Selura
The Primordial of memory and navigation — the most explicitly cross-cultural deity of the post-Dissolution pantheon, with parallel formulae in Anchored archive practice and Driftborn voice-keeper tradition.
Wiki
Aethis
The Primordial of knowledge and compromise — patron of the Academy of Records, architect of the Dissolution, and central figure in Anchored civic religion. The first of the deity-specific reference articles.
The Seven Primordials
The eight gods of the post-Dissolution era — seven Primordials and Ohn the witness. Names, domains, current state of worship, and the divergence between Anchored and Driftborn observance.
The Academy of Records
The principal scholarly institution of the Shifting Coast. Departments, scholar ranks, the Karath Archive’s three-tier access system, the Bronze Index, the Tide Office, the Observatory, and the relationship to the Compact.
The Order of Vyn
The institution that registers and monitors the Touched. Foundation, registration practice, the five recognized categories of manifestation, the pale grey coat, and the Order’s place in Anchored civic life.
The Harbor Master’s Office
The commercial regulatory authority of Karath. Customs, berthing, manifests, the port ledger, and the dark-blue-coated collectors who work the three principal piers.
The Karath Compact
The governing council of Anchored Karath. Annual sitting in Veren, the numbered registry system, three-judge panel procedure, private-room minor registries, and the licensed investigator houses that work with Compact-court.
The Port Watch
The civic security force of Karath and allied ports. Rank structure, specialist roles, equipment, reputation, and the unusually long tenure of Watch officers.
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.
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.
The Bone Deep
The Bone Deep is a cave network said to exist somewhere beneath the Coast, filled with objects forged by the gods before they dissolved themselves. The Academy has never located it. Driftborn verses say not to seek it. The tradition is old, persistent, and stubbornly unresolved.
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.
Stars and Sky of the Coast
The Observatory on Karath's highest tier has been recording the sky for more than six centuries. A short public reference on the six principal constellations, the moon Teska, the two wandering stars Heresh and Shora, and the celestial Bleed effects the Academy has not yet learned to predict.
Seasonal Rhythms of the Coast
Coastal life turns on the four seasons — Veren, Kira, Arhen, Siol — and on the specific character each brings to the work of ordinary people. A short public reference on when things happen through the year, and on how Anchored civic rhythms align with, and differ from, the Driftborn seasonal round.
