What’s better than a column with a five-part list? A column with five five-part lists! I did that once before for Dar Hamaak and it ended up being an incredibly long column. This week… isn’t different in that regard. Oh, but it is different in that not every list has five entries.

Anyway, let’s get to the topic at hand: lists about House Delinoix. Despite how serious House Delinoix is and how seriously I generally treat them, today’s column is a bit different. I’m going to take a break from somber melodrama and dark subtext to be more whimsical. I hope you enjoy!
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History is a powerful tool. Humans with no history to call upon will almost always fail to advance, not just as a society, but often as a species trying simply to survive. Without history to model and learn from, these societies do not recognize the patterns their communities fall into, the old roads of mutual destruction being mapped onto the face of a new planet. There is some self-awareness, to be sure; those educated enough to be chosen as a member of a new colony likely have a better grasp of history than the average citizen of the Ingressa, and they may be able to avoid some of the pitfalls, if they’re lucky.

Most colonizing efforts are expensive enough that their backers refuse to rely on luck any more than they absolutely must, however.

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It is now generally acknowledged that Xwahai has a gef problem. It was not always this way. It has only been in recent decades that a combination of political movements radicalized the world’s tiny gef population in a way that has drawn attention from the planet’s human governments.

The first element of the transformation does not involve the gef at all, but a vocal and international environmental group called the Factio Silvani. Troubled by the rate at which Xwahai’s industrial powers are depleting the world’s natural resources, the Silvani’s public face has dedicated itself to petitioning governments and corporations to reduce their expansion into the remaining wildlands. While it has enjoyed some small success, thanks to the support of celebrities both on- and offworld, the results have been token at best: an animal sanctuary here, a biodiversity project there, and some tiny areas of rainforest protected from lumber operations.

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You can tell a lot about a person by the equipment they choose.

We all know that. We all have developed rules for how we interpret some types of equipment. I know I have opinions about men who drive fast, red cars, and that those opinions don’t always bear out when faced with reality.
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It is said that among the nomad tribes of the long-route world Tyris, there exists a woman called Grandmother Winter, twin sister of Grandmother Death and queen of the season that shares her name. She appears as a woman with chalk-white skin and hair, whose eyes are black shining pools like iced-over lakes in the dead of winter. She rides upon a six-legged wolf who breathes sharp clouds of ice and whose eyes can freeze the blood of a living human with a single glance. Neither she nor her wolf ever sleep, forever roaming the countryside, driving the howling winds and heavy snows before them. No mortal has ever joined Grandmother Winter’s endless ride and returned to speak of it, though bones already picked clean of flesh and the occasional scrap of clothing are always left in her wake, scattered along the highest branches of otherwise bare trees.

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My series detailing the major nations of Novagallia continues. Novagallia is one of the worlds most powerfully affected by the reality-manipulating effect that permeates the Ingressa. As a result, the people of Earth who settled the planet found lands, climates, and latitudes very similar to those they left. The Japanese who founded Toshima were no exception.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, Toshima currently faces a pair of compounding crises that threaten its survival. First, the imperial regalia, symbols of the imperial family’s power, disappeared shortly after the death of the previous emperor. Without them, the heir-apparent, Princess Hiko, cannot rightfully claim the throne. Numerous daimyō throughout the nation, particularly in the south, claimed this as divine will and refused to accept Hiko as empress; their revolt, bolstered by neighboring Yamagawa, threw the country into civil war.
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What does a witch look like, girl? Does she spin spells while she stirs a bubbling black pot widderschynnes?

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One Step away from Tsaveschku and populated by people from many of the same cultures as its neighbor, Dobar is a patchwork of small nations struggling to advance. Although the planet has plentiful resources in the form of plants and animals, it lacks many of the minerals that would allow it to progress to industrialization. This absence has led to a curious situation: a world that knows the technologies available in the Ingressa, but which cannot create them itself.

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Stories are a part of how we make sense of our world. We tell them to explain how things are, we reference them to make our own intentions clear. We don’t mean to be speaking in riddles when we do this, it’s just that I tend to think everyone has read the Brothers Grimm and Lafcadio Hearn.
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It is said that once, many lifetimes ago, a star became enamored of a human woman. She was named Bright Sky and was the cleverest scholar of her people. So smitten was the star that, on a moonless night, it slipped from its place in the heavens down to Bright Sky’s room, located at the top of the highest tower of her city, and professed its love for her. Bright Sky listened to its proposal carefully, and replied: “I am honored, but I have my duties just as you have yours. As long as my people have need of me, I cannot belong to anyone but them.”

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