A comprehensive, alphabetized reference to the world's coined terms, peoples, places, and concepts. Entries are deliberately terse — each links to the canonical doc where the concept is developed in full.
The setting uses Greek-derived names for its metaphysics; where useful the literal sense is glossed in quotes. For the connected narrative picture see World Overview; for the reference-register metaphysics see Cosmology & Metaphysics; for a dense self-contained briefing see Metaphysics Summary. Unsettled terms are tracked in Open Questions; set-aside ones in the Idea Bank.
Design-bible markers
A few entries carry truths not known in-world (flagged design-bible). Keep these out of character-facing text.
A god-power as raw metaphysical substance. Each is a paired Virtue and Vice. See The Archai / Eidolons.
Eidolon (εἴδωλον, "image")
A god-power as a worshipped face — an Archē together with its mortal holder. The religious name for an Archē.
Katochos / pl. Katochoi (κάτοχος, "one who holds / is held")
The mortal elevated to godhood by holding an Archē; the living gods. They dwell in the Realm of Light.
Exousia (ἐξουσία, "power")
The raw vital force — the substance of magic. Pervades matter, soul, and land. Even matter is Exousia at its lowest intensity (panpsychism — "no dead matter, only quiet matter"). See Exousia.
Praxis (πρᾶξις, "action, conduct")
The Will — the reservoir that directs Exousia (the MP bar). Grows with aligned conduct, atrophies with disuse. Gods perceive only Praxis, never belief. See Praxis.
Doxa (δόξα, "belief")
Public religious belief — the face of devotion, not the real divine mechanism (which is Praxis). The Praxis/Doxa distinction is an esoteric secret.
Soul waveform
Every soul radiates Exousia as a unique waveform (sex offset, amplitude = sapience, frequency = vitality, and an inherited Archē-alignment). See Soul Waveform Properties.
Hypodochē / pl. -ai (ὑποδοχή, "receptacle")
An object into which Archē-aligned Praxis has been bound — the basis of Devices, wards, constructs. Temporary (lent, returns) or permanent (surrendered, lowers the maker's ceiling). See Hypodochē.
Thronos (θρόνος, "throne")
A divine-tier Hypodochē holding a fragment of a Katochos's Praxis; anchors a Pneumatophoros. Only a god can make one. See Thronos.
Soulshard
A Hypodochē built from a living practitioner's willingly-surrendered Praxis, carrying their Archē-signature; lets an Investor weave a foreign lineage's gift into a working. See Soulshards.
A person whose Praxis is permanently at zero — body persists, self does not; only an insatiable hunger for Exousia remains. The opposite pole to the Consumption.
Skorpismos (σκορπισμός, "scattering")
A directly-attacked or blocked Archē diffusing across reality as a peopleless field. See Skorpismos & Synagōgē.
Synagōgē (συναγωγή, "gathering")
The re-coalescence of a scattered Archē into a new holder. The only path back for the Forgotten.
Toxic Exousia
Exousia taken by force or from tainted sources; cheaper, but contaminates a living user's Praxis (drives toward Husking). Safe only through an automated Device. Surfaces as the occult damage quality. See Toxic Exousia.
Exousia shell
The reserve of ambient substance that pools around each soul to be spent in casting (refills only as fast as the surroundings supply). The law of signature matching governs whether the shell is power or sickness. See The Exousia Shell.
Elemental magic (fire/ice/lightning/earth/wind/water). Binds nothing — called from what's present; terrain-coupled; not lineage-locked, reached by the Connected.
Investment (Imbuing)
Innovation / Glyphein
Binding Will into external matter (the Hypodochē art). Damage quality: arcane.
Self-binding — Will committed into one's own flesh (the body as Hypodochē). Safeguard: the somatic template (the body's memory of its true form). Damage qualities: necrotic / disease / bleed.
Seeding — Will committed into a living, growing system; positive-sum (repays if it thrives, lost if it withers). Safeguard: the stop-signal (growth ends at the host's natural form). Damage qualities: radiant / divine.
The only second-order Form — acts on another's power. Two faces: Virtue elevates (amplify/bear/pool); Vice subsumes (take/overwrite/fold-in).
Concept
Meaning
Self-binding
Shaping's cost-relation: Praxis committed into one's own body; temporary shapes revert, permanent shapes lower the ceiling.
Seeding
Blooming's cost-relation: Praxis committed into a living host that repays with surplus if it thrives, and is lost whole if it withers.
Somatic template
The body's memory of its true form — Shaping's safeguard; is Temperance, restraint made flesh. Disruption-corrupted → body-horror runaway.
Stop-signal
The cue that ends seeded growth at the host's natural form — Blooming's safeguard; is Hope's faith that growth fulfills. Disruption-corrupted → the Forest's overgrowth.
The Two Faces
Every Form manifests as a Virtue-face or a Vice-face, tracking which face the practitioner lives toward. The reason the Consumption tips souls toward Vice. See The Two Faces of Every Form.
Reality's layered structure — three core realms (Light/reason, Images/spirit, Shadow/appetite) and two interstitial ones (Waves, Echoes), mapping onto Plato's three-part soul. Mortals live on a sixth, base/material plane below all five. See The Five Realms.
Realm of Light
Highest, core realm (reason); Skyne's abandoned seat, now home to the Katochoi.
Realm of Waves
Interstitial; churning raw Exousia before it takes a god-aligned shape. A crossing power passes through here.
Realm of Images
Core realm (spirit); dwelling of the Forms (Plato's perfect patterns — the Circle, the Blade, the Virtues/Vices).
Realm of Echoes
Interstitial threshold where ideals dissolve into appetite; can be pulled into the world via the Image of Shadow.
Realm of Shadow
Deepest, core realm (appetite); the primal foundation.
Skyne, the Departed
The higher-world demiurge who shaped this world, forged the Archai, then returned home and died — leaving only an echo that still sustains creation. The gods wrongly believe him alive. See Skyne. (In-world, only Euphen knows he is dead.)
Blood memories
Faint impressions of the higher world, carried by all life Skyne seeded here; felt most clearly by the Archai (notably Humility).
The Eternal Spiral
The macro-process the Archai turn through — Emergence, Manifestation, Transformation — the process-time layer beneath Succession/Ascension/Skorpismos. See The Eternal Spiral.
Virtue / Vice
The inseparable two faces of every Archē (e.g. Hope/Despair, Humility/Pride). Defining a Virtue automatically instantiated its shadow Vice — a flaw Skyne never noticed.
Full god roster: The Eidolons and Their Peoples. Known Archai: Wisdom, Hope, Temperance, Humility, Innovation, Courage, Justice, Truthfulness, Liberation, and the scattered Forgotten.
Name
What it is
Sophronoi
A prideful ruling elite, people of Humility (shadow: Pride); their Form is Koinōsis. The Collective draws from them. Originally from Sophron, a temperate land to the south. See The Sophronoi.
Elpidi (The Order of Pious Sun)
A sun-worshipping people/order, people of Hope (shadow: Despair); their Form is Blooming. Their piety is a discipline of harmony ("the Sun sings"). Driven into Forest exile ~2 centuries ago. See The Elpidi.
Vanarites
A shapeshifting people, people of Temperance; their Form is Shaping (called Vanarism, once "Gandharvism"). Immune to the Consumption (they reshape it away), so they cross the Forest freely. Settled at Vanar. See The Vanarites.
Glyphein
A bloodline-cluster (not a single race) tied to Innovation; their Form is Investment. The Kuklos populace are their descendants — and the bloodline the Disruption harvests.
the Forgotten
An Archē that fell into permanent Skorpismos in deep prehistory; its scattered substance is ambient elemental Exousia and the source of Primal magic. In-world nameless ("the scattered Archē"). Design-bible: its Virtue/Vice are Reliability / Rigidity — never in-world knowledge. See The Forgotten.
the Connected
Those able to channel Primal — reached by disposition, not blood (apartness opens the socket; steadfastness picks the current). Sustained channeling causes a slow drift toward the Forgotten, checked by staying split. In the party: Phaidros (strongly), Sophia (partially). See The Connected.
Cheria Sofias (Yomenites)
Desert tribes of Wisdom that wandered, treasured water, and pilgrimaged to mountains/seas/wetlands. Relationship to the Vanarites is open.
The forced replacement of a god: meet its conditions — overwrite its Domain (#1) and break its bloodline's consensus (#2) — and a mortal seizes the throne. Metaphysically it is an Apotheosis made permanent (the transient touch held forever).
Domain overwrite
Condition #1: a network of Devices strips the land's Innovation-resonance and imposes the aspirant's. Displaced Exousia compounds outward in concentric rings — this is what the layered zones of the Unknown are.
The Consumption (Exousia sickness)
The overaccumulation affliction: souls whose resonance no longer matches their surroundings cannot metabolize the flood, which erupts as madness + cancerous growth. The opposite pole to Husking. Specifically forced Koinōsis in its Vice face — the land making every soul common with the Collective. Casting vents it. See The Consumption.
Exousia bathing
Modern natives scraping latent power through prolonged Forest exposure — at the cost of creeping Consumption.
The inert zone
A maintained bubble of near-empty Exousia around Kuklos — the Collective's shelter from the flood; where magic is impossible without a carried source.
The Cosmic Wound
(Deepest reveal, held for far beyond this story.) A possible primordial fracture beneath reality — leading candidate: the standing echo of Skyne's death. The faint tearing at the targeted Archē is its first glimpse. See Open Questions.
The Vdélygma (lit. "abomination"; "ved-mah")
Children used as subjects in the Collective's weapon-experiments fusing augmentation with physiology (euphemism: "creatus"). Lione is a survivor. See The Vdélygma.
The cabal engineering the Disruption — inner ring the Seven Elders, drawn from the Sophronoi; ultimately the arm of Humility. Publicly preaches henosis; secretly each Elder means to betray the rest. See The Collective.
Henosis
The state religion — doctrine of purity, perfection, and the coming unification of humanity into one transcendent being. Naming unsettled (Henosis / Henoa / Dairism). See Henosis.
Henoa Secundi
The male religious head, "returned" ~60 years ago alongside a particular Elder's emergence; pure counterpart to the Queen. True nature open.
The Mendicants (Dervishes)
An ascetic, mostly-male sub-sect that pursues purity by seeking out adversity (a soft echo of Vanarism); they ride out with expeditions as priests and medics. See Sub-sects.
The heretical order
A tiny Bahá'í-analogue order (name pending) teaching one true God, a world outside the Disruption, and radical equality; crushed in purges ~50 years ago, now near-extinct underground. Had Elpidi ties.
The Union
The government — a constitutional monarchy. Naming unsettled (the Union / Cember / Daire). See The Union.
The Queen (the Mother Pearl)
The monarch — a young woman who reigns chaste from age 10 to 20, then abdicates into the Royal Harem.
The Nacreous Matrix (Royal Harem)
The body of royal-lineage advisers behind the throne.
The Nacrine (Daughters of Pearl)
The harem's augmented "red right hand" — knights/spies/executioners bearing artifact vestments, tied to the Collective and its augmentation research (whose grim provenance they don't know). Sophia was one, then a defector.
The Adventurer's Guild
A rich, heterodox, indispensable guild headquartered in the Light Tower, quietly sympathetic to the Vanarites and Elpidi. Runs a guildwives' co-op. See The Adventurer's Guild.
Seven Elders
The Collective's inner ring; ascension-seekers preserved by the time-freeze. Possibly the figures Henosis mythologizes as the Imams.
The old city at the world's heart — pre-Disruption seat of Investment-craft and a golden age of soulshard-woven magic; its core was time-frozen by the Disruption. See Kyanos.
Kuklos Anankes ("Circle of Necessity"; Kuklos)
The present-day walled city standing on old Kyanos's heart — ~2-mile diameter, curtain wall, baobabs, the Decagram at its center. See Kuklos.
The Unknown (the Forest; outsiders' World Wound)
The expanding zone of transformed, layered reality around Kuklos — Rainforest → Marshes → Caustic Rise → the Crest, plus the Stonefield, Mountains, Valleys, Infinite River, Desert of Mist, and the outermost Shell ("Void"). Saturated with Exousia (hence the Consumption) but essential for recharging ampoules and recovering lost Devices. See The Unknown.
The Decagram
The ten-starred central fortress — civic seat, supreme Henosis Bethel, and the Collective's hidden core, all within the same walls. Its ten-pointed star gives the faith its iconography. See The Decagram.
The Light Tower
A gilded tower in the bazaar district, base of the Adventurer's Guild; a contested Henosis holy site.
Vanar
The Vanarites' primary settlement, beyond the city in the Valley.
The Skeletal Tree Yard (Graveyard)
Where near-death Vanarites (Vetala) venture to fight the creatures of the Crest.
An automated machine that channels Exousia (including, safely, toxic Exousia) to do work — Innovation's craft. Built from three parts: a Germ (exousium container holding the charge), a Source (the Exousia fuel), and a Set (the Investment working that shapes it). See Devices.
Exousium
Refined crystalline material from which a Germ is forged.
Ampoule
A portable store of Exousia charge; recharges in the saturated Forest. See Ampoules.
Glyphion equipment
Charge-based, unusually powerful named gear with unique abilities (limited uses per combat).
Runic Builder
A pre-Disruption profession (programming + engineering) that harnessed Exousia through Runes — symbols intrinsic to nature, by formal logic. Cyrus is the foremost survivor. See Runic Builders.
Ergastiri (lit. "Workshop")
The (largely private) foundries Runic Builders operated from.
The Device Problem
Why pre-Disruption Devices fail in overwritten zones — their runes/Exousia no longer match the realigned land. The correction is a lost runic art, rediscoverable only by a Runic Builder. See The Device Problem.
Entropic Blade
A runic sword Cyrus acquires mid-campaign — additive optional equipment, not core to his archetype; its Set shifts the elemental signature it channels. Mechanics: Named Devices.
The Image of Shadow
A relic black stone (shifting lines) that can pull the Realm of Echoes into the material world.
The transient deification: at the peak of concentrated Will, a living mortal reaches up the channel of their own lineage and briefly, partially becomes a "little god" of one domain before falling back. It is the same act as Ascension, made momentary instead of permanent — Ascension is the spark held forever, the Disruption a forced mass version. Source = lineage (which divine register you reach); shape = self (how it manifests). Each playable character has a uniquely-named form — Sword Surgeon (Cyrus), Showtime (Vaughn), Eruption (Phaidros), Harmonic Resonance (Paidi), Omnific Mirror (Lione), Shadow Lord (Euphen), Crimson Vessel (Chiranjeevi), Maelstrom (Sophia), Magnum Opus (Adam). The Disruption's Exousia-flood has made it newly common ("an age of flickering little gods"). Full treatment: Apotheosis — The Transient Deification.
Term
Meaning
Transcendent(status)
An Apotheosis past the point of no return — irreversible, accumulating; a mortal fixing into the divine register (Ascension caught mid-completion in one body). Adam alone can inflict it. The danger every Apotheosis risks by holding too long; cf. the Consumption.
Euphen's brother; a wanderer from the higher reality; gave the Collective partial god-supplanting knowledge — the Disruption's secondary actor; is the Master of Those Who Know (the "Enlightenment"). See Story.
Kadmos
A historical figure of the ampoule/beam-weapon era, canonically still alive in the wilderness.
Phoebe
The scientist Lione most blames for the experiments done to her.
Phaidros's mother
Pioneer of Project Eudaimonia, the research that grew into the conduit-experiments (and Lione).
Talos
A retired smuggler who shelters street orphans and protects Lione.
Batuo
The leader who brought the Elpidi through the Forest into hidden exile ~2 centuries ago.
This glossary is maintained alongside the Changelog. When a term is coined, renamed, or retired, update the relevant entry here.