The Darëssef

These are some short vignettes “by” members of the various Eldraeic darëssef – not castes, not since very early pre-Imperial days, since one can move freely between them and, indeed, maintain a place in multiple darëssef simultaneously, but rather, groups of social-role archetypes with their own sets of philosophies, customs, protocols, and so forth – on what it means to be one of that darëssef, from their point of view.

These are the acquiescents (priests and other god-touched, which these days means people working directly for the weakly godlike superintelligence behind the curtain); the aesthants (artists of one kind or another); the executors (planners, managers, supervisors, and bureaucrats); the hearthmistresses[1] (those who maintain, which covers people as disparate as housewives, doctors, farmers, sysadmins, and valets); the plutarchs (merchants, bankers, and businessmen); the runér (wielders of the Imperial Mandate; governors); the sentinels (the military, law enforcement, emergency response, paramedics, etc.).; and the technarchs (thinkers and builders).

(While there are also the serviles, the unskilled labor darëssef is obsolete in the modern era, and even before that was the case, no-one would have bothered to ask them anything, anyway.)

Acquiescent: The Bridges

We are those who stand between Light and Darkness, and bring fire to the Darkness on behalf of the Light.

We are those who stand at the gates of the Twilight City, and hold them open for the thunders of gods and the whispers of men.

We are those who learn the concepts of, not from, the eikones; who take it upon ourselves to embody, as best we can, the perfected ideals they are, that men may have a light to strive for, and the universe be set right, in the despite of the great Flaw, the Darkness-behind-Darkness, which is entropy.

Thus we are named acquiescent, for alone among our kind, our valxíjir[2] is not an expression of self, but of that concept which we serve and reify.

– Alwyn Muetry of Elmiríën,
Philosopher-Priestess of the Fane of Orderly Blossoming

Aesthant: Beauty Is Truth

The soul of the Empire is in our keeping.

For beauty is our calling, and beauty is the language of the soul. Beauty inspires, uplifts, and enlightens. It comforts the sore at heart, and gives ease to the weary. As the word of Lanáraé proclaims, beauty, like love, calls the divine fire, the lincál, down to earth. With it, we dwell in a civilization of enlightened souls; without it, in mere hovels of scurrying beasts.

And so we must shape all things accordingly. The pure artists among us strive with song and sculpture, with book and game, with edifice and performance, to show the world what it could be. Others work elsewhere, with technarchs and plutarchs to make elegance walk alongside functionality; with runér and hearthmistresses to build shining cities where no shadows fall; even with sentinels, as they strive to preserve and restore beauty in the wake of ruin. So shall we work, until all the world reflects this harmony, and neither ugliness nor darkness lies in wait to cast gloom upon the heart and shadow the soul of its beholders.

Thus is our Heaven built.

– Kynar Cendriane,
Lyceum of the Frozen Flame

Executor: The Middlemen

It’s all in our name: we execute.  All our counterparts have grand plans.  The aesthants create, the technarchs invent, the plutarchs deal, the runér govern – and we take care of the details.  We run the branches and the Initiatives day to day.  We make the schedules, and lay out the critical paths, and keep the books, and write the contracts.  We supervise and coordinate, evaluate and analyze, mediate and facilitate.  We remove the obstacles and provide the necessities to allow those we work with to focus on their intent alone.  We enable every great work to be done.

Ours are lives of estxíjir, the outward focus, but no less pleasing to us.  The machine of the world cannot run itself.  It turns upon a million, million cogs, and of all of them, we are the greatest.  Do you imagine there is no satisfaction to be found in that?

– Medora Allatrian-ith-Alclair,
certified commercial obligator

Hearthmistress: The Answer to Decay

Slice by slice, Entropy eats the world. That is the truth of the Flaw.

We fight it most directly. That is the truth of the hearthmistress.

All the daressëf fight it in their own way, it is true. The aesthants set beauty against it; the plutarchs challenge it with wealth; the technarchs strive with truth and tools; and the sentinels turn it against itself. But in a million million tiny drops, in dirt and rust and error, in disease and decay and disorder, in rot and ruin, the Flaw undermines the grandest of plans and the greatest of dreams.

To that, we are the answer. We maintain. We keep the homes and tend the forests; we heal the sick and console the reft; we oil the machines and operate the ‘weaves; we cleanse the blight and repair the faults; we see that lights shine and water flows, that food reaches the table and garbage the fires; and in all ways uphold the necessities that empower our fellows to do their work.

To all these matters, we attend, for the mightiest of machines turns upon its smallest gears. Thus, we are the bearers of the world, and to all that it requires, we must and shall be sufficient.

– Irys Vidumarvis,
First Chatelaine of the Seat of Storms

Plutarch:  Stokers of the Engine

It is widely said that wealth is energy.  I can’t begin to count the metaphors that hinge on that analogy. “Lifeblood of the Empire.” “Any coin that burns.” And insofar as all our economies are indeed powered by its flow, they aren’t all that far off the mark. But wealth is a superior principle in many ways. Wealth never decays. No-one ever heard of “waste wealth”.  It circulates, turns a thousand cogs as it passes, and is never diminished.  Wealth has no thermodynamic law of decay. Better yet, it multiplies.

Look down there at the Exchange. People come here to trade from all over the Worlds, from Eö to K!rrr!t!llr, and a good half of them are damn fools who think they’re playing a zero-sum game of extracting wealth from greater fools, as if gambling were all we do. They’ll file trades for a thousand years and never know what it is to be a plutarch…

We make wealth. Look around you. Aesthants dream, technarchs invent, and the other darëssef play their parts – and without us, their works would be futile. We move their goods and supply their needs with our markets – and with every trade, wealth grows. We concentrate a thousand thousand rivulets of capital into a river mighty enough to turn the machines of industry – and wealth grows faster.  We find those sparks that have potential, and feed them with those markets and that capital until they blossom into roaring furnaces, radiating prosperity like heat around them. Behind all these dreams that you see made real stand the plutarchs who kindled them.

And always got 12%.

– Idris Cheraelar,
Vice President of Commercial Banking (Seranth),
Gilea & Company ICC

Runér: The Wielders of the Mandate

Runér.

Our name is a word that is hard to translate into other languages.  Most misgloss it as “noble”, seeing in us the closest thing to their own rulers that the Empire has, but that would more accurately be a gloss for korásan, “forceful one”, those who governed in the ancient kingdoms, before the Empire.  Before civilization.

It comes from the name of an eikone.  Not from that of Nimithil, our special patron, but from Rúnel, eikone of harmony, etiquette, and civilization, and so a better way to translate it would be “harmonizer”, or “coordinator”, perhaps.  Unlike the korásan of old, we are not set over people and wealth; we are set among them.  And while – as the korásan claimed to be – we are charged to defend, to enable, and to preserve, neither our station nor our law empowers us to command the least of those we are set among, nor seize a single gram or cycle to meet our necessities.

We do not enforce.  We do not dictate.  The Right of Domain declares every man sovereign over him and his, and we – first among all others, more than any others – must respect that.

While the public infrastructure falls within our dominate, words are our best tools.  With eloquence and persuasion, with promise and contract and oath, with example and suggestion and well-timed whispers in the right ears, we move the world.

But first, we follow where it leads.

–          Olbria Amanyr,
cisatar of Iniscail

Sentinel: Those Who Defend

Despite our towering Galactic reputation as armed-to-the-teeth, prickly maniacs, we’re really a dreadfully soft people.

We live in Utopia.  We have no war, no crime.  No disease, barely any injury, and certainly no death that can’t be easily reversed.  Thanks to the autofac, we’ve never known poverty, and we live on worlds where no-one for generations ever has.  In societies where, by the Contract and the Code and the tireless efforts of archai like Unification, we can always trust, people always care, and happy endings always happen for good people, which is to say, everyone.  We go through our lives without experiencing more than the briefest moments of the mildest pain, or even inconvenience, and few but the eldest of us remember the true taste of suffering, or injustice, or fear, or loss.

And we, the sentinels, are those who must keep it that way.

The hainadar watch the borders against attacks from without, from the savages and deimands and governments and death-worshippers tolerated by the outer world, and watch within them for the madness-spawned malice of the rare, hidden Defaulter.

The seredar guard us from accident, from injury, and from plague.

The dulasefdar watch and guard against the Chaos, entropy and its spawn, chance disaster and decay, the malice of what the acquiescents would call the Universal Flaw.

And so we serve our Utopia by renouncing it.  That the Empire may enjoy its serenity, we shape ourselves into the weapons it needs.  With extensive training, of course, but much more with deliberate exposure to the truths of fire, and blood, and pain, and the never-forgettable knowledge of what the real default state of the world is when the Darkness isn’t watched, and guarded, and fought.  And finally, with death, proving at the last that we can set aside immortality for duty.

Is it worth it?  Look out there.  Take an hour or two to watch what we guard.  What price would not be?

– Minaj Ancalyx,
District-Captain of Lower Iselyain,
Watch Constabulary

Technarch: For Science!

“Knowledge is its own justification,” so the Fellowship says.

Of course, knowledge has lots of other justifications. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is wisdom. Knowledge is civilization. If you like having fire and tamed lightning and the dance of atoms at your fingertips, thank a technarch. If you get an answer when you ask how, or why, or why not, thank a technarch. And since it is it’s finitely but most significantly preferable to reside in a comfortable habitat set among the stars, with the wisdom of millennia and the goods of a thousand worlds to hand, rather than eating in the woods, shitting in the woods, sleeping in the woods, living and dying in the same damn woods, thank a technarch for that, too.

But none of that is the spirit of technarchy. None of those are why we’re the explorers, the scientists, the tool-makers, the builders. Nice spin-offs to have, certainly, but leave those to the plutarchs and their executors to pick up.

There’s a shining truth out there. There are answers to every question, the plans for this magnificent machine-organism-ecology that is the universe and everything – and everyone! – within it; how every cog turns upon every other, and how to bend them to your will – reality, to be commanded, must be understood – to bring whatever you can conceive of into existence. And we have to have those answers. We have to know. We have to understand. We cannot abide ignorance of our own mechanisms. That’s what makes a technarch, and that’s why we do what we do and are what we are.

For science.

Hand me that iridyne key, would you? No, the left-handed one…

– Cirys Lochran,
Academician Excellence,
Union of Circumstellar Artifice