest. Every place these people live is named after a journey that no longer happens, so their maps are obituaries.
Meetsend Row in Kaerys is the poorest district in the city and holds the largest concentration of irreplaceable skill anywhere in the world: navigators, weather readers, beast handlers, people who have crossed the Belt and come back to describe it.
The routes they knew do not run, so the work does not exist, so they are poor. The skill is undiminished. That is the whole of the arithmetic.
Bring to session zero
The five waypoints above are the ones I was told. There were a great many more, and the naming rule is simple: a place is named for the stage of the journey it recorded.
Propose a waypoint, and say which stage of the journey it recorded.
Decide which knot your family taught first, and what it named.
Decide whether your character believes the route can return, and what it would cost them to be wrong.
They carried riders. At or near the armistice, they refused.
For four centuries the Crown has taught that its dragons freely chose their riders. The claim is carved into institutions that depended on it and repeated in every ceremony of rule. The dragons carried riders; that much is public history. What the older relationship was is not established here.
At or near the armistice eight years ago, they stopped carrying anyone. They did not die or depart. The refusal happened on published schedules and in staffed courts, and neither the dragons nor the Crown has offered a public explanation.
An empire whose legitimacy rests on the claim that the dragons chose it is watching them decline to continue. That is the whole safe fact. Anything more belongs to evidence the campaign has not yet earned.
Wants
Not established.
Holds
The route slots they are no longer keeping, and the silence around them.
How to recognise one
Public record
Schedules, rider orders, mounting courts, stalls, and four centuries of Crown art. These prove institutional use, not the Crown’s explanation of it.
Present fact
The dragons remain in Ilyrion and do not carry riders. Their individual movements, access, and reasons are not described in this folio.
Bring to session zero
What your household was told, and whether it believed the Crown’s account, is a private character fact.
Decide what your family was told about why the dragons refused, and whether you believed it at the time.
Decide what your household did with obsolete rider equipment afterwards: sold, stored, burned, or still maintained.
Every vessel here is built to be read twice. At distance: one graceful inhabited silhouette, with a prow, a working middle, a stern, and an obvious relationship to whatever is holding it up. Close to: load paths, fuel or tenant burden, heat, water, patch history, service access, and the people correcting it.
Institution changes how the whole is built and how it is meant to be understood. It does not change the physics. A Crown crystal courier and a Crown steam patrol craft are two different vessels, not one hull with different engines in it, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never had to service either.
Hull lineages recurring in the Kaerys corridor
Lineage
Working form
The tell
Inherited Ilyrion
Long composed coastal hull, high inhabited decks, pale structural ribs, dark timber, enamel or mosaic at the authority points.
Crown refits conceal the machinery inside inherited proportion. You hear it before you see it.
Harrowmark and Coldwater
Deep merchant and yard hulls with strong cargo wells, black timber and iron, and boilers and drive machinery you can actually reach.
Patch history stays visible. A repair that has been seen is a repair somebody can be asked about.
Windlass successor
Existing hulls cut down or recombined, plus purpose-built forms with replaceable sections and retained watertight compartments.
Inspection access has not been hidden, and the vessel is still a whole ship rather than a platform with an engine on it.
Foreign hulls arrive at Kaerys as memorable visiting silhouettes, and I have left them alone. Their home traditions are outside my competence, and guessing would put an error into a document people navigate by.
A curved inhabited hull sits close beneath a dominant patched envelope. Suspension bands, structural pylons, side screws, access, and human scale make the maritime inheritance load-bearing rather than decorative.
Boundary Integrated steam-lift construction grammar only. Exact hull, class, ornament, pylon count, propellers, line routing, envelope pattern, scale, mission, and water-alighting capability remain unsettled.
Kaerys crystal craft carry a quiet bone-and-chalk shell, restrained subsurface branching, and machinery grouped where workers can reach it. The central reliquary is capped, gasketed, fastened, and opaque.
Boundary Material, protected-core, maintenance, and directional-hull language only. Exact hull, dimensions, mission, apertures, neural routing, service bays, deck plan, and amphibious capability remain unsettled.
Bring to session zero
If your character has a vessel, or grew up on one, its lineage is a decision worth making before its name is.
Choose the lift family first: living, envelope, steam, crystal, or hybrid.
Choose the mission second. A tug and a courier are not the same object.
Then decide who built it, who has repaired it since, and which of those two the vessel currently looks like.
On the state of this chapter
The shortest chapter in the folio.
Institutions were the thing I was worst at. I could survey a crossing and tell you what it would cost to make. I could not always tell you who would be standing at the far end of it, or what they would want from the person who arrived.
Where a name is missing here, it is missing because it has not been settled. Bring one to session zero as a proposal. Say what it holds and how it argues the holding is legitimate; if the table keeps it, this chapter will take the correction.
Chapter IV
Two of them share one city.
Kaerys to the charts, the Windlass to the dockers, the crews, and the yards. One inherited port, overprinted by rival governments, with a painted line where a warrant stops being worth anything.
