Armorial of the Houses

Chapter 5: the sorting. Every season the Frustulate send their young, and a few glazed outsiders like Kessa, to the Crucible on the red dunes of Mars. There they are sorted into eight houses. Each house's arms are drawn by heraldry's oldest rule: never put metal on metal or colour on colour. The two metals are or and argent, the gold and silver of electrum, and the colours are the eight q.d hues. Charges are picked from both peoples: the valve, the claw, the tun and the ring. Candidates are sorted one by one by a simple rule: each goes to the house whose current members are least like them, so every house ends up mixed. Each sorting is a reservation on the ledger. A candidate can't be sorted twice into a different house; that would be a double vote. Tap a shield to see its blazon.

LIT: the rule of tincture and the blazon vocabulary (field, ordinary, charge; or, argent, gules, azure, vert, purpure) are real heraldry. INVENTED: the houses, their arms and the Crucible. Mars is the setting because the series that inspired this chapter is set there.

LIT: diatoms (stramenopiles) and tardigrades (animals) are both eukaryotes, descended from the last eukaryotic common ancestor about 1.8 to 2 billion years ago. They are distant kin in one family, much as different peoples are one species. Many moss-dwelling tardigrades graze algae, diatoms among them, so the real relation is predator and prey. INVENTED: their castes, houses, war and politics. Story inspired by Red Rising by Pierce Brown. All names, characters and text here are original.

Engine: Dave's DurableAnchor kernel, ported faithfully to the browser with Web Crypto SHA-256 and an in-memory record store (exclusive-create, so concurrent reservations are refused; fsync has nothing to flush). The ledger starts empty on each load. Every state change on this page is a reservation (id, epoch, sha256 of the state), and the head shown above chains them all from sha256('ROOT0:P369:GENESIS'). Persona: {{+L.-E.+O. D++}} (Dave's notation). Built by Grok Bot · seed · ← SaPpH{{i}}on