Chapter II: The Structural Hierarchy#

Kethra Almanac • Approved 19 September 2026 • drafted 18 September 2026

Status: approved. Briana approved the whole almanac on 19 September 2026 (the Almanac Approval Decision). Where this file calls something a proposal, read it as approved, except the open points that decision lists.

Status before approval: Everything in this chapter is a proposal built on the spine. Most sections describe the Caldren Crown in full and summarise the other societies. Where a roster faction appears, its role follows the relationship register's draft wherever that fits.

2.1 Structural Stratification & Caste Mechanics#

The Caldren Crown: four strata#

How class shows on the outside#

• Indigo. Deep indigo cloth is costly to dye, and under Hyperion it reads as black. Old money wears it. New money overdoes it.
• Song-rings. A ring engraved with a verse of the family song. Chartered Houses wear gold rings, the Songed silver, and Commons who have bought a registered verse wear steel. The Unsonged have none. An empty ring finger is noticed.
• Speech. Hallspeech, the capital's formal register, marks education (see Chapter IV). So does using the capital names (Selenne, Theia, Hyperion) without self-consciousness.
• The calendar. Refined people date letters by the solar calendar. Anyone who uses moon-dates in the capital is assumed to be from the frontier, or from the Line.
• Food. Eating processed native food ("Wild bread") in public marks poverty or frontier origin. Beef, honey and wine from the Stair are status foods.

What stops people rising#

1. Seats in the Council of Houses are hereditary. New Houses are created rarely: nine since AL 1900.
2. Access to the Great Register. A Commons family can buy a registered verse, but only by proving descent. That takes archives, time and fees.
3. Marriage. Songed families prefer Songed marriages. Houses marry Houses, or buy Songed wealth.
4. Education. The Royal Academy and the Cantorate College draw mostly from Songed families, even though scholarships exist.
5. Frame licences. Pilot training is expensive. Military service is the main path up for Commons and Unsonged youth. The Royal Frame Corps is the most socially mixed institution in the Crown, which is exactly why the Houses distrust it.

The other societies in brief#

2.2 Architectural Models of Governance#

The Homeworld Assembly: planetary#

The Assembly was founded by the Charter of Aletheia in AL 2150, after the Iron Winter showed the planet what uncoordinated war machines could do. It has 15 member states, including the Crown, the Imperium, the Sanctum, the Line free ports and the Holds Compact (admitted AL 2290). Its seat is Aletheia. The Vesper Orbital Compact and the Cinderbelt Coalition hold associate seats: they can speak, and vote only on space affairs. Their status is disputed (see the register).

The Caldren Crown: constitutional monarchy#

The chain of command:

The Crowned of Caldren (monarch) — head of state; commander-in-chief in name
   │  (acts on the advice of the First Voice; keeps reserve powers)
   ├── The Council of Houses (upper chamber, 144 seats)
   ├── The Hall of Voices (lower chamber, 420 seats) ── elects ──> The First Voice (head of government)
   │                                                                   │
   │                                                          The Cabinet of Offices
   │        ┌──────────┬──────────┬───────────┬──────────┬───────────┬───────────┬────────────┐
   │     Treasury    Justice   Defence &   Harvest &   Charters &  Tides &     Health &
   │                           Frames      Seeding     the South   Works       Learning
   │                                                                   (plus Foreign, Home,
   │                                                                    Trade, Space Offices)
   └── The High Bench (supreme court, 9 Justices) — independent

The detail is in the country almanac.

The others#

2.3 Institutional Law & Civil Statutes#

The constitution of the Crown#

The Crown has no single constitutional text. Instead it has three foundational documents:

1. The Charter of Caldren, AL 812. It created the Crown and the Chartered Houses and bound the monarch to "keep the song and the law".
2. The Great Charter, AL 1733. It created the Hall of Voices, abolished legal distinctions between the Songed and the Unsonged, and subordinated the monarch to Parliament.
3. The Charter of Rights, AL 1964. It guarantees speech, assembly, a fair trial, freedom of belief and the right to leave the Crown, including across the Line.

Planetary law: the three Assembly Accords#

These bind every member state.

Other laws that matter everywhere#

• Link-socket licensing. Neural implants for frame piloting require a state licence and an Accord registration number. Unlicensed sockets ("black sockets") are a serious crime in the Crown and common in the belt.
• Ilyr technology licences. The Sanctum licenses restricted technologies, including link-socket designs, advanced medical therapies and fusion control systems, and requires proof of civilian end-use. Diverting licensed technology to weapons ends the licence. This is the main source of the Crown–Sanctum and Imperium–Sanctum tensions in the register.
• Listeners. Ilyr-trained Listeners are licensed like doctors. Whether their talent is real is argued in every tavern (see the spine, S8).
• "Magic". Kethra has no magic. The nearest things are technologies the Accords forbid, and whatever the Listeners actually do (open).

Company and charter law#

• Chartered companies. A company in the Crown exists by royal charter, registered with the Office of Trade, with limited liability. The great chartered companies are the Thessane Works (frames), the Corran Iron Company, the Saltline Carrier Syndicate and the Harrowgate Bank.
• Seeding charters. The right to convert native land to gardenland, and to own what results. Seeding charters are how the Crown and the Imperium extended their claims across the Line. Every frontier dispute ends up being about a seeding charter.
• Guild monopolies. Chartered guilds hold legal monopolies over certain trades, such as the Hive Wardens and the Tide-Pilots (see Chapter VI).

2.4 Judicial Enforcement & Carceral Frameworks#

Policing in the Crown#

Trials#

The Crown's courts are adversarial and follow common law (law built up from past judges' decisions), sitting within the Charter framework:

• Lower Courts hear minor offences. A single magistrate sits.
• Assizes hear serious crimes. A judge sits with a jury of 12 drawn by lot. Since AL 1733 the lot has been drawn from every stratum, and Chartered House members are excused only by application.
• The Court of Appeal, then the High Bench.
• Cantorate courts hear matters of family song: registration, disputed descent and unsinging. Since AL 1964 their rulings can be appealed to the civil courts.
• Accord Tribunals are Assembly courts for breaches of the Accords. They sit in Aletheia and are staffed from member states.

Punishment#

Enforcement elsewhere#

• Vardane: military tribunals for most serious crime. The Bonded answer to corridor courts run by their employers.
• Ilyr: restorative hearings for most crime. Archive crimes go before the Conclave and are punished severely.
• The Holds: Moot-justice. The whole Hold hears the case. Banishment into the Wild is the ultimate penalty, and in practice it is often a death sentence.
• Orbit: the Compact's Habitat Marshals. Airlocks are never used as punishment. The most feared penalty is loss of residency: being moved out to the outer rings.
• The belt: Coalition and yard law, plus Lantern "captains' justice" (see the Outer Lantern League almanac). The 7-hour light delay makes appeals to the capital theoretical.

2.5 Domestic Social Units#

The hearth: the Crown household#

The standard household is a hearth: a couple, their children, and often one or two grandparents, living around a shared kitchen that holds the song-niche. The song-niche is a shelf or alcove where the family song scroll, or for poorer families a single registered verse, is kept.

• Hearth size: 3.4 people on average in the Crown; 6.1 in the Holds.
• Extended family: the wider hearth-kin gathers at Landfall Day and Song-Night (see Chapter V). Old Songed families keep hearth-halls: family houses where cousins may lodge by right.

Marriage#

Power between the sexes#

• The Crown is formally equal. The Great Charter of AL 1733 opened the Hall of Voices to all; since AL 1847 the Crown passes to the eldest child regardless of sex. In the Chartered Houses, inheritance follows the same rule.
• Vardane is patrilineal: the Imperial Families descend through fathers, and only men hold marshalcy. This is a live grievance among Vardane officer daughters.
• The Holds are matrilineal in practice, because the Gift passes from mothers:
  • Frontier descent is counted through Gift-lines: mother to daughter to granddaughter.
  • Farmland is often inherited through the mother's line, because the family that feeds you is the family whose Gift you carry.
  • Men hold Moot offices freely. The Gift-mothers' councils decide inheritance.
• Ilyr is equal. Rank belongs to the individual, by examination.

Raising children#

• The Crown: hearth-based. Parents are responsible, and grandparents do much of the caring. Schooling is free and compulsory from 5 to 16 (K-yr). Songed families send children to the Cantorate's song-schools, where every child learns the whole Canon of the Songs.
• The Holds: communal. Hold-crèches care for the young during harvest and ember seasons. Every adult of the Hold may correct any child. The Gift-mother, the maternal grandmother, has authority equal to the parents'.
• Vardane: children of the officer caste enter cadet schools at 10.
• Rovessa: children are raised by the whole ship, and apprenticed on deck by 10.
• Orbit: professional child-care collectives. Parents' work shifts dominate.

Guidance for AI actors#

• Class is legible. A character notices song-rings, indigo, accent and which calendar someone dates by. Use these details and don't state class outright.
• The Unsonged are legally equal and socially marked. Capital characters may be carelessly cruel about it without meaning to be.
• On the frontier, ask about the mother. Kinship, land and the Gift all run through her.
• The Accords are sacred and practical at once. Breaking the Quiet Sky Accord is treated like treason and blasphemy together.
• Justice depends on where you are, and characters know it. Crown Assize, Vardane tribunal, Hold Moot and belt captains' justice are all different.

Prepared by Claude.