The Driftborn Oral Tradition
The four bodies of knowledge a voice-keeper carries, how Driftborn tradition is transmitted without writing, and why it has remained unwritten for centuries.
Cultures
Music of the Coast
An overview of the two great musical traditions of the Shifting Coast — the principally vocal music of the Anchored, centered on breath and word, and the principally rhythmic music of the Driftborn, inseparable from the voice-keeper’s work of oral transmission.
Marriage, Family, and Inheritance
Marriage forms the household. The household raises the children. The continuator inherits the principal property. The cycle begins again. An Academy overview of the integrated system by which Anchored households form, raise children, and transmit property across generations.
Anchored Civic Life
Anchored communities expect participation. A household that does not show at assemblies, does not send representatives to guild meetings, does not host or witness, is — within a generation or two — no longer a household of standing. An Academy overview of the texture of public life.
Driftborn Festivals
Driftborn ceremony is quiet. Driftborn festivals are not. An Academy overview of the named collective festivals of the mobile companies — First-Sighting at the return of the company's constellation, the Kira Moot at the year's height, the Quiet Feast as the black tides begin.
Food of the Coast
Fish, grain, salt, oil. The Coast feeds itself on a narrow and stable inventory, and the commercial arrangements built around it are among the most durable institutions of Coastal life. An Academy overview of what the Coast eats, where it comes from, and how it keeps.
Dead Languages of the Coast
A dead language is one no living person speaks as a first language. The Coast has a number of them, in layered strata from the oldest pre-Dissolution inscriptions to the most recent post-Dissolution attrition. An Academy overview of what can be read, what cannot, and what is permanently lost.
The Languages of the Coast
Two language families on one Coast: the Anchored family of related regional dialects, and the Driftborn family carried in voice from company to company. An Academy overview of both, of the trade-speech that bridges them, and of what the Languages department has and has not documented.
Driftborn Customs and Ceremony
Where the Anchored codify practice in statute, the Driftborn codify it in what is remembered, recited, and transmitted from one voice-keeper to the next.
Anchored Law
The Karath Compact is the oldest continuously enforced legal system on the known Coast. An Academy overview of its three codes — criminal, property, manifester — the hierarchy of courts that applies them, and the Port Watch that enforces them.
Driftborn Mobile Settlements
An Academy of Records public reference article. On the settlement forms of the Driftborn — their fleets, their anchorages, and the great gatherings that assemble a temporary people from a scattered one.
Daily Life in Karath
To live in Karath is to live by the bells. This article describes the texture of daily life for the one hundred and twenty thousand Coastal Anchored who live in the Coast's principal city — the tiers, the civic bells, the nine-day week, the markets, the food, and the rhythms of work and rest.
The Driftborn
The Driftborn are the peoples of the Shifting Coast who live on the sea — organized as several hundred independent companies, following fish and winds and the turn of the year, passing their knowledge down in voice rather than in writing.
The Anchored
The Anchored are the people of the Shifting Coast who consider themselves rooted — who build in stone, farm in soil, bury their dead in named ground, and pass their names down along inherited houses.
