Dictionary
290 terms generated from published document titles and useful headings. A Drive doc named Dictionary or Glossary can override these definitions.
A
- A Nation of Plenty
- Prosperiticers did not diverge from their human ancestry through mutation, curse, machinery, or some dramatic physical transformation. Most remain close to the old human form.From Prosperiticers
- A Place in An'kor
- Xanaras changed many things. It did not erase old hatred.From Demians
- A Society That Cannot Stay Dead
- Zompire civilization is shaped by people who can be removed but rarely erased.From Zompires
- Across An'kor
- 'Still inside.' - A grim answer meaning alive, safe, or not yet lost.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Adaptive Antivenom
- Genevolver laboratories maintain libraries of toxins, diseases, immune responses, and engineered treatments. Their best field kits can be adjusted rapidly when the contaminant is known.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- After Xanaras
- The arrival of Xanaras devastated more than Technobeast territory.From Technobeasts
- Aquarians
- Aquarians are an amphibious, human-descended people whose civilization developed beneath An'kor's oceans.From Aquarians
- Argent Table
- Strategists, officers, intelligence specialists, logisticians, and veteran defenders focused on preparation.From Overview
- Ascendant Faculty
- Influential old-school Genevolver establishment defending aggressive biological research.From Overview
- Ask Before the Wrench
- Among Technobeasts, modifying another person's body without explicit consent carries enormous historical weight. The phrase 'ask before the wrench' began as workshop humor and became a general expression for respecting autonomy.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- At least 1,300 years before present
- The conflicts between An'kor's nations hardened into what later historians call the Long War.From Timeline of An'kor
- Aurelia, the Unpoor City
- Aurelia is one of the great Prosperiticer cities and perhaps the clearest demonstration of what a society looks like when material wealth is ordinary. Its public buildings use materials other nations reserve for palaces. Farmers travel roads better maintained than royal avenues elsewhere. Ordinary hFrom Aurelia, the Unpoor City
B
- Bastion Argent
- Bastion Argent is a fortress, military academy, logistics center, and strategic school famous for producing Prosperiticer officers. Its training culture treats waste as a form of incompetence. Students are taught that bravery is useful, but arranging a battle so bravery becomes unnecessary is preferFrom Bastion Argent
- Beard's Children
- Engineering society honoring Dieselbeard through invention, apprenticeship, preserved machinery, and ambitious prototypes.From Overview
- Before the Curse
- Mara was a human woman with a husband, a home, and children. Sevrin Veyr was obsessed with her, but she did not return his affection.From Mara
- Behavior
- Xanaras does not appear to hate An'kor.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Behavior and Temperament
- Sevrin is intelligent, obsessive, possessive, theatrical when emotional, and capable of genuine charm. He can be patient for years and catastrophically impulsive in a single night.From Sevrin Veyr
- Black Vein Consortium
- Mine owners and industrial interests seeking new Diesel resources, often through dangerous frontier projects.From Overview
- Blood Recall
- A dangerous family of old vampiric techniques that uses blood as a sympathetic link. Depending on the school, a practitioner may track a recently fed-upon victim, sense whether specific blood is fresh, or strengthen perception of a person whose blood they have consumed.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Borrowed Faces
- Shieldline soldiers tell stories about Feeders that mimic people they have consumed. The creatures in these accounts speak with familiar voices, repeat memories, or stand at the edge of the shield calling family members by name.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
C
- Cities Beneath the Sea
- Aquarians built enormous cities beneath the oceans.From Aquarians
- Claim Maps
- Diesel Dwarf families, Prosperiticer estates, displaced governments, farmers, temples, and ordinary refugees all maintain maps marking property that now lies beyond the shield.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Classification Limits
- These classes are practical battlefield language.From Feeder Field Classification
- Closed Hand
- Privacy-focused movement emphasizing encryption, compartmentalization, and restriction of dangerous information.From Overview
- Commonly Found
- Near the shieldline, in abandoned settlements, ruined infrastructure, tunnels, collapsed buildings, and newly occupied territory.From Feeder Field Classification
- Communication and Information
- Communication is often faster than travel.From Life in An'kor
- Continuity Engineers
- Technicians and infrastructure crews who keep the surviving network, relays, power, and data systems functioning.From Overview
- Core Oaths
- In Corian, swearing 'by the Core' or 'on the Core' has become common even among people with no religious attachment to it. The oath carries the implication that the speaker is invoking the one thing nobody can afford to treat lightly.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Corian
- Built in the center of An'kor after the Demian warning, Corian is the youngest great nation and the political heart of the surviving world. It was created specifically because no old capital could be trusted to represent everyone. Every people contributed something to its construction, which means iFrom Corian
- Corruption, Lobbying, and Black Markets
- An existential threat did not make politicians incorruptible.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Creation and Ownership
- Many Genevolvers consider a Mutamon their property.From Genevolvers & Mutamons
- Cultural Language
- Modern An'korians use geography socially.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Current Reading
- Aquarian investigators can examine water for traces of recent magical disturbance, unusual biological activity, toxins, temperature change, or violent displacement. It is often described as reading what the water remembers.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
D
- Death and Funerals
- Death remains ordinary enough to be culturally important and common enough that nearly every community has rituals for it.From Life in An'kor
- Deep Breath
- An Aquarian spell that temporarily allows an air-breathing creature to extract usable air from water. The spell does not make the subject pressure-resistant, warm, able to swim, or immune to drowning if concentration fails.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Deepworks Brotherhood
- Guild, labor union, and mutual-aid network for miners, engineers, tunnel crews, and industrial workers.From Overview
- Demian Life
- There is no single Demian personality, profession, or way of life.From Demians
- Demian Rights and the Politics of Memory
- Demians occupy an unusual political position after the invasion. Their warning helped save civilization, and their contribution helped make the Core possible, yet old discrimination survived.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Demians
- Demians are a human-descended people born from one of the ugliest chapters in An'kor's history.From Demians
- Diesel Dwarves
- They produce it. They drink it. They sweat it. They breathe it.From Diesel Dwarves
- Diesel Pressure Engines
- Diesel Dwarf engines convert refined Diesel into enormous mechanical force. Pumps, drills, lifts, rail engines, saws, generators, furnaces, and battlefield machinery all descend from this basic family of designs.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Diesel-Blooded
- Generations of constant exposure changed the dwarves themselves.From Diesel Dwarves
- Dieselbeard
- Dieselbeard was the dwarven scientist whose discovery transformed the mountain people of the Thundering Heights into the civilization now known as the Diesel Dwarves.From Dieselbeard
- Dieselbeard's First Foundry
- Preserved deep within the Thundering Heights is the workshop traditionally identified as the place where Dieselbeard refined the first successful batch of Diesel and built the earliest engines that used it. Historians argue about how much of the current site is original. Diesel Dwarves argue that hiFrom Dieselbeard's First Foundry
- Dieselbeard's Knock
- Miners in the Thundering Heights sometimes hear three heavy metallic knocks from rock that no tunnel has reached. Tradition says Dieselbeard is pointing toward a rich deposit.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Drill City Nine
- Drill City Nine was built around a machine so large that the settlement eventually took its name from the drill rather than the other way around. When the shield withdrew, evacuation orders came too late to save most of the industrial equipment. Long-range observers occasionally report lights, vibraFrom Drill City Nine
- Dwarven Temperament
- Diesel Dwarves have a reputation for being simple-minded.From Diesel Dwarves
E
- Education
- Literacy is common in cities and developed regions because An'kor depends heavily on records, technical knowledge, military coordination, medicine, and administration. Access and quality vary dramatically.From Life in An'kor
- Eleven Watch
- Tracks Zompire deaths, expected returns, legal status, property, military losses, prisoners, and missing returns.From Overview
- Eleven-Week Humor
- Zompires make jokes about their resurrection cycle constantly. Mortals usually cannot tell which jokes are acceptable.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Entertainment
- People make time for entertainment because a world without recreation is simply a slower kind of death.From Life in An'kor
- Environmental Compression
- The shield also compressed nature.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Exceptions to the Gradient
- The inward gradient should never become a rigid rule.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
F
- Family, Relationships, and Community
- Mixed cities have produced friendships, marriages, households, business partnerships, and families that would have been politically unthinkable during parts of the Long War.From Life in An'kor
- Feeder Bells
- Many shieldline settlements maintain alarms with sounds deliberately different from fire, weather, or military drill signals. The exact designs vary, but the phrase Feeder Bells has become common even when the alarm is electronic.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Feeder Field Classification
- The term Feeder is a field classification, not a proven biological category. It refers to mobile organisms repeatedly observed acting in ways that support Xanaras: scouting, hunting, harvesting, reshaping territory, testing defenses, or moving material through occupied regions.From Feeder Field Classification
- Fifteen Years Before Present: Xanaras Arrives
- Two years after the Demian vision, an enormous object struck An'kor carrying the first known manifestation of Xanaras.From Timeline of An'kor
- Final Hunger
- Cross-racial religious movement, strongest among Zompires, that venerates Xanaras as the possibility of a true ending.From Overview
- Finalists
- Researchers and volunteers seeking permanent Zompire death without sacrificing the rest of An'kor.From Overview
- First Ignition
- A Diesel Dwarf who completes a major machine traditionally starts it in front of family, coworkers, teachers, or anyone else likely to laugh if it explodes.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Food and Drink
- Cuisine changed dramatically after the invasion because refugee populations were forced together. Corian in particular has become a culinary collision of every surviving culture.From Life in An'kor
- Fourteen Years Before Present to the Present: The Interrupted Digestion
- The war against Xanaras became a cold war.From Timeline of An'kor
G
- Genevolvers
- Genevolvers are a human-descended people whose civilization became obsessed with one question: if life is written in blood, flesh, and genes, why should nature have the final word?From Genevolvers & Mutamons
- Genevolvers & Mutamons
- Genevolvers are a human-descended people whose civilization became obsessed with one question: if life is written in blood, flesh, and genes, why should nature have the final word?From Genevolvers & Mutamons
- Gilded Restoration
- Movement seeking to reclaim lost Prosperiticer lands, estates, collections, and monuments.From Overview
- Glasswater
- A practical Aquarian technique that stabilizes a volume of water or air into a transparent pressure-resistant boundary. Small versions create temporary air pockets, isolate contaminated water, protect delicate objects, or form windows during underwater work.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Gravecount
- Zompire occultists developed methods for sensing the remaining time before a dead Zompire's return. The simplest forms rely on ritual objects linked to the deceased. Experienced practitioners can sometimes estimate the return without seeing the corpse.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Great Houses
- Powerful extended families whose patronage, rivalries, military traditions, and commercial interests shape Prosperiticer politics.From Overview
- Green Communion
- Priests, healers, naturalists, mystics, and practitioners of Demian living-world traditions.From Overview
- Green Mercy
- A Demian healing tradition that encourages a body to cooperate with its own natural repair. It can slow bleeding, reduce shock, support recovery, and improve the survival of damaged tissue.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Guarding Prosperity
- Prosperiticers will tolerate many things.From Prosperiticers
H
- Houses of Measure
- Political coalition arguing that abundance creates an obligation to fund public works and survival.From Overview
- Housing and Cities
- The surviving world is crowded. Repeated contractions pushed populations inward, and temporary camps often became permanent districts before anyone officially admitted it.From Life in An'kor
- How Certain Is the Timeline?
- Modern events are well established because living witnesses remember them.From Timeline of An'kor
- How Magic Is Understood
- Magic exists throughout An'kor, but there is no single universal magical theory. Aquarians study it as a measurable part of the natural world. Demian traditions often approach it through living systems, spirits, places, and relationships. Old human traditions include ritual magic, curses, charms, divination, and countless local schools.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- How the Gradient Formed
- When Xanaras advanced, the shield contracted. Each contraction turned another belt of inhabited territory into the outside.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
I
- Industry at the Edge
- Heavy industry has an uncomfortable tendency to migrate outerward.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Industry Without End
- The greatest weakness of Diesel Dwarf civilization is also the thing that made it powerful.From Diesel Dwarves
- Innerward
- Innerward regions are territories considered comfortably distant from the shieldline. They include much of the most stable surviving infrastructure, major government offices, prestigious institutions, wealthy neighborhoods, secure archives, hospitals, universities, and important commercial centers.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Innerward Versus Outerward
- Class politics now has geography.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Inside and Outside
- After the shield contracted, 'inside' and 'outside' became emotionally loaded words throughout An'kor. Inside means protected territory. Outside means lost territory, even when the speaker is discussing a place that was once their home.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Intent
- Why does Xanaras consume worlds?From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
K
- Keepers of the Current
- Magical ecologists who study how water, magic, weather, minerals, and living systems affect one another.From Overview
- Kindness, Curiosity, and Sanctuary
- Aquarians are often awkward people.From Aquarians
L
- Land and Property
- Property law is one of the strangest parts of post-Xanaras politics.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Land, Speculation, and Evacuation
- Shield geography created a ruthless land market.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Law, Crime, and Policing
- Most law remains local. National governments, cities, guilds, military districts, Aquarian settlements, Zompire jurisdictions, and refugee communities can have very different legal traditions.From Life in An'kor
- Legacy
- Technobeasts remember Alvas with complicated anger. Without his work, their people would not exist. Because of his assumptions, their people began in captivity.From Professor Alvas
- Life Between Sea and Land
- Aquarians can breathe both water and air. Their bodies are adapted to cold, pressure, long periods of swimming, and the constant moisture of the sea.From Aquarians
- Life in An'kor
- An'kor is not a world in which everyone spends every waking hour staring at the shield and waiting to die. Xanaras has been part of life for fifteen years. People have learned to live around the danger because ordinary life does not stop simply because extinction remains possible.From Life in An'kor
- Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- This document collects the smaller beliefs, inventions, spells, stories, customs, rumors, and habits that make An'kor feel inhabited. Not everything here is objective truth. Some entries are established practices, some are common beliefs, and some are stories that people repeat because the story isFrom Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Living Splints
- Genevolver medicine produces cultivated braces, grafts, membranes, and temporary tissues designed to support damaged bodies while they heal. A living splint can grow around a shattered limb, stabilize a joint, or protect exposed tissue, then be removed or allowed to dissolve.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Living With Xanaras
- Most people do not think about Xanaras every minute. They cannot.From Life in An'kor
- Lyrassa, City of Glass Tides
- Lyrassa is one of the greatest surviving Aquarian cities, built vertically around a deep ocean trench. Crystal towers descend toward darkness while living coral districts rise toward warmer water. Entrances exist in every direction because Aquarians have little reason to respect the surface world'sFrom Lyrassa, City of Glass Tides
M
- Magic and Scholarship
- Magic sits near the center of Aquarian civilization.From Aquarians
- Mara
- Mara was the woman Sevrin Veyr tried to possess through immortality. She became one of the first vampires, died because of the life he forced upon her, and rose eleven weeks later as one of the first Zompires.From Mara
- Mara's Window
- One window of Veyr Manor is said to show the house as it existed during Mara's captivity if viewed at the right hour with no artificial light nearby.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Medicine
- Medical capability can be extraordinarily advanced where resources and expertise overlap.From Life in An'kor
- Memory Cores
- Technobeast memory cores store large amounts of written, visual, technical, and sensor information. They transformed recordkeeping even before Xanaras and became invaluable after Aquarian archives were destroyed.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Methods and Subjects
- Genevolver experimentation began with animals. Countless creatures were altered, crippled, killed, or rendered unrecognizable before meaningful progress was made. One branch of this early research eventually contributed to the rise of the Technobeasts, whose ancestors gained intelligence through the work of Professor Alvas and ultimately rebelled against their creator.From Genevolvers & Mutamons
- Military Power
- National militaries still exist, but the war against Xanaras requires multinational command structures.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Modern Aquarian Scholarship
- Aquarian scholarship changed after Xanaras.From Aquarians
- Modular Prosthetics
- Technobeasts pioneered standardized mechanical joints, sensory interfaces, artificial limbs, and replacement organs that can be repaired or upgraded without rebuilding an entire body.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Morcant, the Returning City
- Morcant was lost during the expansion of Xanaras after a defense that killed large numbers of Zompire soldiers. What happened eleven weeks later is poorly documented because by then the city was outside the shield. Stories claim that some of the dead returned among the ruins only to be killed againFrom Morcant, the Returning City
- More than 5,000 years before present
- The oldest surviving traditions describe An'kor as a world inhabited by humans and ordinary animals. Human settlements spread across coasts, plains, forests, mountains, river valleys, islands, deserts, and eventually beneath the sea.From Timeline of An'kor
- Mutamons
- A Mutamon is the result of Genevolver biological experimentation.From Genevolvers & Mutamons
N
- No Single Pantheon
- An'kor has no universal religion and no agreed list of gods. Old human-descended cultures produced thousands of local deities, saints, spirits, ancestors, philosophies, and cults. Some survived. Others were absorbed into later traditions or vanished when their temples, languages, or peoples disappeared.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
O
- Open Circuit
- Movement for open standards, distributed knowledge, mirrored archives, and information as a defense against control.From Overview
- Open Depths
- Humanitarian sanctuary network providing shelters, clinics, evacuation routes, and legal aid.From Overview
- Open Door
- Decentralized safe-house network helping persecuted people, fugitives, refugees, and escaped Mutamons.From Overview
- Open Door Marks
- Some Demian homes display carved, painted, or woven symbols near the entrance indicating that a person fleeing persecution, family violence, or abandonment may ask for temporary shelter.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Origin
- Nothing reliable is known about where Xanaras came from.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Outcasts
- The first Demians had no place in either of their parents' worlds.From Demians
- Outerward
- Outerward regions lie close enough to the shieldline that everyone knows exactly which roads lead outside.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Outside Salvage
- Objects recovered from beyond the shield are valuable, emotionally charged, and potentially dangerous. Nations regulate salvage differently. Some demand quarantine. Some claim military priority. Some recognize old ownership. Smugglers recognize whatever rule leaves them with the object.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Overview
- This page is for fast table reference. The groups below are influential, not universal; ancestry does not determine personality, politics, or faction membership.From Overview
P
- Political Consequences
- The gradient creates a permanent political divide between people who bear frontier risk and people who make decisions from safer territory.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Political Culture in Corian
- Corian is where incompatible worldviews collide daily.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Politics of the Surviving World
- The arrival of Xanaras ended the Long War without erasing the nations that fought it. Modern An'kor is therefore neither a single unified state nor a collection of fully independent countries. It is a network of old governments forced into permanent cooperation by a shared defense system none of theFrom Politics of the Surviving World
- Power, Water, and Utilities
- There is no universal technological standard. One neighborhood may have reliable electrical power and automated systems while a village a day's journey away still relies on lamps, wells, wood, animal labor, and local magic.From Life in An'kor
- Pressure Glass
- Aquarian magic and material science produce transparent panels capable of surviving depths that would crush ordinary construction. Pressure Glass allows underwater observatories, visitor chambers, laboratories, and sealed gardens to look directly into the surrounding sea.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Professor Alvas
- Professor Alvas was a Genevolver researcher whose work accidentally created the first Technobeasts. He is remembered as one of the most important scientists in An'kor's history and one of its clearest warnings about the difference between creating intelligence and recognizing personhood.From Professor Alvas
- Pronouns
- An'korians do not agree on whether Xanaras should be called he or it.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Prosperiticer Field Logistics
- Prosperiticer military engineering is less famous for spectacular machines than for making armies arrive fed, informed, supplied, rested, and difficult to surprise. Standardized containers, collapsible bridges, portable fortifications, coded inventory systems, route planning, and redundant depots are treated as weapons.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Prosperiticer Gifts
- Because ordinary monetary value carries less status among Prosperiticers, thoughtful gifts emphasize rarity, effort, history, personal relevance, craftsmanship, or access.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Prosperiticer Influence
- Prosperiticers are among the most politically active peoples in the surviving world.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Prosperiticers
- That is the first word most people in An'kor use when speaking of the Prosperiticers.From Prosperiticers
R
- RACES OF AN'KOR - QUICK REFERENCE
- This page is for fast table reference. The groups below are influential, not universal; ancestry does not determine personality, politics, or faction membership.From Overview
- Reclamation Versus Preservation
- The central strategic argument of the age is whether survival requires pushing outward or holding what remains.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Recovery Concord
- Recovers lost records, archives, and historical knowledge.From Overview
- Red Rooms
- Hospitals and research stations near the shieldline sometimes maintain sealed contamination rooms for anyone exposed to unknown Xanaras tissue, fluids, spores, parasites, or environmental effects.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Refugees, Citizenship, and Lost Nations
- The invasion created millions of displaced people and later contractions created more.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Relay Prime
- Relay Prime is the largest surviving hub of the Technobeast network. Communication towers, buried cables, data centers, workshops, power systems, drone docks, and transmission arrays fill the settlement. To a Technobeast, it is infrastructure. To many visitors, it looks as though an entire city wasFrom Relay Prime
- Relevance
- Xanaras is the central fact around which modern An'kor has been forced to reorganize.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Religion and Belief
- There is no single religion of An'kor. Local gods, ancestors, nature traditions, philosophical schools, saints, spirits, cults, household rituals, and secular worldviews coexist.From Life in An'kor
- Religion and Interpretation
- Different peoples have tried to force Xanaras into concepts they already understand.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Restraint
- Genevolver reform movement focused on consent, subject protections, oversight, and experimental law.From Overview
- Rootcall
- A Demian nature-working used to encourage roots, vines, fungi, and other local plant life to move or grow in a desired direction. It can reinforce soil, reveal buried structures, entangle movement, or help damaged ecosystems recover.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Roughly 1,100-900 years before present
- Human and near-human communities continued to keep ordinary animals as property, labor, companions, status symbols, and entertainment. In some of those communities, humans sexually abused animals in their care.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 2,500-1,500 years before present
- Physical and cultural difference increasingly became a basis for prejudice.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 250-17 years before present
- The Long War became more destructive as technology, magic, biological science, industry, and military organization improved.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 3,500-2,500 years before present
- Distinct peoples, languages, settlements, and regional identities became increasingly recognizable. Differences that had once been variations between distant human populations hardened into ancestry, culture, law, and eventually politics.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 300 years before present to the present
- Technobeast civilization expanded rapidly through shared knowledge.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 340 years before present
- Alvas's uplifted animals learned how to implant and reproduce the neural technology themselves.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 360 years before present
- Professor Alvas, a Genevolver researcher studying artificial neural enhancement, implanted a microchip into the brain of a hamster.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 4,500-3,500 years before present
- Mountain populations living in deep settlements gradually developed bodies suited to cramped tunnels, climbing, heavy labor, cold stone, and darkness. They became shorter and more powerfully built than their distant ancestors. Better low-light vision became common, eventually developing into the darkvision now associated with dwarven bloodlines.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 450-300 years before present
- Genevolver medicine and biological science became increasingly aggressive.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 500-300 years before present
- The Thundering Heights could no longer supply every demand created by Diesel civilization.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 600 years before present
- A dwarven scientist remembered as Dieselbeard discovered a method of refining minerals from the Thundering Heights into an extraordinarily energetic fuel.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 800-700 years before present
- Aquarian preservation efforts expanded into the first repositories later remembered collectively as the Great Archives.From Timeline of An'kor
- Roughly 850 years before present
- Sevrin Veyr became obsessed with a woman named Mara, who rejected him, married another man, and built a family.From Timeline of An'kor
- Rumors Worth Keeping Unresolved
- Some stories should remain available without immediate answers.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
S
- Sanctuary Reef
- Sanctuary Reef is an Aquarian settlement built around the idea that preservation applies to people as well as books and ecosystems. Demians fleeing persecution, discarded Mutamons, political refugees, wounded travelers, endangered scholars, and people who simply have nowhere else to go can sometimesFrom Sanctuary Reef
- Scale
- Xanaras is at least planetary in scale.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Seventeen to Fifteen Years Before Present: The Corian Project
- The nations began constructing a new shared nation near the center of An'kor: Corian.From Timeline of An'kor
- Seventeen Years Before Present: The Vision
- A Demian child received a vision of the arrival of Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder.From Timeline of An'kor
- Severance Station
- Severance Station was once a major network exchange connecting several regions now swallowed by Xanaras. During the retreat, technicians attempted to preserve its data cores while physically cutting the station off from the surviving network. Some systems may still contain enormous archives from befFrom Severance Station
- Sevrin Veyr
- Sevrin Veyr was the first vampire and, after his first death, the first Zompire. Every Zompire curse can ultimately be traced back to his refusal to accept that another person did not belong to him.From Sevrin Veyr
- Shield Compasses
- A post-invasion collaborative invention, shield compasses combine magical sensing with Technobeast calibration to estimate direction and distance from the Core's protective boundary.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Shieldborn
- Children too young to remember the world before Xanaras are sometimes called Shieldborn. The term is not a separate ethnicity. It describes a generation for whom shrinking borders, emergency drills, Feeders, refugee districts, and the Core are ordinary facts of childhood.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Shieldline Settlements
- The actual frontier is stranger than an ordinary poor district.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
T
- Technobeasts
- That fact sounds less important than it is.From Technobeasts
- Technology and Society
- Technobeasts are among An'kor's most advanced engineers of electronics, robotics, cybernetics, communications, and automated machinery.From Technobeasts
- The Age of Diesel
- The first diesel-powered machines were built to make mining easier.From Diesel Dwarves
- The Archive of Many Copies
- Founded after the destruction of the old Aquarian repositories, the Archive of Many Copies is less a single library than a philosophy turned into architecture. Every important record stored there is copied into multiple media and sent to other settlements whenever possible. Technobeast storage, magiFrom The Archive of Many Copies
- The Argent Table
- The Argent Table is an influential circle of strategists, logistics experts, officers, fortification planners, intelligence specialists, and veteran Core guardians. It is not formally the government, but few governments ignore it. The Table believes survival is first a problem of preparation. Food,From The Argent Table
- The Arrival
- A Demian child foresaw Xanaras seventeen years before the present day. The warning eventually convinced An'kor's warring nations to attempt a joint defense.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- The Ascendant Faculty
- The Ascendant Faculty is the most influential old-school Genevolver research establishment. Its members believe forced biological advancement remains one of civilization's greatest tools and that excessive ethical restriction risks freezing life in whatever imperfect form history happened to leave iFrom The Ascendant Faculty
- The Beard's Children
- The Beard's Children are an engineering society devoted to Dieselbeard's practical tradition. They sponsor invention contests, preserve old machines, fund apprentices, publish failures as proudly as successes, and believe nearly every problem deserves at least one attempt involving tools. Their workFrom The Beard's Children
- The Black Vein Basin
- Once the richest industrial mining region outside the Thundering Heights, the Black Vein Basin supplied enough raw material to feed refineries across several nations. Its loss was one of the moments Diesel Dwarves understood that Xanaras threatened not only territory but the physical substance theirFrom The Black Vein Basin
- The Black Vein Consortium
- The Black Vein Consortium represents mine owners, refinery families, industrial investors, transport interests, and engineering concerns obsessed with securing Diesel resources. Since rich mining territory fell outside the shield, the Consortium funds prospecting, reclamation plans, frontier infrastFrom The Black Vein Consortium
- The Blue Vaults of Namaris
- Before Xanaras, Namaris was one of the largest historical repositories in the Aquarian world. The Blue Vaults supposedly contained copies of treaties, extinct languages, magical theories, genealogies, maps, and histories reaching farther back than most surviving surface archives. Namaris was lost asFrom The Blue Vaults of Namaris
- The Briar Wards
- The Briar Wards began centuries ago as one of the overcrowded districts where unwanted Demian families were pushed together. Over generations the slum became a permanent community, then a city district, and finally a place Demians defend with fierce pride even after legal restrictions around them weFrom The Briar Wards
- The Central Irony
- The people closest to the Core are, on average, the best protected from the consequences of its failure right up until the moment it actually fails.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- The Chapel of the Final Hunger
- One of the better-known names associated with Zompire Xanaras worship is the Chapel of the Final Hunger, although it is unclear whether the 'chapel' is one permanent place or a title reused by several death cult cells. Meetings are rumored to occur near the shieldline, where cultists can watch terriFrom The Chapel of the Final Hunger
- The Closed Hand
- The Closed Hand believes the Open Circuit learned only half the lesson of Technobeast history. Information can free people, but it can also enable surveillance, manipulation, weaponization, and control. Closed Hand cells specialize in encryption, privacy, compartmentalization, secure identities, resFrom The Closed Hand
- The Common Lattice
- The creation of the Core required Aquarian magic, Demian natural forces, Genevolver enhancement, Technobeast control systems, and Diesel Dwarf infrastructure to function together. Researchers later developed much smaller cooperative rituals inspired by that achievement.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Common Lattice Institute
- The Common Lattice Institute studies hybrid magical and technological principles first proven during construction of the Core. Aquarians, Demians, Genevolvers, Technobeasts, Diesel Dwarves, Prosperiticer funders, and independent researchers participate. The Institute develops shared power systems, sFrom The Common Lattice Institute
- The Continuity Engineers
- The Continuity Engineers are technicians, network planners, repair crews, power specialists, and infrastructure rescuers dedicated to keeping the surviving Technobeast network alive as territory shrinks. They rebuild relays, maintain redundant routes, recover damaged data, and enter places other peoFrom The Continuity Engineers
- The Core
- Far beneath Corian sits the enormous sphere of concentrated energy that generates the shield protecting what remains of An'kor. Diesel Dwarf shafts and foundations surround it. Technobeast systems monitor it. Aquarian magic, Genevolver science, Demian-called natural forces, and Prosperiticer guardiaFrom The Core
- The Core and the Stalemate
- The Core is the first known force in An'kor capable of reliably preventing Xanaras from continuing to consume protected territory.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- The Core as a Holy Object
- The Core was built as a defense mechanism, not a temple. That has not stopped anyone.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Core Compact
- The Core Compact is the multinational body coordinating the Core itself. It includes engineers, mages, scientists, military representatives, guardians, technicians, maintenance chiefs, and specialists from every tradition required to keep the shield functioning. The Compact is not supposed to be a gFrom The Core Compact
- The Corian Deepworks
- Beneath Corian stretches the enormous network of shafts, support structures, maintenance tunnels, pumps, lifts, machine rooms, emergency chambers, and access ways excavated by Diesel Dwarves during construction of the Core. Some Deepworks tunnels are now effectively underground neighborhoods. OthersFrom The Corian Deepworks
- The Current Climate
- The alliance is tired, functional, suspicious, and indispensable.From Politics of the Surviving World
- The Death of Memory
- The arrival of Xanaras destroyed more than Aquarian territory.From Aquarians
- The Deepworks Brotherhood
- The Deepworks Brotherhood is a network of miners, engineers, tunnel crews, refinery workers, mechanics, and heavy-labor specialists. It functions as professional guild, union, and mutual-aid society. The Brotherhood certifies apprentices, maintains safety standards, investigates collapses, supportsFrom The Deepworks Brotherhood
- The Desire for Death
- Many Zompires are tired.From Zompires
- The Discovery
- The dwarves of the Thundering Heights had mined ores and strange minerals for generations. Many deposits were useful. Others were abundant but difficult to refine into anything worth the labor required to extract them.From Dieselbeard
- The Eighth Archive
- Aquarian scholars joke that whenever a student cannot find a lost text, they claim it survived in the Eighth Archive. The joke became a legend.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Eleven Bells
- The Eleven Bells is a Zompire city whose institutions are built around the certainty that death creates an absence rather than an ending. Eleven great bells are used to mark resurrection periods, legal waiting times, military return dates, and the expected reappearance of important citizens. InheritFrom The Eleven Bells
- The Eleven Watch
- The Eleven Watch tracks Zompire deaths and expected returns. It is part funeral service, missing-person bureau, legal registry, prison administration, and investigative organization. When a Zompire dies, the Watch records the death, helps secure property, monitors the eleven-week absence, and confirFrom The Eleven Watch
- The Eleven Weeks
- No known method has permanently killed a Zompire.From Zompires
- The Eleventh Death
- A widespread non-Zompire superstition claims that a Zompire who dies eleven times in exactly eleven years will not return after the final death.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Feeders
- The creatures called Feeders accompany Xanaras and act throughout occupied territory.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- The Field of Eleven Graves
- Centuries before Xanaras, two Zompire armies fought repeatedly over the same stretch of land. Soldiers killed in one battle returned eleven weeks later and often rejoined a war that had never properly ended. Graves accumulated in layers until nobody could agree which burial belonged to which death.From The Field of Eleven Graves
- The Final Hunger
- The Final Hunger is an umbrella name for religious movements that worship Xanaras as the possibility of a true ending. Zompires form the largest share because permanent death has obvious appeal to people cursed to resurrect forever, but membership is not exclusive to them. Mortals join too: nihilistFrom The Final Hunger
- The Finalists
- The Finalists are Zompire scholars, occultists, physicians, Genevolver collaborators, and reckless volunteers dedicated to discovering permanent death without sacrificing the rest of An'kor. They test curses, magical annihilation, extreme destruction, Xanaras tissue, biological procedures, and dimenFrom The Finalists
- The First Cage
- The ruins traditionally identified as Professor Alvas's original laboratory became a Technobeast historical site long before Xanaras. The place where uplifted animals were created, employed, confined, learned to modify one another, and eventually revolted was preserved with uncomfortable care. The FFrom The First Cage
- The First Spark
- Technobeasts generally resist language suggesting that Professor Alvas gave them souls. Their cultures prefer to speak of the First Spark: the historical moment when uplifted animals stopped being objects of research and became able to recognize, teach, and free one another.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The First Uplift
- Alvas continued his work.From Technobeasts
- The First Zompire
- For a brief moment, Sevrin believed the impossible resurrection had finally given him what he wanted.From Sevrin Veyr
- The Forgotten Fortune
- No one knows where the wealth came from.From Prosperiticers
- The Garden of Failed Saints
- Despite the name, this was never a religious site. It was a remote Genevolver research estate where generations of experimental subjects were kept after being judged too valuable to kill and too unstable to release. The name was supposedly coined by a visiting scholar who thought rows of altered bodFrom The Garden of Failed Saints
- The Ghost in the Network
- Technobeast technicians occasionally report packets, machine handshakes, or fragments of corrupted data that appear to originate from network infrastructure outside the shield. Most are explained as damaged routing tables, old automated systems, or ordinary errors.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Gilded Reach
- The Gilded Reach was a broad region of Prosperiticer estates, workshops, vineyards, private collections, country palaces, and fortified roads. When Xanaras advanced, enormous amounts of wealth were simply abandoned because wagons, vaults, and treasure were less valuable than evacuation time. From aFrom The Gilded Reach
- The Gilded Restoration
- The Gilded Restoration is a movement dedicated to reclaiming lost Prosperiticer territories, estates, collections, monuments, and family holdings beyond the shield. At its best, it preserves claims, supports displaced communities, and prepares for future reclamation. At its worst, it asks why soldieFrom The Gilded Restoration
- The Great Archives
- The stability of Aquarian civilization allowed them to preserve something the surface repeatedly destroyed: memory.From Aquarians
- The Great Houses
- Prosperiticer politics also operates through a shifting collection of Great Houses: wealthy extended families with old reputations, patronage networks, military traditions, collections, commercial interests, and political clients. The Houses are intentionally not exhaustively defined yet. Some backFrom The Great Houses
- The Green Communion
- The Green Communion gathers Demian priests, naturalists, healers, mystics, and magical practitioners who study the living-world traditions that contributed to the Core. They agree that nature can answer. They do not agree on what that means. Some believe An'kor itself possesses a form of consciousneFrom The Green Communion
- The Green Moot
- The Green Moot is a broad living sanctuary where Demian naturalists, priests, elders, healers, and representatives from different communities gather. It is one of the places associated with the old Demian tradition of calling upon the forces of nature, the same broad tradition that contributed to thFrom The Green Moot
- The Helix Courts
- The Helix Courts are the largest surviving concentration of Genevolver universities, surgical institutes, laboratories, specimen houses, and research families. To visitors, the district looks equal parts academic city and place where several laws of nature have been formally asked to leave. GenevolvFrom The Helix Courts
- The Hollow Refuge
- The Hollow Refuge is a hidden settlement founded by escaped and discarded Mutamons in a network of old quarries and natural caverns. Its exact location is deliberately kept vague in public records because too many Genevolvers still consider individual residents stolen property. Life there is difficuFrom The Hollow Refuge
- The Houses of Measure
- The Houses of Measure are a Prosperiticer political coalition built around the Steward's Argument: abundance creates obligation. They fund hospitals, refugee districts, roads, fortifications, schools, archives, and public works. Supporters see proof that wealth can become responsibility rather thanFrom The Houses of Measure
- The Houses of Open Doors
- Scattered through surviving Demian territory are old communal houses built for children and adults rejected by their families because of visible hybrid traits. Some are now formal institutions. Others are simply large homes maintained by extended families who remember what abandonment did to earlierFrom The Houses of Open Doors
- The Impact Scar
- The object that carried the first known manifestation of Xanaras struck An'kor here. Whatever landscape existed before the impact is gone. The region is now a vast wound of alien matter, altered geology, and structures so large that explorers argue over whether they are organs, terrain, or both. NoFrom The Impact Scar
- The Keepers of the Current
- The Keepers are Aquarian magical ecologists who study relationships between water, minerals, weather, living systems, magical flows, and long-term environmental change. They advise governments and frequently oppose industrial projects whose consequences are poorly understood. They are not anti-technFrom The Keepers of the Current
- The Last Bag
- Families near unstable frontier regions often keep a small bag ready for evacuation. Food, identification, medicine, money, water, family records, and one or two irreplaceable objects are common contents.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Living World
- Among many Demian communities, nature is treated less as a personified goddess and more as a living totality that can be listened to, offended, aided, or called upon. Groves, rivers, weather, migration, decay, predation, birth, and disease are all part of the same living system.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Middle Lands
- Between the affluent inner regions and the frontier lies most of ordinary surviving An'kor.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- The Mutamon Question
- Mutamon personhood is one of the ugliest unresolved legal issues in An'kor.From Politics of the Surviving World
- The Network
- Technobeasts believe information should move.From Technobeasts
- The Network Question
- Technobeast communication infrastructure is essential to modern government, military warning, commerce, medicine, and Core operation.From Politics of the Surviving World
- The Northeastern Fracture
- Along the northeastern shieldline, rumors persist of a weakness large enough for some Feeders to cross into protected territory. The stories disagree on its size, location, cause, and whether the weakness is permanent. What matters is that enough credible sightings exist for military patrols to takeFrom The Northeastern Fracture
- The Old Nations Still Exist
- The nations and peoples that survived Xanaras retain their own governments, laws, military traditions, citizenship rules, institutions, and territorial claims wherever possible.From Politics of the Surviving World
- The Old Warrens of Keth
- Keth was one of the earliest known places where abandoned Demians formed a stable community large enough to survive without hiding individual families among human settlements. Much of the later Demian identity was shaped by stories of the Warrens, though the surviving accounts disagree on whether thFrom The Old Warrens of Keth
- The Old Wars
- During An'kor's ancient wars, the Aquarians occupied a strange position.From Aquarians
- The Open Circuit
- The Open Circuit is a vast public archive and technical institution built around the principle that useful knowledge should not be trapped in one laboratory. Designs, historical records, medical procedures, engineering manuals, maps, and research are copied and distributed from here whenever law, seFrom The Open Circuit
- The Open Depths
- The Open Depths is an Aquarian humanitarian movement operating shelters, clinics, evacuation routes, legal aid, and safe settlements for refugees, persecuted Demians, escaped Mutamons, displaced scholars, and others with nowhere reliable to go. Its members are idealistic and occasionally exhausting.From The Open Depths
- The Open Door
- The Open Door grew from the Demian custom of marking homes willing to shelter people fleeing persecution or abandonment. It is now a decentralized network of safe houses, escorts, healers, forgers, sympathetic officials, transport workers, and families willing to make someone disappear for a while.From The Open Door
- The Pelagor Observatory
- Pelagor was built in deep water to study magical currents, astronomical phenomena, tides, and changes in the world that surface observatories could not measure. Some Aquarians believe its instruments recorded unusual activity before the Demian prophecy of Xanaras, although nobody remembers enough ofFrom The Pelagor Observatory
- The Poor Prosperiticer
- A centuries-old Prosperiticer folktale claims that one day a child will be born among them who possesses absolutely nothing. No estate, no inheritance, no hidden family fund, no valuable name, no unexplained account. That child will mark the end of Prosperiticer abundance.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Present Day
- An'kor survives behind the shield.From Timeline of An'kor
- The Reclaimers
- The Reclaimers are not one institution so much as a cross-cultural political movement built around one demand: the surviving world must eventually expand outward again. Refugees want homes. Diesel Dwarves want mines. Aquarians want archives. Technobeasts want relays and data. Prosperiticers want estFrom The Reclaimers
- The Recovery Concord
- The Recovery Concord is the largest organized effort to recover knowledge lost when the great Aquarian archives were destroyed. Its historians, mages, divers, linguists, archivists, diplomats, and expedition leaders search lost cities, bargain with collectors, interview ancient Zompires, and reconstFrom The Recovery Concord
- The Red Conservatory
- The Red Conservatory specializes in the cultivation, preservation, and study of living tissue. Its halls contain organs kept alive outside bodies, experimental plants, preserved mutations, bloodlines maintained for research, and biological samples from nearly every people in An'kor. The ConservatoryFrom The Red Conservatory
- The Refugee Rings
- Every major contraction created its own generation of displaced people.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- The Relationship That Refuses to End
- Mara's resurrection created one of the crueler jokes in the Zompire curse.From Mara
- The Restraint
- The Restraint is a Genevolver reform movement advocating consent, subject protections, experimental law, transparent review, and limits on what researchers may do to unwilling bodies. Traditionalists mock it as timid and dishonest about how many breakthroughs came from practices modern reformers conFrom The Restraint
- The Retrieval Companies
- Retrieval Companies are licensed or semi-licensed expedition groups recovering people, records, equipment, biological samples, historical objects, and intelligence from dangerous frontier regions and, when possible, beyond the shield. Some are government sponsored. Some work for universities, familiFrom The Retrieval Companies
- The Revolution
- The turning point came when the animals learned how to implant the microchips themselves.From Technobeasts
- The Right to Modify
- Technobeast culture places enormous importance on bodily autonomy.From Technobeasts
- The Sacred Continuity
- Most Aquarians do not worship knowledge as a god, but many treat preservation as a moral duty with almost religious seriousness. A life, language, ecosystem, memory, or discovery destroyed without necessity is considered a wound in the continuity of the world.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Shape of Ordinary Life
- Where someone lives determines much of what daily life feels like. Innerward districts tend to be safer, wealthier, better supplied, and more permanent. Middle regions contain most ordinary farms, towns, workshops, schools, mines, factories, and older communities. Outerward districts are more crowded, temporary, militarized, industrial, and exposed to shield scares.From Life in An'kor
- The Shared Assembly
- The multinational assembly in Corian functions as the closest thing An'kor has to a world government, but it does not directly replace national governments.From Politics of the Surviving World
- The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- The Core's shield did not merely save part of An'kor. Its contraction reshaped where people live, what land is worth, how cities grow, where industry goes, how ecosystems survive, and what poverty looks like.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- The Shieldborn Generation
- Shieldborn refers to people too young to meaningfully remember the world before Xanaras.From Life in An'kor
- The Shieldline
- The shield has no single border wall. Its edge cuts across mountains, ruins, fields, coastlines, tunnels, rivers, and open sea. In some places it is visible as a distortion of light or magic. In others, people know where it stands because the world on one side is inhabited and the world on the otherFrom The Shieldline
- The Shieldwardens
- The Shieldwardens are a multinational frontier military and civil-defense organization stationed along the shieldline. Their ranks include soldiers, scouts, medics, engineers, magical specialists, observers, Feeder hunters, evacuation officers, and researchers. Shieldwarden identity often becomes stFrom The Shieldwardens
- The Silent Menagerie
- Long before Demians existed as a people, the Silent Menagerie was a vast complex where wealthy humans kept, bred, displayed, worked, and fought animals. Later Demian histories remember it as one of many places representing the grotesque relationship between possession, status, cruelty, and the animaFrom The Silent Menagerie
- The Steward's Argument
- A Prosperiticer religious and philosophical tradition holds that abundance creates obligation. If a person possesses more food, land, security, education, wealth, or influence than they require, they become responsible for what their surplus could protect.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Still Tide
- A defensive Aquarian working that suppresses motion within a limited volume of water. It can slow projectiles, weaken currents, stabilize collapsing structures, or make swimming extremely difficult.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Successful Ones
- A small number of experiments produce extraordinary results.From Genevolvers & Mutamons
- The Surface World
- Aquarians have never been especially interested in controlling the surface, but they are deeply affected by what surface civilizations do to the world.From Aquarians
- The Thundering Heights
- The Thundering Heights are the ancestral mountains of the Diesel Dwarves and remain one of the loudest inhabited regions in An'kor. Entire peaks have been hollowed into mines, refineries, workshops, lifts, ventilation shafts, rail tunnels, engine halls, and settlements stacked through layers of stonFrom The Thundering Heights
- The Treasury Without Ledger
- Beneath an old Prosperiticer estate lies a vault complex whose contents predate the oldest reliable records of where Prosperiticer wealth came from. Coins, raw metals, gems, sealed containers, art objects, and materials of uncertain origin have been catalogued repeatedly, but no surviving document eFrom The Treasury Without Ledger
- The Unforgotten
- The Unforgotten is a Demian political and historical movement dedicated to preserving evidence of persecution and preventing post-Xanaras unity from becoming an excuse to erase older crimes. Moderate members pursue legal reform, memorials, compensation, anti-discrimination law, and education. HarderFrom The Unforgotten
- The Unmade
- The Unmade is a predominantly Mutamon underground network helping experimental subjects escape Genevolver control and survive afterward. It moves fugitives, steals medical records, acquires stabilizing drugs, recruits sympathetic healers, and maintains hidden communities. Cells within the Unmade areFrom The Unmade
- The Useful Dead
- Diesel Dwarves do not have one standardized ancestor religion, but famous engineers, miners, rescuers, and inventors are often treated with a reverence outsiders mistake for sainthood. Workshops keep tools associated with dead masters. Families repeat useful sayings attributed to ancestors whether or not the ancestor actually said them.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The Vision of Xanaras
- For all the contempt directed toward them, it was a Demian who warned An'kor that the end was coming.From Demians
- The Walking Drill
- Long-range observers of Drill City Nine have reported periodic vibrations and lights since the city was lost. One popular Diesel Dwarf rumor says the enormous central drill has torn itself free and now moves beneath occupied territory.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- The White Theatre
- The White Theatre was once one of the most prestigious surgical laboratories in Genevolver history. Several procedures still used in modern medicine were first demonstrated there before audiences of students and patrons. It is equally infamous because many demonstrations involved unwilling subjects.From The White Theatre
- The Witnesses
- The Witnesses are historians, archivists, refugees, artists, old Zompires, Aquarian scholars, teachers, mapmakers, and recordkeepers dedicated to documenting what existed before Xanaras erased or occupied it. They collect oral histories, songs, maps, family records, images, legal documents, recipes,From The Witnesses
- The World He Changed
- During Dieselbeard's lifetime, workshops became refineries and mines became industrial complexes. Settlements rebuilt themselves around engines, furnaces, lifts, crushers, pumps, and drills. The Thundering Heights began changing faster than any previous generation thought possible.From Dieselbeard
- The Wrong Stars
- Travelers near lost territory sometimes claim the stars look different through the sky above Xanaras. Constellations seem slightly displaced, dimmed, or rearranged.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Three Copies
- Among modern Aquarians, important personal records are commonly kept in three forms: one local, one stored elsewhere, and one in a different medium. The custom began with scholarship and spread into family life.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Timeline of An'kor
- This timeline is a working historical spine for An'kor. The oldest periods are approximate because records were lost, rewritten, destroyed in war, or consumed with the Aquarian archives. The closer history approaches the present, the more reliable it becomes.From Timeline of An'kor
- Trade, Resources, and Political Leverage
- Food, Diesel, medicine, power, water, transport, data infrastructure, and safe land are political resources.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Transportation
- An'kor has advanced transportation, but infrastructure is uneven.From Life in An'kor
- Tunnel Rail
- The Diesel Dwarves maintain heavy rail systems through the Thundering Heights and parts of Corian's underground infrastructure. Trains move ore, fuel, machinery, soldiers, refugees, and supplies through routes that surface roads cannot match.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
U
- Undeath
- Zompires exist in an uncomfortable state between vampire and corpse.From Zompires
- Unforgotten
- Political and historical movement preserving evidence of Demian persecution and pushing reform.From Overview
- Unknowns
- No one knows how information gathered by Skitters is transmitted, if it is transmitted at all. Destroying a scouting group sometimes appears to provoke later activity in the same area, but the connection is unproven.From Feeder Field Classification
- Unmade
- Predominantly Mutamon underground helping subjects escape, survive, obtain treatment, and build medical autonomy.From Overview
- Untitled document
- For thousands of years, the nations of An'kor were at war. Most of them forgot the reasons why they were fighting and just fought for money, honor and pride or just for fun.From Untitled document
V
- Valesse, the Empty Palace City
- Valesse was built as a city of courts, diplomacy, artistic patronage, and elite residences. It contained archives of noble correspondence, military treaties, private collections, and objects acquired from nearly every people in An'kor. The city fell quickly during the contraction of the shield and wFrom Valesse, the Empty Palace City
- Veyr Manor
- The old estate associated with Sevrin Veyr and Mara still exists, although centuries of rebuilding, violence, abandonment, occupation, and renovation have made it difficult to know which parts belong to the original structure. The cellars where Mara was imprisoned are preserved with far less agreemeFrom Veyr Manor
W
- War
- Zompires make unnerving soldiers because death is still costly but rarely final.From Zompires
- Water, Food, and Space
- Safe land is not the only scarce resource.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Wealth After Xanaras
- Then Xanaras arrived and taught the richest people in An'kor what scarcity felt like.From Prosperiticers
- Wealth, Safety, and Social Class
- Distance from the Core has become a rough proxy for privilege.From The Shield and the Inward Gradient
- Weatherknot
- A difficult Demian technique that nudges existing weather rather than creating it freely. A skilled practitioner can encourage fog, delay rainfall, redirect wind, or help a storm break earlier.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- What Is Unknown
- No one knows where Xanaras came from.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Whisperwire
- Whisperwire is the common nickname for Technobeast communication systems that carry messages through cables, relays, encoded signals, and network nodes far faster than physical messengers.From Living Lore, Myths & Wonders
- Work and the Economy
- An'kor does not use one perfectly unified economy. Old national currencies, local coinage, barter systems, credit traditions, electronic accounts, and institutional notes all still exist.From Life in An'kor
X
- Xanaras
- When the Demians warned An'kor of Xanaras, the Zompires contributed nothing to the creation of the Core.From Zompires
- Xanaras Research
- Everyone wants to understand Xanaras. Nobody agrees on what research is acceptable.From Politics of the Surviving World
- Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
- Xanaras is not a king, god, demon, army, or monster in any ordinary sense.From Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
Z
- Zompire Personality (Legacy - Superseded)
- Zompires are selfish and don't care about worldly matters.From Zompire Personality (Legacy - Superseded)
- Zompires
- The problem is that death will not keep them.From Zompires