Lore
88 published documents, pulled from Drive at build time.
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,
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 i
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 work
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 infrast
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, res
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, s
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 peo
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 g
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, supports
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 confir
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: nihilist
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 dimen
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 soldie
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 back
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 consciousne
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 than
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-techn
The Open Circuit
The Open Circuit is both an institution and an ideological movement arguing that useful knowledge should be distributed widely enough that no individual Alvas can monopolize what others need to remain free. Its members promote open standards, shared designs, mirrored archives, repair knowledge, and
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.
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.
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 est
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 reconst
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 con
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, famili
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 st
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. Harder
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 are
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,
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.
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 is
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 h
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 prefer
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 i
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 hi
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, vibra
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's
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 again
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 was
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 sometimes
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 bef
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, magi
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 their
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 as
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 we
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 terri
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 guardia
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. Others
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. Inherit
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.
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 F
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 bod
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 a
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 th
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. Genevolv
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 difficu
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 earlier
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. No
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 take
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 th
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, se
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 of
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 Conservatory
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 other
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 anima
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 ston
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 e
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.
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 w
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 agreeme
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 the
Aquarians
Aquarians are an amphibious, human-descended people whose civilization developed beneath An'kor's oceans.
Demians
Demians are a human-descended people born from one of the ugliest chapters in An'kor's history.
Diesel Dwarves
They produce it. They drink it. They sweat it. They breathe it.
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.
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?
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.
Overview
This page is for fast table reference. The groups below are influential, not universal; ancestry does not determine personality, politics, or faction membership.
Prosperiticers
That is the first word most people in An'kor use when speaking of the Prosperiticers.
Technobeasts
That fact sounds less important than it is.
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.
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.
Zompire Personality (Legacy - Superseded)
Zompires are selfish and don't care about worldly matters.
Zompires
The problem is that death will not keep them.
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.
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.
Xanaras, the Infinite World Feeder
Xanaras is not a king, god, demon, army, or monster in any ordinary sense.
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.
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.