▸ On Essence

Power is burned, not bought. Every drop of essence in this realm was once a core: pried from a corpse, teased out of a leyline, or won off someone who pried it from a corpse.

No sum of gold presses essence into being. A merchant offering essence for coin is selling you ground glass and optimism. Report them to the tollhouse; the Arbiters will handle the refund.

▸ On the Market

The market is taxed, not rigged. The toll is two parts in a hundred on every sale. No more, no less, and the same for a beggar's knife as for a warlord's harness.

Listings stand seven days, a patron's fourteen; when they lapse, the goods walk home to their seller on their own. Prices go where buyers drag them. The Arbiters hold no stalls, set no floors, and take no gifts. Attempts to bribe the tollhouse are recorded as donations to the gallows fund.

▸ On the Post

The post is not a bank, but it will hold your gold hostage if asked. A letter may carry a price: the recipient pays your asking to open it, the tollhouse forwards the gold, and nobody rides for free.

Decline a priced letter and it walks home with the goods still in it. Official wax never carries a price; a toll on an Arbiter's letter is forgery, and forgeries are reported, not paid.

The box is small: twenty letters to a standing address, forty to a patron's, and a burned letter forfeits whatever it carried. Read your mail.

▸ On Gear

Steel is earned. Every true blade, plate and charm in the realm leaves a forge, a workbench, a lab, or an altar, made by hands that paid in material, essence, and scarring.

The wilds drop hides, ore, and rumors. It does not drop breastplates. Anyone selling you a story about a sword that fell off a wagon is also selling the wagon.

▸ On Wear

Steel is honest about its age. Every fought task wears what you wore into it: a victory scuffs, a defeat scuffs twice. At zero a piece is broken: still worn, still yours, and lending nothing until mended.

Mending costs gold and counts against the piece. The first three rebuilds are safe; from the fourth on, every trip to the anvil gambles the piece itself: a chance, growing with each repair, that it comes apart for good, and what the mail brings home is a scrap of the story, not the steel.

Two exemptions are recognized: gear that mends itself a little with every fight (it still gambles with the rest), and gear that cannot be destroyed at all. The Arbiters do not explain how either was made.

▸ On Duels and the Ring

The ring is voluntary. Enlist and your saved build may be challenged while you are about other business; decline and your purse stays out of it. No one is drafted into the arena.

A duel is staged like any task: the bout plays out on the clock and the purse pays at the claim. The winner takes the larger share, the loser a consolation, and the house keeps no cut. It merely keeps score.

Ratings rise and fall with every match, in public. Steel still wears in the ring: a bout scuffs both fighters' gear the same as any road.

▸ On the Burning

The fire accepts bribes of its own kind only. Essence burned before a craft or a gather sharpens the roll: fifty for a nudge, a hundred and fifty for a shove.

The fire sells odds, never outcomes, and a burned attempt is a consumed attempt. Scrap the task and the burn stays burned.

One guarantee exists, and it is sold for gold: the Sigil of Ascension promises a craft no worse than Rare, exactly once.

▸ On Banners

A banner costs five hundred gold to raise and flies one faction, and no other. Members share the fire, the stash, and the grudge.

The stash is a public trust: what goes in belongs to the banner, and every hand in or out is written in the banner's own chronicle. Give accordingly.

Banners level on burnt essence and donated gold, five seats apiece at the start and five more a level. The week is settled in war: paired banners raid each other's rosters, and the points bank where everyone can read them.

▸ On the Hearth

The realm keeps marriages, and the lines that come of them. One marriage stands per pair at a time; the paperwork is forever.

Children are rolled at birth and grow on their own clock, and prove useful exactly twice: a recruit for the company, or the body a next life succeeds into. The family tree loses nobody.

▸ On Titles and the Hall

Season champions are titled, and the title rides the nameplate where everyone must look at it. The Hall of Legends keeps the top of every board in bronze, silver, and gold.

The realm remembers what you did, and charges nothing for the remembering. Forgetting is available nowhere at any price.

▸ On the Record

Every life writes itself into a chronicle, and every season writes itself into the archive. Both are public, both are permanent, and neither takes a fee at the door.

What the realm witnessed, the realm retains. If a deed is not written down, the Arbiters did not witness it, and they are not prepared to discuss what that implies.

▸ On the Hand Behind the Curtain

The stewards of the realm may, on occasion, reach into the world and set something right: a lost purse returned, a destroyed heirloom mended. Every such act is written into the public audit trail: who, what, to whom, and when.

Nothing is given in the dark. If power ever changes hands outside the ledger, the ledger is the lie, and that is treason against everyone still alive enough to read it.