#sitheria

[starsailorstories]

Historical Overview of the Seven Suns systems

Ok I’m still planning to do a more fun illustrated/narrative version of this and plot-essential stuff is in the exposition of the books BUT if you’re a nerd (and I know I am!) here is Everything that led up to the Hyperian dynasty, directly or indirectly, starting from the first astraeas to live in this area

First Permanent Migrations

Cosmonist legend holds that the first astraeas to leave the vacuum and settle on the surfaces of planets did so on the six Holy Worlds that have been populated the longest: Tarega, Sitheria, Thass, Vesta A (the Basilean name for the world of Ami Ge), Esmrrrder and Hirimar. This is arguably true, although making a distinction that doesn’t really matter--worlds in the antedome and the Elorica quadrant were being settled around the same time. There’s more archaeological evidence to support another legend--that a flotilla of debris rafts that had drifted with gravity for generations, carrying the ancient proto-astraeas who had lived on them for generations, counselled in the outer orbits of the Basilean binary. Some continued on to the Sol Minerva system and settled on the Sitherian surface almost immediately upon their arrival. Another group set their course for the inner Sol Atya system, and would live on their rafts in the upper atmosphere of Tarega, gradually evolving as the chemistry of their lights changed from generation to generation in response to its composition, for another several million years. Because astraea genetics are as much a result of environment as they are of heritage, it’s difficult to tell where these proto-Sitherians and Basillans came from originally. What matters is that they came together and were in heavy communication even prior to written history.

The Miragari of the Sol Vesta system have likely lived on their own world even longer than the Sitherians have lived on theirs, but they seem to have migrated from the opposite side of the dome, reaching Basilea’s second-closest unincorporated star via the Carina Alta arm. Like the Basillans, ancient debris in the orbit of their world suggests that they lived in the upper atmosphere for anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand of their planet’s years before beginning to build their civilization on solid ground.

Other species seem to have arrived later in other mass migrations, having already developed inheritable biological features in other atmosphere environments (the fact that the Esmrrrderians and Hirimarians are more physically similar to each other, for example, than they are to the Basillans, Sitherians, Thassians or Miragari would suggest that they were once members of the same clan or group of clans). There is some theorizing that the Thassians may have originally come from Sol Vesta, but if so, their traits diverged from those of the Miragari long ago. They lack the archaeological evidence a “lander culture” that is common to other established species in the area, so their origins remain mysterious.

Development of Planetary Civilizations & First Atya System Explorers

Pre-contact Miragari cultures were sophisticated but tenuous, with populations in some parts of the planet dwindling after rapid agricultural development brought about significant changes to the local atmosphere. Although they developed their own forms of powered spaceflight and traveled widely, organized exploration was sparse--their system’s dense asteroid belt made exit in a large ship of the period difficult, and most of their resources were focused towards on-planet innovation. In this they advanced far beyond their counterparts in other systems, building massive and efficient cities with elaborate codes of law and traversing their abundant seas in ultra-fast and luxurious submarines.

The Basillan colonies that had landed on the surface of Tarega spent some generations growing apart from their Sitherian cohorts, but eventually began communicating, trading, and cooperating. The centralization of the Sitherian settlement in the megametropolis of Ovaiakon, which had by this point grown to cover 20% of the planet’s largest landmass, made travel and trade convenient for Basillan sailors. This partnership gave rise to mergers of cultural institutions all over both worlds--the most significant of which were the adoption of the Sitherian Syfrae logography/syllabography across the Sol Atya system and the compilation of the Writings of the Holy Poets, the document that solidified and spread the Cosmonist religion. With these uniting cultural threads, leaders on Tarega were able to ally with one another and pool resources to begin formal, recorded exploration missions to other planets--leading to the first settlements on Glasmiri, who appointed the first of the area’s planetary High Queen in order to unite politically and win a war of independence against their mother tribe--and to other systems.

Soon after the Glasmirian push for sovereignty, the Sitherian archpraeceptorate was established, and immediately developed a relationship with the planetary royal court, urging the High Queen and her scionettes to enter into honor-bound contract with the goddesses. This began to set the precedent of the perceived relationship between the Basillan planetary nations and the pantheon their people believed in.

Invasion of Sol Vesta System & Planetary Conflicts

Among these was one to Ami Ge (Vesta A), which in the next few centuries the Ixavol clan of Tarega and their wide-reaching allies, seeking conquest of the system of the nearest Holy Sun outside the immediate binary, would invade at multiple surface points--leading to a long and treacherous war, known widely as the Sol Vesta War, which would last for over twenty cycles and whose repercussions are still felt. After a complex series of concessions were negotiated on the planet’s surface, Basillan outposts remained in her orbit, basically maintaining a presence to keep the territory in their sights.

Over the effectively generational time passage that occurred during the war, the political motivations for fighting it shifted. While the original invasion had political and religious impetus, by the time of the final withdrawals the Taregan climate was changing, and holding land in the Sol Vesta system (including the uninhabited Kori Ge) became vital to the importation of particularly water and building materials. For a period of about 6,000 years following the concession talks scarcity on both Ami Ge and Tarega led to infighting among the regional populations of both worlds. Populations were significantly affected, but eventually technological advancement began to resolve things: Sitherian engineers--most notably the priestess and researcher Eiona Vang, who took eldership over the project--were brought to the royal courts of Saivega and Solreg to design large-scale atmosphere regulation systems that allowed for the creation of settlements above the clouds of Altamai, where the Taregan aristocracy fled practically in full in a span of just decades (with a few notable exceptions). Soon after, there was a mass migration of common colonies, who converted industrial spacecraft, hitched rides, or built their own ships in the desert and flew out by night without the behest of any authority.

Settlement of Altamai & Shali

Once on Altamai, Basillan culture changed and flourished. The international council of leadership that had existed on Tarega, after some centuries of trying, finally managed to appoint a high queen, Athaema Seflioma of Avès, who oversaw the building of ten experimental cities. In order to survive above the cloudline, the citizens of the new cities needed a steady supply of artificial atmosphere. With the same technology that allowed their mountaintop superatmospheric buildings, ships were constructed that could sustain a large crew for a long period of time. After several exploration missions, a fleet of ships were sent to the orbit of Shali, where, expanding upon the models for orbiting settlements that had been used to blockade the Sol Vesta system, they were gradually developed into a permanent orbiting settlement--effectively a company town for the atmosphere harvesters. This building model would later be used in the Fila Fenaeta and Fuscus swarms and, most grandly, in the Rings of Basilea.

In this period the planetary royal court developed rapidly, ennobling hundreds of notable residents from the settlements and making them both distributors of the wealth and enforcers of the royal will. Meanwhile tensions grew between post-war enclaves established on Ami Ge, specifically those that still maintained a relationship with the Taregan-Altamaian aristocracy and those that did not. Although extremely primitive by the standards of the system at the time of the story, this was the first conflict in which the Basillan ruling classes provided arms to their allies, making the conflict much more uneven than it would have been and placing the unallied Maeg people, whose ancestral mountains bisected the zone of the turf war, at an economic and political disadvantage that would take centuries of struggle to overcome.

Trade between the Jenya, Atya and Minerva systems, meanwhile, was busier than ever, with thousands of solar-powered ships passing between the populated worlds every few planetary centuries (most voyages at that time took 4-5 of those, which in the context of an astraea lifespan is sort of like 1-2 years). It’s in this era that the spacefaring subculture--its specific routines, songs, legends, superstitions, and roles which still hold at the time of the story--really began to take root. Basillan, Sitherian, and Miragari voyages to the Ante-dome and the disk also took place in this period, laying the groundwork for sociopolitical situations in the centuries to come.

As the difficult construction of the permanent settlements on Shali was finally completed, the current ruler of the Seflioma dynasty died suddenly on the brink of producing an heir. Astraea Mothers experience a period of basically hibernation before childbirth and health complications are relatively common, but given their honored role in society preventative care is also generally excellent, and a childbearing-related death, particularly of a noble or royal, is almost unheard of, so this was a cause of much anger and suspicion--even at the time of the story, it’s still widely believed that she was poisoned. Her “consort colony”--that of her wife--had recently had a new Mother born, and the court agreed to allow her coronation when she came of age. For the next several hundred cycles, the planet was effectively in the hands of her aunt, a Faellran dowager submaxima who worked tirelessly to set up global interests for her ward. When the Olaean dynasty finally dawned, it was into unprecedented power, and within the first few years of her reign Queen Daemarima commissioned the research and creation of a global language based on the planet’s three most common tongues. The teaching and speaking of Standard Altamaian was theoretically enforced by law all over the planet, although this proved logistically difficult, and all three of the local languages it was meant to replace survive to this day. The Standard, however, did grow in popularity, and became the lingua franca of court life and politics, as well as developing as the common language between new workers on Shali.

The Turn of the Intergalactic Age

On the less permanently-settled worlds of the Sol Garna and Sol Amphira systems, isolated cultures were beginning to make contact with the rest of their own planets as their populations grew. The Esmrrrderians in particular began to connect the peoples of their world through vast networks of trade and communication, which brought about an unprecedented era of global exchange and peace. At several points in the past, Esmrrrderians had intercepted Basillan and Miragari ships attempting to avoid the Sol Vesta blockades, or rescued the survivors of wrecks, and these aliens integrated into their colonies fairly seamlessly. But at this point, they still had no official contact with the Jenya-Atya system or with any other.

On Altamai, Daemarima’s great-great-granddaughter said fuck everything, married her lady-in-waiting, and abdicated to her younger sister, who married acceptably but then promptly died in a duel defending her older sister’s choices. Possibly because everyone was fed up with their nonsense, the throne passed peacefully from the Olaeans to the Fortefemens.

Meanwhile in the orbit of Sol Minerva, Ovaiakon was rocked by a series of earthquakes over a period of about three centuries, their intensity increasing over time. Finally--just days before the all-important Avi-fora (festival of the end of the liturgical calendar)--the great city cracked down the middle.

In the coming years residents of this intellectual and religious capital of the binary watched as the two sides of their city rapidly drifted apart and the sea rushed into the fault. The geological schism fueled several political and religious ones, with various sects interpreting the catastrophe as divine retribution for some act they disagreed with. For a few solar years there was absolute chaos. Priestesses and literators were executed by their own followers; still others fled to the wildernesses of the Glasmirian equator or the uncharted solitude of the Sol Amphira system (whose watery worlds and moons are largely absent from this history because their island-dwelling natives are so far-flung they don’t interact much with the outside world or each other). Order returned slowly, but Ovaiakon would now become two cities on two continents under one name, gradually drifting apart; and for many whose religious fervor outweighed their political loyalty, faith in its authority was forever shaken.

Several centuries after, another galaxy-changing event befell the system: a joint coalition involving scholars and politicians from multiple Basillan worlds sent a series of exploration missions to the neighboring Maculata galaxy, which we know as the Milky Way. After several landings on uninhabited worlds (they were looking first for planets that could support their own type of life, not the type they actually found) they finally ran across a Cadrian outpost on a moon of their homeworld.

Initially, the landing party were mistaken for invaders from one of the planets of Alpha Centauri, and might have unintentionally reignited an interstellar war (millennia before they INTENTIONALLY reignited it) if they hadn’t immediately engaged, giving the Cadrians a good look at them to confirm they weren’t Centaurian as well as earning their respect in battle (not every [sub]culture on the Cadrian homeworld would’ve reacted like that, but for better or for worse these did). After spending years as honored, if slightly uncomfortable, diplomatic guests, they returned, introducing Cadrian delegates--and the business interests they represented--to their respective leaders.

The aristocrats, noting the similar life spans and political structures but slightly appalled by what they perceived as a lack of reciprocity in Cadrian culture, jumped to form military alliances and yet weren’t at all interested in doing business. The delegates, however, wanted to get their hands on some of those super-fast, intergalactically-durable spaceships, and they weren’t going to wait around to earn the trust of nobles. The commoners who had gone on the mission had had time to understand the bizarre system of investments and currencies, and fidelity in the most Andromedan sense was all it took to get them building away--they felt they owed the Cadrians for their hospitality, and their colonies and professional networks provided labor out of simple loyalty. When simple loyalty in the labor force wavered, the new common shipyard moguls appealed to their Cadrian backers for resources and began to provide an “arrangement” for their workers--land off the local noble’s estate--that still allowed them a high profit margin. This was the beginning of the astraea-specific version of industrial capitalism, and notably also kicked off the massive Elorica quadrant asteroid-mining industry as foundries struggled to produce enough vitruvol to meet the demand. The descendants of these original shipyard owners remain the wealthiest and most powerful commoners in the Seven Suns at the time of the story.

Eventually, Andromedan spaceships began to be exported to the Maculata in such numbers that some inevitably fell into the wrong hands, and Maculatan pirates--as well as Andromedan pirates, but the nobles didn’t talk about those as much for ~some reason--got pretty bold with it, attacking planetary estates without warning. Between this and the (fallacious, but spoken about) idea that working for one of the common shipyard moguls provided Options, the popularity and clout of nobles began to be much more dependent on their ability to protect their resources and provide for their peasants. In response--and without explicit royal permission--they formed a legislative body which was to become the High Parliament and which actually streamlined (for better AND for worse) the process of enacting international law considerably. In retaliation, the Queen ordered them to hear official delegation from the Union of Commons, a political party of wealthy and powerful non-nobles who effectively bought their way into court (this still exists and has a reputation for being socially liberal and advocating legal reform, though it’s a joke on all surrounding sides of their political spectrum that this has to do with the fact that the Basillan nouvelle riche are so very very commonly in legal trouble).

Around the same time, international councils on Esmrrrder and Hiramar made a joint decision to open their system to trade with the rest of the galaxy. The two worlds had industrialized and begun to advance technologically practically overnight (especially by astraea standards) and with industrialization had come economic disparity between urban and rural communities. The leadership claimed--and perhaps some of them really did intend--that the economic boost would allow local governments to provide necessities like water and medicine for small villages affected by environmental destruction and other modern problems. But the new Basillan and Cadrian capitalists poured their resources into wringing productivity from the cities, worsening conditions for workers there and for the rural villagers alike.

The people of the Sol Garna system were not about to take that shit lying down.

While they couldn’t fight the exoplanetary power completely, labor unions and parties rose to prominence after centuries of a bloody power struggle that made their system infamous among the elite of the Seven Suns for the tenacity of its populace. Traditional Basillan morality taught loyalty to the beneficience of authority, but traditional morality as taught by the Garnaxe lawspeakers taught loyalty to the planet, the self, and the community, and the people returned to it in force. Although not without flaws--the same principles had been used to justify isolationism, and many of the labor activists harbored prejudices understandably towards the Basillans and Cadrians but less rationally towards all outsiders--the movement led to a system of defenses against economic exploitation that served as a model for other worlds taking up their own causes against the Basillan worlds, and later the aula.

Tensions on the Basillan Motherworlds

As trade--and conflict--with the Cadrians and manufacturing in the Sol Garna system settled into steady rhythms of give and take, the ancient aristocracies of Altamai and Glasmiri were restless. One step beneath them, moneyed commoners threatened to lure away the peasantry that had historically supported their lifestyle (many of them sorted this out by marrying daughters into new-money families or going into business themselves). One step above them, the planetary High Queens--legitimized by the praeceptorate and venerated by the people--could still limit the power they held in the courts and the legislature almost with impunity. Noble houses favored by the Queens defended them almost fanatically--most had formal and legal Fidelities and honor bindings to uphold, and some Particular Favorites had even more personal stakes. At the height of the divisions in high society on both worlds, the High Queens of Glasmiri and Altamai announced, together, that their eldest daughters were betrothed. The loyal subjects celebrated; the courtiers drew swords on each other in their castle gardens.

The alliance sealed, the next few heirs to the throne continued to operate over the loud aristocratic paranoia that they would become unassailable tyrants. The mutual economy boomed, with Altamaian interests establishing the free-drifting macroengineered Fila Fenaeta settlement in a resource-rich nebula in the Naulia quadrant and Glasmirian ones building the similar Fuscus Swarm structure in an enclave of the Milky Way sold to them by the government of one of the Cadrian national superpowers. With these outposts driving down the cost of chemical resources for space travel, the age of exploration and imperialism that had begun with the first voyages to the Maculata kicked into a higher gear, laying ground for the occupations later undertaken by the Hyperians in the Ante-dome and in the outer-disk Djickhasa and Sokhash systems.

It also sparked the dream of the Rings--the largest building project Basillan civilization had ever undertaken. It would ease strain on the overcrowded Altamaian cities and fragile Glasmirian wetlands. It would create farmland to grow the raw materials for textiles, which had become a main export to the Cadrian home system. And it would all be directed by one trusted royal advisor: maximata Siderina Hyperia.

Siderina was a leading figure in the aristocracy’s political corner. Coming from a high-ranking family, she styled herself as a Defender of the Old Ways and gained mass support from her peers and from the bootlickers segment of the traditional peasantry who believed that increased autonomy for their Sworn Ladies would lead to prosperity for their own families. As I detailed in this post, she betrayed the Queen and established her building project as the capital of a new empire. Attempts to hold her legally accountable for her breach of a royal Fidelity--normally a capital crime--fell through on the favors of nobles and politicians who owed her for something or other and felt compelled to stay silent. Siderina treated betrayals among her own ranks with infamous volatility, and nobody wanted to be on her bad side, at least not until they knew how this was going to play out.

Siderina’s daughter became the first Empress. A new calendar, based on the rotation of the rings, was begun. Within its first three generations of monarchs, the new government--which subsumed the still-existing High Queendoms by virtue of legally binding vows of familial loyalty--invaded dozens of unaffiliated worlds, including Caesura, Aeverell, and Ashtiva; spearheaded the modern LGA with the help of the Cadrians and started recruiting people to fight all kinds of random wars for them; and developed the cloning technology that would create the labor force for their runaway expansion. 

[xnorthstar3x]

Some of my favorite tmnt oc’s

The Kindel sisters

Adora Kindel

Adora is a pink haired girl from another dimension. Her family are the rulers of their planet and have been for millennia, they age indefinitely until they are physically killed. Nest in line for the thrown. Leads kingdoms army in the battle for Sitheria to destroy her sister and free the corrupted to bring back peace. Leaves to earth for 5000 years and the battle eventually is wrote off to myth and kingdom develops into new era.

Meets the turtles when they wonder into marikamis one night while she’s working in the back so murikami could have a day off. The turtles not knowing waltzed into the noodle shop while adora was in the back taking their seats they waited and dropped their jaws when the pink haired witch walked into the lobby meeting all of their gazes.

��Miss these are costumes.”

“And I’m not from another dimension.”

Ares Kindel

Ares is Adoras twin sister but I shortly quite the opposite of adora. She has black hair and the only thing similar between them is their eye color. Ares always found her most powerful form of magic was dark magic. She had tried to overthrow the kingdom in order to gain power and turn the world into one of her own making due to the jealousy she harbored from how their magic instructor doted on Adora.

“DONT YOU DARE SYPMOTHYZE WITH ME IVE STOOD BY FOR 500 YEARS WHILE YOU WERE CHOSEN AS OUR PARENTS FAVORITE DAY AFTER DAY.”

[janetfraiser]

thelightonlyshineinthedark replied to your post:

the one with handporn. obviously. but…. that look in the other one….

I think that's the winner. For now. maybe.

diamondorloj replied to your post:

both are fantastic and if it was simply about art, I’d say the left one, but I feel like I connect you more with the right one, so I’d take that one.

I think you connect me more with the right one because it's been around longer :D

gloriousunderstanding replied to your post:

the first one imo, the one on the left where she’s in profile. i truly love that one.

Man, I was prepared to take the right one, AND THEN I DID THE THING AND THE LEFT ONE HAPPENED.

sitheria replied to your post:

These are great! I would take the left drawing because it feels more introspective.

I think so too. I'd take both if I could buuuuut...

kjay9558 replied to your post:

Amazing!!!

Aw well thank you!

[barbie-shoes]

What do you consider the most pivotal point in your life?

There were a lot really. However, as cliche as it may sound, coming out was extremely pivotal. It wasn’t a moment, it sort of happened over the course of a year or so, telling various friends and family. But as I did, I noticed my entire personality changed. I had always been very shy, quiet, reserved, a little weird maybe. Then suddenly, it was like I was finally allowed to be me. Even people I didn’t tell, I felt more outgoing around, because I knew who I was and I was finally comfortable with it. I am not shy at all now, I am known for being rather loud, and talkative, and I wave my freak flag proudly!

[starsailorstories]

“ovaiakon” is the only proper name ive ever been able to come up with that’s unique enough that you can google it and all that comes up is my shit

deep dark process secret: took the name of an anime convention, changed every other letter

[starsailorstories]

The Elements in Basilean thought!

Astraeas tend to understand “the elements” differently than human occultists since, having yknow star-biology, they can actually taste and feel the difference between different types of air and tell something about the composition of materials from the smell and taste of them (like, they would know wood has carbon in it from the smell, the way we can tell fruit has sugar in it from the taste, for pretty much the exact same reason--their senses are wired to find the things their bodies need). Since they evolved in space and matter in space is sort of distributed based on factors of age and mass and what forms chemical bonds with what, their classical understanding of “the elements” that make up everything is literally just the first couple rows of the periodic table, plus the broad category “metal” which is made up of heavier elements that are found in trace amounts in and around stars and star systems. Although their understanding of chemistry has advanced a lot, most astraeas who are involved with nature spirituality/animism or occultism (like most humans of a similar predilection) consider the classical elements to be symbolically significant. 

As the history differs, the associations and interpretations differ as well--many are associated with multiple colors based on how they appear on a spectrogram (primitive spectroscopes were developed as a medical technology a long time before the time of the story) and there’s not as much emphasis on the elements being “in balance”--like everything in cosmonist-dominated thought, they have a hierarchy, although in this case it is actually based on observation of their natural distributions in space and in astraeas’ bodies. At the same time they all interact and influence one another in specific ways and there’s a pseudoscientific idea that stages of the cycles of death and rebirth in nature are each guided by one of the elements.

Hydrogen - Being the main component of most stars and the most abundant element in the universe, the elemental properties of hydrogen are viewed as “baseline” in superstitious contexts. It is somewhat associated with water and with consumables that have balancing effects (as I’ve mentioned before, inhaling the vapor from a home electrolysis setup such like you’d make for a science project is like, the iconic representation of “went too hard last night”), although of course these are hydrogen compounds rather than the pure stuff, which is highly volatile. This too is taken symbolically for magical and superstitious purposes--hydrogen is the primordial, the life force, the fire that sustains. It’s the “origin point” for the other elements and parts of the cycle.

Helium - Associated with healing, mutability, lightness, calm, and renewal. In addition to being essential for astraeas in medical contexts because it slows the burning of the heavier elements of the core after an injury to a person’s light, helium is stable in environments where hydrogen is volatile, and in classical thought was seen as neutralizing it--where hydrogen births, helium sustains and nourishes. The “growth” part of the cycle.

Oxygen - Ancient Taregan and Sitherian scientists observed that oxygen was present in many stable, sustainable, and abundant parts of their planets. Although they didn’t have the means to exactly predict atoms and molecules, they inferred through the means available to them that essentials of planetary life--such as plants and liquid water--involved it somehow. Stone inscriptions preserved in the temples of central Ovaiakon describe oxygen as the “orderer” of habitable planets and an “apprentice” to the grand orderer, gravity. 

Carbon - Similar to oxygen, carbon is associated with the tangible and “gravitybound” and thought to be subordinate to the lighter elements which are more common in space. The personality of carbon, however, is even more stable, enduring, and stubborn. Where oxygen organizes, carbon codifies--trees take in CO2 and make wood; developing astraea chrysalises take in light elements and make bones and tissues, both of which are observably mostly carbon and observably more permanent in their states than water or atmosphere. Therefore carbon is the “enduring” part of the cycle, associated with maturity and tradition. Heightened levels of carbon are also seen in the bodies of mothers on the brink of hibernation, creating an association with stillness, rest, and dormancy, particularly as it precedes new growth and life.

Iron - As the last element burned before the death of a star, iron has an association with decay and destruction in several otherwise unrelated astraea cultures. Ancient thinkers recognized it in the red of dying main-sequence stars and aging astraeas’ lights, as well as rusting metal and (mistakenly) dormant plant life. 

Nitrogen - Terrestrially based astraea communities, once they were established, discovered the role of nitrogen in the fertility of a planet’s soil and air with relative speed using observational methods that (archaeologists assume) were developed in a spacefaring context. Ancient speculation regarding what we on earth call the nitrogen cycle (although it doesn’t look exactly the same on every planet, Tarega for example has a lot less uncombined nitrogen than earth does) led to the conception of nitrogen as representative of potential and rebirth.

“Metal” - The broad elemental category whose name I translate as “metal” includes rarer elements found in the stellar life cycle like lithium, boron, etc. Many of these are involved, in tiny amounts, in the growth of an astraea’s body tissues (hence the reference to “carbons and metals” as a treatment for wounds) but are mildly toxic at higher levels, and they’ve been deliberately mixed or compounded with lighter elements like hydrogen, helium and oxygen as recreational intoxicants for as long as astraeas have been capturing stellar gases for convenient consumption, which is to say, longer than they’ve lived on planets. It’s this more ancient use--which precedes the medical one, although their use as painkillers is also well attested in the archaeological record--from which the elemental association of metal comes: illusion, dreams, deluded thinking, yet also the emotional and creative release that can come with lowered inhibition. The narrative of the births of the goddesses which appears in the Holy Poets says that while Orellistia hibernated, dreaming of the universe as it would be under her daughters’ rule, Levinoxia “held before her neck the metals of the mysteries,” one of several mythological references to metal as a source of inspiration or a gateway to the realms of the subconscious.

[starsailorstories]

Notes about Classical Syfrae

Just a selection of things that will probably be part of an organized grammar at some point, apologies for possibly confused understandings of phonology and music theory

Originally a silent light-projection language, Syfrae evolved for thousands of quinturns on the Sitherian surface. Sometime in the late Nine Cities period, when it is believed that established intercolony meeting places began to be marked out and codified into Ovaiakon’s inner enneagram and canal system, the glyphs of projected Syfrae began to be used as a system of musical notation, with a particular subset of its 600-odd glyphs standing for phonetic syllables. Each of these 25 syllabic glyphs was then organized into a group of five variants, each representing a step on one of two basic pentatonic musical scales. These became the five pitch-accent tones and two “registers” (the social register, based on the anhemitonic version of the scale, and the ceremonial register, based on the version which includes minor notes) of spoken Syfrae. The written language still includes logograms for most nouns and intransitive verbs, which can then combine with syllabic glyphs to convey grammatical information.

The five pitches of spoken classical Syfrae are related to one another by a pattern of ratios just like notes on a pentatonic scale in music. The first mora of a sentence is treated as the tonic (pitch 1) regardless of the proscribed pitches of the first word in other contexts, and then further morae are assigned tones in relationship to it based on where in the scale (1-5) their pronunciations fall. 

The precision and outright musicianship needed for “correct” pronunciation of Syfrae is of course linked to its history as an academic and ceremonial language. It’s uncertain how or if the system was relaxed when it was a living, vernacular language. Vivaki, its direct descendent, maintains stress patterns that seem to correspond somewhat to the pitch distributions of Syfrae root words, but the surviving words are more rhythmic than musical.

[starsailorstories]

While I’m talkin about Sitherian stuff

As I’ve said before the technological situation of the SC setting is all over the place and I own that it is because I personally am the type to keep a manual typewriter on my desk for the aesthetic but I do enjoy the in-universe explanation which is basically “millennia-old tradition of locking people with mechanical engineering degrees in cloisters and having them hand-build watch parts as a soul-improving labor.” 

So many things like the mechanisms in the spaceships and the speakerlenses and the various augmentations for radio signals and stuff are handwaved with “sitherian mechanisms” and what that means is basically mechanical computing and signal processing but without the limitations of the human life span on the ability to get it built

[starsailorstories]

The Licentiati

The majority of Cosmonists don’t identify with any sect or like, adjective on their belief system. Particular communities honor the deities and ideas from within the broad Cosmonist umbrella that are most relevant to them without the direction of any authority outside the very slight influence of their local shrines and priestesses. But the authorities of the holy city of Ovaiakon--where the writings of the Poets were first compiled--and later the Hyperians, have made several attempts to secure the loyalty of their subjects via regulation of the faith of their subjects, and many of these attempts have sparked organizations specifically established to counter them.

A few years ago when the SC universe was really new, I tried to do overview posts for all the different religions from different worlds but got bogged down in trying to even describe the diversity of interpretations of Cosmonism. I still want to describe all the different belief systems from around the galaxy because they’re all really interesting, but first I think I’m going to do a series on different major Cosmonist sects because that’s behind a lot of the cultural push and pull happening in the main setting.

So without further ado, the Licentiati!

This is a sect/set of beliefs within the Cosmonist umbrella based around the mainstream teachings of the Sitherian praeceptors, who traditionally have been considered the highest-ranking interpreters of religious law in Basilea. Maybe at one point you could say that the Licentiati (“sanctioned”--as in sanctioned by the throne) were the arbiters of “Official” Cosmonism, but that point was a very long time ago. It’s a religion that inherently doesn’t sit well with centralization; the Empress can puppeteer the praeceptors all she wants, but as long as local priestesses and the Holy Poems hold that one’s local cosmological forces have the final say, there are going to be those devout enough to listen to them first. That said, the Hyperians (and certain of the planetary High Queens before them) have Put The Work into cultivating a Basilean nationalistic sentiment, and there are certainly those who believe every word a praeceptor writes simply because she has the favor of Our Most Exalted Lady The Empress Matri Hyperiae.

History

The first praeceptors were trained by a priestess named Centora--so named because she was supposedly the hundredth descendant of the captain-queen who founded Ovaiakon, the “city of destiny” where the writings of the Holy Poets were first anthologized (the liturgical/ceremonial sections of which are thought to have been authored by Centora herself). Although they were trained by an actual priestess, praeceptors do not perform any ceremonies themselves--they’re purely teachers who train “sanctioned” staff for “sanctioned” shrines and temples. At the start there were six, now there are 216 (it’s traditional, though not required, to initiate them in classes of six. Early Cosmonists were big on sixes because the early Taregans were big on sixes. The early Taregans were big on sixes because they perceived the seasons of their world as occurring in multiples of six, although they’re not actually that tidy). Somewhere along the line the office of the Archpraeceptor was created as a liaison to the public and the royal family. Although it’s tempting to go lol lesbian space pope about that (I know I do!) it’s important to note that the Archpraeceptor isn’t actually above the others despite her title--she’s more like a very holy press secretary.

Organizational structure

The thing that DOES make the Archpraeceptor special is that she carries requests from the Empress to the rest of the praeceptorate, and she’s responsible for conveying their collective decisions to the public, so one of her main qualifications is being a brilliant lecturer. Praeceptors are teachers, not authorities, in theory, but with her skills and intergalactic platform to bolster their agenda, they still hold a ton of moral influence.

Sanctioned holy maidens also include literators--resident scholars of the Poets who live and work at local temples and act as arbitrators in doctrinal disputes--and satellite priestesses of the imperial city’s Temple of the Excelsic Barycenter, who train with them directly and are expected to deviate little from their pet ideas (see below).

Some vestals are Licentiati and some aren’t. A majority of Orellistian and Levinoxian orders in the Seven Suns are/were sanctioned, but only a slight majority, and orders devoted to the minor goddesses are all over the place.

Teachings

Even though they didn’t originate it, the Licentiati are the main dispensers of the idea that the forces of the universe dictate a rigid Order that’s best not fought against. Being that they get most of their perks from the Hyperians’ favor, they have a vested interest in positioning the hierarchy as inevitable.

On the other hand, the praeceptors have been around a lot longer than the empire has, and historically they’ve been a main source of the guiding relational quality of Basillan and Sitherian morality--loyalty is the highest virtue, your first duty is to take care of your own (or those directly above and below you), and the goddesses, as your most powerful benefactresses, are to be showered with reverent affection so that they know the love with which they provide for you is reciprocal. 

The Licentiati have been responsible for laying the groundwork for the flipflop on Levinoxia that we see underway in the Vol. 2 flashbacks, framing chaos and the spiritual conception of the vacuum as potentially confusing influences to be avoided by all but the very advanced in religious study at first, and then as outright corrupting, a shift that occurred gradually within a few generations of teaching but went public almost overnight.

Ritual

The praeceptors are obviously very into the calendars of ritual offices recorded in the Holy Poets, because *Bernie Sanders voice* they wrote the damn liturgy. They’re also the fondest of all the sects of portraying offerings and prayers to the goddesses as simply the highest tier of feudal tribute and homage, a stance a few controversial praeceptors have even taken as far as being opposed to mundane fealty (why give a cut to a Great Lady when you could give all to the Greatest Ladies?). These obviously didn’t last long because they had to fall in line with their own royal/imperial backers, but it was an interesting logical extreme, though sadly not as revolutionary as it sounds when coupled with the conservative ideas about the inherent fittedness of some folks to rule over others that they also tend to espouse.

[starsailorstories]

Glasmiri and Tarega are both a fair bit smaller than earth, Sitheria is closer to earth-sized but a lot of it isn’t really inhabited because there’s only one major landmass (it takes a special type of person to choose to live on a sea island 24 hours’ time zone separate from the nearest population center) and Altamai is a similar size but has a whole different set of habitability issues. Caesura is tiny, Ashtiva is tiny and orbits a half-dead star anyway so there’s an upper limit on how much life it can support energy-wise although it has a lot of specialized biomes. I didn’t intend this but my approach to worldbuilding several planets believably has organically become “keep them little and weird”

[starsailorstories]

In other news I finally finished the long, wild, aristocratic-nonsense-fraught history of altamai

The first officially-sanctioned superatmospheric settlement on Altamai broke ground in the year 2190 of the ninth Taregan cycle, and her first official citizens arrived just under a (Taregan) decade later, after a long and dangerous building process largely carried out by the indentured and indebted of the ancient city-state of Solreg. In this early period, the population was scattered between “legitimate” landing sites, fly-by-night towns, and nomadic groups. The planet was a frontier: land changed hands via sword and seduction; criminals held territory with no trouble but the occasional vigilante; and vigilantes operated however they saw fit for good or ill, living in their starships and chasing bounties across the foggy plains.

The supposed descendants of the original Captain-Queens who settled Tarega had long had an informal international council, which became formal in the early years of Altamaian habitation. Gradually, national lines began to be drawn--most of the wars had already been fought, and there was a period of non-violent, albeit not necessarily just, claims and concessions. By virtue of the ancestry of their leadership, the Oghai, Saiven, Solrega, Nadega, Avesian, and Faellran peoples emerged as major powers.

In an oathing ceremony performed at request by a praeceptor-trained priestess, these seven world leaders would become (in addition to the queenly titles most of them brought from their homeworld) the Avesian Maximatas--to this day, the highest offices of Basillan nobility outside the royal family, passed down in a continuous line for over 600,000 planetary years. Here they swore to be mothers to the planet, to care for all of her inhabitants and follow the will of the goddesses. The language of the oath would later become a rallying point for commoners seeking accountability for their rulers, although ruling classes in the Binary have always had the kind of accountability problem that only revolution really solves.

Anyway, for holding to a vow of such profound importance, the priestess exacted a high price--she asked that if, as had been discussed, they chose a High Queen for the planet, it be her own country’s queen, Athaema Seflioma of Aves. They technically could have refused this request, but it would have been, to use the proper terminology, a Whole Thing. To turn down the bargain of a priestess and an oracle, and one sanctioned by the holy city, would be seen as akin to disrespect for the goddesses if it got out that it had happened, and wouldn’t start the new seat of power off on a popular foot. And so, in 10230 19th cycle, High Queen Athaema was crowned by her peers and sisters, and immediately got down to business setting up a royal court designed to serve the entire Sol Jenya system, planning and constructing ten state-of-the-art “civilized” cities to centralize industry and government in the various population centers, placing unaffiliated frontier towns under the jurisdiction of local landed gentry, and bearing over 2,000 children, her successor Aviana among them.

The crackdown on unaffiliated settlements was indiscriminate--lumping peaceful, self-sufficient villages established by poor colonies seeking freedom from the abuses of the feudal system in with organized-crime strongholds rife with violence and exploitation. The decree was presented with a spin that basically guaranteed its popularity with those who had no firsthand experience with the situation--without the care of the nobility, the court instructed its messengers to say, fly-by-nights were vulnerable to extreme poverty and plagued by thieves. A select few hard-luck stories were treated with highly public charity, and the project is still widely understood as a benevolent one by Basilean citizens at the time of the story. In reality, many fly-by-night towns were happy, prosperous, and most concerningly, egalitarian; and these fought tooth and nail to remain free until they could fight no longer. The far left wing of Basilean opinion remembers as martyrs a handful who went down swinging to the last girl standing. During Aviana’s comparably unremarkable reign, others simply vanished into the mists, operating in such secrecy that only the archaeological record attests to their existence. Fairly recently at the time of the story, a colony was discovered who had been living in self-imposed isolation for so long that they had developed a unique dialect of the Solrega Aundell language, a unique projection style adapted to their low-visibility home in the Tonevan cloud forest, and even a few subtle but distinct physical adaptations.

As the 23rd cycle drew to a close, Athaema’s granddaughter Ouriama died suddenly before she could produce an heir. Although an assassination was suspected, no proof was uncovered, and it remains an unsolved mystery and system-wide legend. The crown passed to her wife’s colony (and to another of the seven powers) in Faellra, where a new mother had just been born who could inherit it, and the guardian of this new queen, Analemma Olaean, jumped at the opportunity to make her ward Daemarima the best-connected and most legally powerful High Queen yet. This unwittingly made her a prime suspect in the previous Queen’s death, but from the international council’s centralizing perspective, it was all worth it. High Queen Daemarima commissioned the construction of Standard Altamaian, a single lingua franca for the planet, less than a turn (not that they measured turns back then, but it’s a good way to describe a period that feels like ‘a quarter year or so’ in astraea lifespans) after her coronation. In the ninth year of the twenty-fifth cycle, the planetary government financed the implementation of the new language in schools and other institutions, and in a more sinister move, outlawed the speaking of local languages in a handful of key centers of resistance to the hierarchy. 

The Olaen dynasty lasted six cycles, during which interstellar exploration flourished in this new era of semi-forced international unity. Worlds in the ante-dome and outer disk were “discovered” by Altamaian newcomers on the regular and treated like matrona gifts in potentia for the various queens and aristocrats, although the era of outright invasions was still long to come. A sailor named Via suddenly appeared claiming to have lived on isolated, well-defended Esmrrrder for nearly thirty planetary years, and told tales of an advanced civilization perched high on its planet’s abundant mountains. The dream of crossing the vacuum between galaxies was already being heavily discussed as well, but before an expedition could be mounted, Daemarima’s great-great granddaughter married a commoner and abdicated the throne to her sister Leiliora, who would bring their dynasty to an abrupt end when she challenged Sastiena Fortefemen to a duel in defense of her sister’s honor and lost, dying that same night of an infection from a wound on her side. The Fortefemens had merely accepted the Queen’s challenge, but they stepped obligingly into the power vacuum and proceeded to rule the planet for longer than any other family, effectively controlling a throne they won in a sword fight for like 30,000 years. This is basically all you need to know about the Fortefemens.

It was early in her reign that Sastiena’s former ward Deracoura--named for the scriptural “protector” of the Taregan desert wayfinders--reached out to the leaders of the various Basillan-controlled worlds, as well as those of Sitheria, to spearhead the first intergalactic exploration mission. As you know from my broader historical overview of the Seven Suns, this expedition went in search of sapient life and returned with the first Cadrian delegation, who toured the cities of Ovaiakon, Solrega Nova, Neroka, and Alegia. It was on Altamai that the initial commoner-owned shipyard was founded via Cadrian investment and began exporting to the Maculata (as well as importing from the Elorican asteroid fields) and providing a colony-estate-esque setup for workers who viewed the Cadrian-style wage system with suspicion. As it turned out, providing the bare minimum was more profitable, at the time, than paying workers in flexible currency, and it had the added appeal of letting owners of capital basically act and live like nobility. 

Within the next two cycles, the business interests of commoners continued to grow, and the Union of Commons was formed to protect those interests. They published a manifesto expressing their belief in the right of landholders of low birth to govern their own lands--basically a “hey, we have money, so why don’t we also have power?” directed at the High Court and the nobility. Practically in response, nonroyal nobility from every clan and country began clamoring for international lawmaking power as well. They formed a planet-wide legislative council of their own, and while they declared no hostility to the royal tier of society, they asked no permission from them either. In the middle of all this, while en route from a visit with the Council of Emperors far across the intergalactic sea, Queen Deracoura unhelpfully died. 

Trying to please everyone, keep the peace, and maybe punish her insubordinate maximatas just a LITTLE bit, her heir Felixania Fortefemen ordered the creation of the High Parliament, which included representation from the nobility of each nation as well as for gentry of common birth. She still had the final say on everything no matter what, and it led to the creation of a lengthy court season that allowed the royal family to keep their nobles under close scrutiny, so in a way it was a devil’s bargain. 

In this era, there were clashes of interest between a variety of Basillan and Cadrian notables. In space and even on-planet, business owners enforced their deals like crime bosses and crime bosses did a steady trade. In a climate where the penalty for a breach of contract could be a village burned to the ground, the nobility increasingly styled themselves as the protectors of the people, loyalties strengthened, and divisions grew. Among the common people, favor was split between the common capitalist class--who seemed to offer freedom from the whims of the nobility by offering a relatively secure income, as well as representing the promise of moving up in the world; and the old aristocratic families, who represented tradition, family loyalty (Altamaian nobles overwhelmingly ruled over their own historic colonies and their offshoots, meaning their peasants were all actually related to them--providing, to be fair, accountability that later Basilean aristocratic rule would lack) and a kind of symbolic cultural function--still today conservative Altamaians take the tack that the gentle Great Ladies suffer for their sake and must be defended from (in modern times largely imaginary) outside threats. The nobility was more broadly fractured, with favorites of the one-nation queens and the High Queen defending them stridently while others feared their unchecked power would leave the ancient families destitute to be overrun by the nouvelle riche. Just outside the metropolis of Solrega Nova, a shipbuilding-business billionaire bought a castle, noted for its beauty, built by the Celetorias--an original-lander colony--and announced plans to demolish it to build a complex of vitruvol foundries, giving the entire planet something to throw down about for five seasons straight (she eventually chickened out).

Just as these ideological tensions were reaching a fever pitch, Felixania and High Queen Esthardine of Glasmiri announced that their scionettes were betrothed--an unprecedented consolidation of power in a single household. The marriage of Delianae Fortefemen and Celafina Vividel was the event of the cycle whether you were for the high court or against it: three of the planet’s titled first daughters lost their crowns in duels that day, and three more lost their lives. Scholars took to the streets to warn the peasantry while by and large the peasantry took to the public houses to toast the beautiful young princesses who after all looked so smitten in their official portrait. It was the middle of fiber harvest season in a good market year; people were exhausted and ready for a show.

Following her mother’s death, Delianae laid low (letting the nobility handle urgent matters themselves) until all but the most paranoid aristocrats practically forgot about her, focusing on well-received local historical projects such as the restoration of the first Aivuran temple and a modernized housing for the shrine where the Avesian Maximatas took their oath. Behind the scenes, she reached arrangements with multiple once-hostile Cadrian interests and secured a substantial income from intergalactic trade which was primarily socked away for the use of her daughter Deracoura (styled as Deracoura the second, or sometimes, when she was really feelin’ it, the third). 

Early in her reign, under the guidance of her elder sisters, Deracoura II established the highly profitable Fila Fenaeta swarm, a specialized, state-of-the-art vapor-harvesting operation set amongst the young stars of a resource-rich nebula. While the floating settlement started small, it was destined to grow into a veritable nation of employees of the crown. Almost immediately there was conflict over working conditions in this deep-void environment and the protection of the residents’ few rights as peasant-class planetary citizens (which were still meant to be upheld by the law despite their distance from home, but were not always, particularly with regards to due process in criminal trials and oversight of tribute apportionment--it was common practice for representatives of the nobility to embezzle a great deal of something valuable from a peasant colony and then disappear on a fast spaceship, leaving them on the hook to explain to their rarely-sympathetic lady where all the product went). Repeated uprisings were quelled through mass evictions that displaced families in far-flung space--often with inadequate supplies to get much of anywhere--and forced many to live as outlaws deep in the clouds, gaining the area a reputation as impoverished and dangerous. Dia “Acutri” (Altamaian: sharp-eyed) filia Senema, a second-born mother exiled by her noble sisters, founded a multigenerational pirate colony there that still persists at the time of the story.

The unrest was ultimately no hindrance to the prosperity of the Altamaian throne, and Deracoura continued with zeal the illumination of the galaxy (and beyond) to Basillan and Sitherian travelers that her great-great-grandmother had begun, opening trade routes in the ante-dome that would go on to gradually rob entire cultures blind. The deep roots of the Hyperian empire lead to things sown by the Fortefemens, even if they would later consider themselves rivals.

For two generations now, the narrative that the Old Ways had died with Deracoura I and been buried with the creation of the parliament had been kept at the top of the political toolbox, but no one had used it quite as Siderina Hyperia did from the beginning. With Altamai becoming increasingly inhospitable to its peasantry with the ongoing consolidation of wealth, her appeals to a kind of populist escapism--complemented by her position at the helm of the construction of the Rings and in guardianship of the heir to a little-known but prosperous landed colony--struck a chord with those who saw their planet’s new capitalist class as inadequate caretakers. While she never made any rhetorical attack on the High Queen, she took the angle that the enfeebled royal line now needed to be taken in hand for its own good. With her beautiful ward Estartina, she would revitalize the noble matriarchy of old and lead it to a glittering future in the Rings.

Siderina’s wholesome public image hid the mind of a shrewd general. Weeks after the Rings were announced complete, she commanded her knights to such a decisive victory against the royal guard that she was famously allowed to walk in and kill the old queen (Deracoura II’s daughter Athaema) with a small ivory dagger. In the aftermath she announced that she had acted to protect her world and avenge its integrity, claiming that the Fortefemens had sold information to a hostile Cadrian interest. This may or may not have been true--evidence did materialize here and there, albeit a bit conveniently--but the story was mainly believable because assertions of overfriendliness with Maculatan enemies were not a new thing for the dynasty, and a large segment of the public was willing to accept it. 

Siderina was tried for her regicide in a number of courts, but, by slipping names in the elderly queen’s ear, she had rallied those with judicial power on Altamai mostly to her support, and was never convicted of anything. While the coup had certainly not been a formal duel, the transfer of power was adopted mainly on the strength of the precedent set by the Fortefemens. While Glasmiri was a center of popular resistance, the thrones of the two worlds were still heavily tied together for economic reasons, and the Vividel line remained effectively in Altamai’s thrall. When the Sitherian Archpraeceptor objected to the matter of Estartina’s coronation, Siderina had her ousted, either bribing or threatening practically every organization of priestesses in central Ovaiakon. All of this occurred in the space of two planetary decades--a blink in astraea reckoning. In the twelfth turn of the Rings, Estartina Hyperia was crowned not with the traditional Avesian coronel but with what would come to be called The Diadem of The Empress of the Seven Suns.

At the time of the story, almost two hundred quinturns later, Altamai--the Motherworld of the Basileans, as it is called by the aula--is a place of extremes even beyond its dramatic terrain and climate. Below the cloud line, it is an industrial powerhouse where thousands live in sprawling underground complexes and spend their workdays extracting rapidly depleting natural resources. Above, the last children of the old nobility rehearse the motions of the ancient ways between the pink cloud-carpet and the blue sky. In this dreamlike setting, heavy security, subtle propaganda, and armies of carefully vetted servants work to evoke the memory of a utopia that never existed, tailored to the political predilections and aesthetic whims of the Last Great Ladies. The granddaughter and heir of the deposed high queen, who escaped the coup with her governess as a young child, remains in exile far away in the Perseus Cluster, dreaming, as the old Royalist battle hymn goes, of double sunlight on plumafore fields.

[starsailorstories]

star bug school, which is for star bugs

I don’t think I’ve ever said a word about the various astraea cultures’ education systems, which I can see how one would have questions about considering that they live longer and age more slowly than humans

Basilean society, which never met a thing it couldn’t institutionalize on a massive multiplanetary scale, has a system of government-approved schools run mostly by landed colonies for the benefit of their own children. There’s no national-level public school system; children’s education is treated like an employee benefit, a “favor” bestowed on working parents for their services. This of course means that a great many children slip through the cracks in the system--“orphans” (whose colony matriarch may be living but who have no legal adoptive household) and children of impoverished households or colonies may not be formally educated at all, although it’s common for members of the priestly class, retirees, and housewives in the community to cooperate to provide some general instruction (although this of course is limited by the education of said volunteers themselves). 

Basilean schools where they do exist take in a similar range of ages to those we’d expect from public schools on earth, but they have much longer breaks (practically like a year on/a year off) during which students are expected to help their families, take jobs or apprenticeships, travel, or whatever (there are a lot of supplementary educational or daycare-like programs for younger children designed around this system, although unless they’re coordinated and funded directly by one’s own matriarchal household they’re likely to be expensive and I’m pretty sure the majority of kids--at least in the mid and outer rings--just run riot until the school term starts again). 

Long breaks between terms aren’t the only difference because of the longer relative life span--for older students, especially middle-class ones who aren’t expected to get any sort of prestigious specialized schooling, it’s common to take entire years off to pursue other career options. Military service, intern positions in government offices, and low-level sail-deck or engine-room positions on spaceships are all possibilities in this case. The actual amount of information honestly isn’t that different from what a human gets in twelve years, there’s just a great deal of emphasis on being able to +present+ said information--memorization, demonstration, recitation, etc.--and on structured “social development” designed to equip young imperial citizens for the lifetime of schmoozing ahead (which includes things like deferential visits with the teacher-appointed head girls in your year and games where you have to trade up and negotiate to win).

As you may have gathered, the last few years of school are really flexible, and to actually take classes year round/stay for a long period of time is a known luxury and an Aesthetic for intellectual types from upwardly mobile colonies and wealthy maidens of particularly studious astrology. On the whole being formally educated at all is a privilege of imperial citizenship and connections, although many immigrant colonies in the Rings have their own schools styled after the educational systems of their Motherworlds.

On that note, the older and more integrated-with-their-planets antedome cultures rarely have formal education on the government level, but rather have adults in every colony (and generally, younger adults training under them) who are charged with keeping the homeschooling of children to a certain standard. Among the Loar, this is a hereditary position, while for the Atennui it’s one of many possible adult roles that are meant to be discerned at a person’s coming of age and sometimes there just...isn’t one for a while, although this is considered undesirable as more time and effort will need to be put in once she’s found and identifies which children have catching up to do. The Kengfara, who don’t really do “households” but rather court new romantic partners throughout their lives and raise children communally, aren’t exactly the same TYPE of literate society, but regularly convene all the kids of the same age to teach them techniques for memorizing oral texts and handing them down or teaching them to others, as well as symbol-writing and other art forms. Healers, who also have a number of religious/mystical functions, get a secondary education under a mentor. A few other Aevarellan cultures rely on a mentorship model for the entirety of a person’s education, considering it a standard duty of older adulthood.

The Sol Garna system does have planet-wide public school systems (and FUNCTIONING CHILD LABOR LAWS) which are managed top-down by regional commissioning bodies, although these suffered badly from the Hyperians’ economic sanctions and exploitation and from beholdenness to rich benefactresses for funding. They are slowly modernizing with the help of widespread grassroots efforts, but like a lot of things on Esmrrrder and Hiramar, it’s a long tooth-and-nail fight. Many parents opt to homeschool or to send their children to Sitheria (where many priestly orders still operate charity schools) or the Inner Rings to be educated, but this can be a source of political tension and is a factor in the decline of some Garnaxe minority languages. 

[starsailorstories]

Have some more general info about the Seven Suns language family!

Descendants of Syfrae/Sitherian lander languages:

Projected and spoken proto-syfrae - Syfrae was originally a fully projected language, which seems to have begun being spoken--or more properly sung--about the same time it began being recorded in stone. Originally associated with vocalization for purely musical purposes, it eventually developed into a highly tonal spoken language.

Classical syfrae - prior to the ascendancy of Altamaian interests in the supersystem, the language of intellectual and religious life for Basillans and Sitherians. 

Modern poetic syfrae - an evolution of classical syfrae generally used in Sitherian academic and monastic literature. Retains certain structural formalities of classical syfrae around more or less the lexicon of vulgar syfrae.

“Vulgar” syfrae - transitional dialect between classical Syfrae and Vivaki, Sitheria’s current majority language which is split into three main dialects that sort of change on a gradient as you move from place to place:

Coast Vivaki - dialect associated with the spacefaring trades and the major port districts

Tainvaghe - dialect associated with the central “right bank” of Ovaiakon

Elnvaghe - dialect associated with the central “left bank” of Ovaiakon

Old Avesian - Altamai’s “royal tongue,” the result of the adaptation of classical Syfrae to Basillan tongues among the ancient nobility of Aves.

Descendents of Proto-Taregan:

Proto-uek - developing from the proto-Taregan projection language, Uek began as a series of rhythmic accents meant to call attention to, emphasize, and punctuate projections. Gradually it developed into a system of writable words and later into written Uek, although “correct pronunciation” of a Uek text still requires fairly constant projecting (although many individual Uek words still survive with a single meaning in later language where projecting is strictly emotive).

Sainhek - A newer, northwesterly offshoot of Uek, spoken by the powerful Ixavol clan and their descendents on Tarega. 

Uek - The language in which many Cosmonist myths were first recorded, and the origin of many familiar words in later languages referring to time and astronomical phenomena.

Taregan Oghai - a descendant of Uek spoken by the Oghai clan.

Solreg - official language of the ancient Taregan city-state of Solrega, brought to Altamai through the organized evacuation efforts of its ruling family.

Old Aundell - a lower-class central Taregan dialect which was originally a vulgar form of Solreg and diverged completely during the class tensions of the Flight era as many lower-class colonies went underground to avoid the edicts of their noble relations.

Anwai - Diverged from Aundell among equatorial Glasmirian settlers from Altamaian fly-by-nights, after several generations.

Old Kilne - language established in the Deroait province by Solreg nobility who landed in the Flight era.

Kilne - local language of Deroait, a province in the Glasmirian Northwest Country. Although it originated as an aristocratic tongue, now most daughters of noble colonies there speak Altamaian.

Nadeg - ancestral language of the Taregan Nadeg clan.

Old Saiven - language of a small but fierce clan which originated on Tarega’s southeast face and eventually migrated, mostly, to Altamai.

Soritain - local language of the Soritan province of Glasmiri’s west country. 

Middle Saiven, from which came:

Esaiven - current evolution of the Saiven clan language on the Esaiven (“daughter/heir of the Saiven”) continent of Altamai, where a majority of the population is descended from the clan’s four allied colonies.

Aifex - language spoken by later Saiven migrants to the southern latitudes of Glasmiri.

Ket - language originating in the mountains of the Taregan southern hemisphere. Its name literally means “talk”, a bit of lexicon that survived in the names of some Taregan and Glasmirian animals among other places.

[starsailorstories]

Cheat sheet for time in SC

There are a few stories that I published on the patreon or put up on tumblr before I had completely sorted out the Imperial Standard time system, which is how most of the characters’ viewpoints refer to time unless they come from a planet that’s truly outside the empire’s influence (like Ashtiva. or Earth.) but most of them are using a system I sorted out early this year.

Let’s start with the basics and talk about what actual units IS time uses and how they relate to their earth equivalents.

As you can see, what’s referred to as ‘an hour’ etc is a lot longer than the same designation on earth. I still call them hours and minutes and days etc to help the human reader get in sync with how astraeas perceive time, which is adapted to their longer life spans and to some extent to long day cycles on several of their home planets. You’ll hear characters talk about “minute segments” or divide minutes up into fractions and fractions of fractions; culturally they’ve kind of only started talking about shorter blips of time in precise terms fairly recently, and the older Altamaian and Sitherian languages have all kinds of terms that English could probably only translate as “moment” but which are in fact distinct in meaning, referring to different subjective short periods of time.

A standard day technically begins at sunrise in once specific location (the Imperial Judiciary, on Altamai) but there’s a time zone system that more or less calibrates the hours of the day to local first light or the rising of a reference star. 

The 12 hours of the standard day also have names, in order:

First sunrise

Second sunrise

Third sunrise

Fourth sunrise

Half/low noon

Total/high noon

Waning noon

First sunset

Second sunset

Third sunset

Fourth sunset

Mideve/Dark hour

So it’s somewhat confusing because of course the positions of the four suns look different depending on where you’re at in the supersystem and they might appear to rise at very similar times, but it’s more just that the hours the day is divided into are named after celestial events that happen during them on Altamai, Tarega/Glasmiri (which orbit so close their skies are generally at least comparable), and Sitheria specifically. The net result is that you can still more or less tell what time it is by what the suns are like/the light outside is like. Orbiters in the rings are usually designed to rotate on their central points in such a way as to create a Basillan-friendly ~50 hour day, although some of the poorer or more industrial orbiters are a bit wonky because they’ve been slightly fluctuating for so long with no adjustment that they’ve slowed down or sped up. There are also some small orbiters that are majority Miragari or another interplanetary immigrant community and have elected to engineer a longer rotation period.

[starsailorstories]

Language tree diagram of the Atya-Minerva linguistic family!

Some notes:

All these are languages historically spoken mainly by Sitherians and Basillans. Miragari, Thassians, Esmrrrderians, and Hiramarians didn’t have contact with these until way later even though they were in the same general area.

The little colored dots represent the planet where the language primarily developed--gold for Tarega, purple for Sitheria, pink for Altamai, dark green for Glasmiri, and light green for Shali.

This obviously isn’t complete, each system has much more linguistic diversity than I can portray here, but this tracks the ancestries of the major ones I’m really developing and working with. I’m using dotted lines to represent relationships between languages with a super high rate of borrowing for a similar conlang-notes reason.

Old Standard Altamaian was a widely-adopted auxlang in-universe, although it has obviously evolved naturalistically since its adoption, so...I had to find a way to notate that and this is what I came up with.

[starsailorstories]

Post about the calendar in SC

I’ve said before that the Basilean calendar is sort of two systems of timekeeping layered on top of each other and I’d like to go in depth about them. None of this is needed to understand the stories but if you refer back to it you can get a better idea of what kind of spans of time people are referring to and what time of the season/year it is. The two systems in play are the Cosmonist liturgical calendar, which influences the way history is recorded and weeks are divided up in secular life, and the Imperial calendar, which is used to mark the turn and quinturn date (units of time that are a lot more useful in dividing up 90,000+ earth year astraea lifetimes than planetary years) and also measures agricultural and financial “seasons” based on the Altamaian lunar year. 

Also, this just became firm canon like, a few months ago, so it’s possible that any dates/ages/other markers of time I said before then were either wrong or like completely made up on the fly without regard for any system and I am terribly sorry about that

Cosmonist Liturgical Calendar (used for “decades”, weeks, holidays)

Although the oldest surviving guide to Cosmonist ritual--the one included in the Writings of the Holy Poets--was written on Sitheria, its author was a Taregan. She recorded the religious year as observed by her own people in detail, and it stuck. Although Cosmonism is a big, diverse, and not-always-organized religion and a lot of local sects use their own planet’s calendar or some other system, Sitherians and Basillans who are loyal to either the empire or any of the planetary High Queens observe based on this schedule, which is more than enough to make it the mainstream in the Seven Suns.

The longest unit of the liturgical calendar is the gyevh, or cycle, which turns over every 12,000 years. Originally this span was inspired by the magnetic polar shifts of the planet, and it’s used to describe broad eras kind of the way humans use decades, like someone will talk about living through the 41st cycle the way a human would talk about living through the 90s.

The cycles alternate between arid cycles, when, before the climatological changes that prompted most to leave Tarega, the desert advanced north; and pluvial cycles when waters rose and wells and oases formed. Each cycle was further broken down into anngyevhei, groupings of three thousand years named for the broad natural features of that point in the cycle (I don’t have their words for these worked out yet, but “translations” are on the wheel above).

On a smaller scale, the 690-day Taregan year was also divided up for ritual and practical purposes. Although all the different clans and tribes on Tarega ascribed specific meanings to different phases and configurations of the four moons and some of them kept calendars based on that, the Cosmonist calendar uses the signs of planet’s zodiac (which, because they have two suns, four moons, and two proximal stars to play with are used much more for astronomical navigation than astrology) to divide the year into twelve 34-day periods.

Within the 34-day sidereal "months" there are two seventeen-day periods which are divided up as serves various purposes, but the odd day that would make them indivisible is considered sacred to Cunaderia and is a somber mini-holiday commemorating the passage of time. Some sects of cosmonism don't consider anyone to have officially been born or have died until the off days. The last of these of the cycle is the avi-fora, the Cosmonist tradition’s most sacred day, when the events of the past twelve thousand years are “sacrificed” to the goddess of time and fate in gratitude for the continued expansion of the universe.

Imperial Basilean Calendar

For much of recorded history, this was the only calendar Basillans and Sitherians knew. At times small groups would attempt to create a new one--the Glasmirian political independence movement, for instance, pushed its own calendar based exclusively on the Glasmirian year--but none of them really stuck. The empire, however, established a new calendar based on the length of one full rotation (one turn) of the rings, and made its adoption a matter of National Fidelity(TM). 

Each turn lasts seventy-three thousand days. The length of the day and “month”, which in this context is called a novilunium or new moon cycle, come from their altamaian counterparts. On Altamai, moon cycles are always 27 days long, and the Basilean calendar retains this but groups each Altamaian year of ten months into one of 119 supranovilunia, often shortened to just suprae. The Altamaian calendar looks like this (astraeas seem to like their windows and calendars circular, don’t ask me why):

So while all the Taregan jazz is used for determining religious holidays and marking major spans of time, most people in modern Basilea say dates and whatnot as altamaian day/altamaian month/supra number/turn date. (The disconnect between the liturgical and imperial calendars is the particular problem of every local priestess with a head for numbers and/or astronomy, because she’ll be tasked with making sure everyone knows when most of the religious and secular holidays of the year are. It's become standard practice for Cunaderian shrines to put up a sign every month with what dates the seventeenths of the Taregan months are, for example). Quinturns--groupings of five turns--are often used for general ages (which is handy for telling you the reader how old astraeas are in “human years”) and to describe long-term trends in economics and social sciences.