Aspiria, City of Dreams

Reality's glimmering turquoise curtains

do draw back to show an earthen pit,

splintered with veins of red no longer

visible beneath a blanket of copper and

bronze; where the mist of sleeping hours

makes a barrier to limpid pools of color.

Like a tent's wing the night draws forth

its lantern to show the rising hairs of

the mote-shedding earth, all beating like

a heart with heavy brass wheels that fly

and spin, ever forward to drive the minds

of men to invention, seeking mindlessly

for what they cannot grasp, their fingers

sliding over the land like greased stones

underfoot, as the throngs walk unabated

and free, touching nothing, knowing every-

thing, breathing evening visions and where

the people hear the very murmurs of the earth.

The city began as a mote in a sleeper's eye. It grew ever larger, hung on the hood of a closed lid, dangling from lashes so gently it could drop into a pond of consciousness and tumble into a pile of brass gears, shining and new, at the bottom of the well of sleep. Those who strayed too far in the dream across the wheels found themselves at the roots of the tree of beginnings, lingering among the click and whir of creation, dancing with the fog of half-remembered stories at the beginning of time, where the Kindly Ones had once locked away the aspects of The Dream within the Unicorn of Beginnings, who mates with the day and night. Her aspect spoke to them, saying to go to where the mouth of the earth speaks, in what was once the center of the world.

They awoke cold, and began their journey. They gathered more like them, those with the spark to hear The Dream, and together they crossed seas and land until they came to a place where creation seemed to reweave itself in the sky every night, dancing with marvelous lights. The heavens folded and were drawn like curtains, and they found themselves led to a great crater, a long-dead caldera in the midst of a frozen forest. The trees were garbed in ice, and the stillness of a forest bereft of life fell over the land. They built their first homes in the lava tubes beneath the caldera, digging until the mists of creation burst forth from the ground and they saw an aspect of the Creator Unicorn whose body housed The Dream reveal itself to them.

She spoke again, telling them that their search was over; here was the water of making, frozen still beneath this mountain, where coal and ice were plentiful, and in the union of fire and ice, the crucible of steel and the forge, the toolmakers and lost children of The Dream would build for themselves a city. They carved deep into the earth-dream, dug up the ice-dreams, and expanded ever outward. The factories for melting the ice and the caravans bringing in brass and copper soon decorated the burgeoning settlement with homes and heat, and the gears and cogs the worked beneath the stones of the earth-dream brought a heartbeat to the city.

The steam that filled the city was the mist of dreams, dancing with motes of light and strange forms dancing inside. As the people grew, the need to keep them wise to the ways of the world-machine and the dreams of beginning and ending grew with them. They build The Academy and set a clock tower upon it, which plugged into the heart of the city, which was henceforth named Aspiria, or The City of Dreams. With the birth of the clock tower, the city had heaved a birthing sigh. Now, the mist flows from the pipes and tunnels that line the streets and the walls, creating places where one dream spills into the next, where dark and dim alleys washed of color lie just out of reach around marketplaces that dance with festival pallets. Everywhere one goes, the heart pumps, a constant whirring, clicking, hissing noise that sounds oddly like the noises of deliberate slumber.

This mist is suffused with Aetherstuff, raw chimerical energy to be grasped and utilized by the cogmakers and builders about the city, or so say the denizens. One only needs to start with the intent of placing a building, and the city will follow suit. The shanty towns in the northwestern areas of the city started as metal shacks, but have become suffused with pipes and gauges, rivets, and brass plating.

The World-Machine

The Dream spins and churns, and like clockwork precision it transforms one world to the next, each cycle beginning a new phase of creation. The people of the City of Dreams call themselves The Proficient, and they wield their individual Dreamings like beacons in the process of their lives. A Dreaming is a personal or familial set of beliefs, unique to an individual and his or her set of life experiences. A given Proficient might say he has an ice dreaming or a cog dreaming, however, they also refer to “The Dreaming” as the time of creation.

Doctrine

The Proficient are bound by their mutual practices and their faith in the aspect of the creator unicorn that sleeps beneath their city, as well as the statement known as the Doctrine of the Machine.

Seek above and below, and all between. Seek out the dreams of all things, for buried within are the secrets of creation. As is the world, so is The Dream. As is The Dream, so is the world.

This means that there is nothing in the world that is not a product of The Dream or some aspect of it, and everything is within reality. The Dream is not some thing that can be locked away or hidden; it is everywhere, suffusing all things. A cogmaker praying and throwing coins off a bridge is not seeking the attention of the gear spirits; they are already there. He is acknowledging them and hoping that they aid him or do not throw off his work in any way. The Dream is an omnipresent part of everything. Every animal that grows, every worm and frog, even the rain, which comes from the heavens and greases the wheels of the world machine, is a part of The Dream.

The Proficient believe in two types of time, or two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is the infinite cycle of spiritual time known as The Dream, represented by a great clock, more real than reality. Whatever happens in The Dream establishes the laws, values, and symbols of The Proficient. Those members of the faith who are capable of feats of magic have contact with The Dream, and can sense and see its cogs and gears whirring and grinding in the mists that lie between reality and The Dream. The Dream is the time of creation and the network of all consciousness.

Those who can cross the dreaming land can walk back and find creation spinning in the back alleys and churning in the mist and steam. They can enter The Dream while still awake and come back with pieces and parts traded for gems and gold or sacrifices thereof. The most skilled can do it directly, watching the sacrifices vanish from their fingers into dreaming.

In the early days, the people were scattered, tossed to the four corners of the world by the thump of creation, tossed into wind where they moved back and forth from animals and people, seeking out the dream they had lost. When they discovered it had been put inside a unicorn, they laughed and wondered why that was. The fey are said to not have souls naturally; they are ephemeral, gossamer entities with purpose to their life. They must earn their souls, or be born in a way that grants them one. The ancestors of The Proficient made a deal with beasts to share their souls, that they might know their own place in the world machine.

Once they knew their place in the cogs, they realized that the deal had separated them from their purpose; they had been given over to the same purpose as the other toolmakers. Which is, of course, that they have no place at all. They lamented their fate, and fled even further into the recesses of the world to await the turning of the age, that they might re-emerge into the purpose for which they found they had been born.

It was not to be, not directly. The Unicorn of Beginnings came to them and gave them the power of the Dreaming and chimerical reality, and led them in prophecy to a place where the world once began in another cycle. There they built their city, where the energy of dreams, called aetherstuff, flows free.

Souls and the Afterlife

Each of the dwellers in the city inherits the ancient bond made with the beast spirits, and is bound to that child. Until that child comes of age, however, it changes shape, shifting form like the mists of the Dreaming until at last becoming something else; the form often has something to do with the Proficient's revelation the preceded the moment of adulthood, though this is not always the case. Either way, The Proficient can see the thing that makes them human and interact with it on a fundamentally different level than others. They hold the view that this component can enter The Dream and come back again, and that these guides and souls do so when they are asleep; they are that individual's morals and beliefs, and so, it is a physical manifestation of that Proficient's Dreaming. A rat familiar is referred to as a rat-dreaming, and so on. Be they animals of flesh or creatures of cog and spirit is up to the individual's Dreaming. A Dreaming can also be entitled to a person; for example, if someone is given a bevel-cog-dreaming, they are entitled to tell stories about its origin and paint it, as well as make new ones.

When The Proficient die, their Dreaming leaves them, vanishing to some unknown place deep inside the Unicorn of Creation, only to cycle through the land again, become forever part of the cogs. They feel that the Spark that ignites those who can manipulate aetherstuff is present in all people, just strong enough to hold together that person from aetherstuff, and this Spark is what makes an individual divine. As a person ages, their grip on the Spark wanes, until at last it is set free to join the curtains of aetherstuff once more, though with a bit more consciousness; The Proficient practice ancestor worship as a matter of course. The dreamers of the past have become spirits to watch over the living, and seeing a dead relation's Dreaming animal is tantamount to having been given an omen by that relative.

Coming to the Faith

Coming to the faith is rather simple; the signs of its truth are self-evident in the city, and everyone with the pure blood of The Proficient is born with a Dreaming-self that follows him or her around. As far as the guild is concerned, there are a few reasons one becomes a priest or a guild member.

Faith: Some of The Proficient feel so bound to the world machine and The Dreaming, as well as The Unicorn of Creation that they feel an ordinary life can never be theirs. They feel they must seek The Dreaming as directly and fluidly as possible, and so join the guilds and the academy simply to understand in depth their own nature and the nature of the world machine.

Duty: Other guild members become such people because they feel that they must; they see a gap in the lives of their fellows or neighbors and seek to fill it because someone has to. They join the academy and become Craftsmen to help their own community or circle of friends become more spiritually aware.

Accident: As in The Dream, so in reality. Those who learn to shape chimerical reality on their own or have it handed to them by people they know often become Craftsmen by accident and are quickly accepted by the guilds and the academy if they show competence with the ways of the machine and The Dreaming in general; if one can grasp aetherstuff, that's good enough for most other Craftsmen to recognize a fellow. While that Proficient might not become a guild member, he still counts for a peer.

Becoming a Priest

It is possible to become a Craftsman or Cogmaker without even touching the academy's fabled halls, though it is the most common form of acquiring the title. The academy is more formally known as the Aspirian Academy of Chimerical Gizmometrics and Aetherstuff Manipulation, but most people just call it “the academy” in passing. To join, a prospect must show some method of fundamental understanding of aetherstuff or The Dream in general, either in essay form, poetry, a chimerical object, or a built device. There are two primary ways after this for the prospect to go.

If the apprentice-to-be wants to join the academy, this is done through the application process. If the application is good enough or the applicant has already had some training, he or she may be placed under a journeyman or craftsman already, but if not, they will be placed in a class at the academy. Competition to get into the academy is fierce unless you know someone already in place, despite steep tuition costs. Those who graduate from the academy, however, are more likely to be given major duties or rise in the ranks much faster than those who do not.

The other method by which one gains rank in the hierarchy of The Proficient is apprenticeship at an established guild or under a craftsman. Upper ranking individuals set applicants to task keeping things clean, making appointments, and doing research. Many of these Proficient treat their applicants as bonded servants to put them on the fast track to liturgical knowledge so that they might earn the title of Apprentice within a year or so.

The final option is to become the applicant of an itinerant craftsman, but while an applicant does gain experience and knowledge of the liturgy this way, he or she does not gain experience in the day to day workings of a guildhall or how to manage a series of cogs and gears that he or she could be set to task on. Those who often settle or attempt to attend a guild, showing up out of the blue claiming training they cannot prove are often tested more rigorously than those who trained at the academy or the hall itself.

Tests are arranged at differing levels of the guildhalls; these are most often actual written exams and essays, or challenges to build or maintain certain objects and items. These trials are designed to test The Proficient's aptitude at handling disasters as well as questions about history and liturgy, as well as dealing with social crises and the writing of theses. There are dream-quests, but these are often personal quests related to the craftsman's Dreaming rather than tasks to ensure worthiness in the church.

Orders

There are several guilds and orders within the academy who organize themselves under its rules and dictates. Some of these are knightly orders tasked with guarding the city while others are leaders or humble workers. There are workers who are not members of the guilds; they hold no rank and are referred to as simply laborers or hands, and are often employed by the guilds to do large amounts of work. The vast majority of workers in the mines, for example, are considered hands. Membership in a guild simply means that person is also empowered to tell stories and manage affairs of multiple workers.

The Cogmaker's Guild: The Cogmakers' Guild oversees the workings of the cogs of the city. They are maintenance workers, upkeep staff, and those who manage the affairs of the spirits of the gears, and not just those of metal. They see to the recording of the names of children, interpret the signs given to the journeymen by the gears and the mists, and keep the paperwork of the church straight. The have the most rigid hierarchy and most numbers aside from the militia and are the most likely to recruit directly out of the academy, which they run.

The Dreamer's Guild: As the Cogmaker's Guild is homebound, the Dreamer's Guild focuses more on chimerical reality, the reality shaped by dreams in general. They are much more active, and they roam much farther than the other guilds. Because of this, they are the loosest organized and accept craftsmen from almost anywhere. Members of the guild seek ways to shape aetherstuff directly, and work on unlocking the ancient fey magic that slumbers in their blood. They are responsible for getting much of the food the city needs from deep within dreams or from far away lands.

The Blademark's Guild: The city militia is a tightly regimented authority and isn't hard to miss with their red, purple, and gold uniforms. The blademarks are arranged in the same ranking system as the other guilds, though they observe more military numbers and maintain the hierarchy accordingly. The guild also manages the city's weaponry laws and the point defenses for the city itself, aimed both within and without (you never know when a wandering nightmare might burst from a dream and start causing trouble). The blademarks also act as mercenary forces. The city needs income to keep itself going, so the blademarks sell themselves out, as well as serving as scouts to find nearby settlements (of which there are very few).

The Earthdreamer's Guild: This is a guild of miners and manual laborers, and they are responsible for finding ice and digging up coal and obsidian from the tunnels beneath Aspiria. The guild is also looked to for construction of the buildings thought of by the Dreamer's Guild and the building of steam engines in general; while an individual Proficient is expected to construct personal steam engines, the Earthdreamers build the massive engines and valves that make the city's gears turn. Much of the guild is made up of goblins and kobolds, who spend their time under the city itself.

The Scaraber's Guild: The scarab, an important image to The Proficient as a bringer of death or harbinger of the ending of a cycle, is the key component of this guild's sign. The Scaraber's Guild guides the Dreaming of the dead, seeking out those who have the same Dreaming as those who have died and giving them written copies of the stories and essays of the deceased. They also oversee the distribution of a relation's holdings and funerals in general.

Hierarchy

The academy and the dreamers have no great voice or diet of cardinals. Instead, the Proficient are guided by the guildhalls and the multiple heads of each given guild.

Applicant: This designation technically has no rank, and serves to denote someone who is not a member of a guild yet, but has prepared themselves for the task and is in the process of testing. Applicants do not get paid and must find their own work, making sure that it is work they are allowed to do, such as helping in a shop, cleaning the streets, building, or operating a stall. They are not much different than a hand.

Apprentice: The lowest rank in a guild; such members are either still in the academy or training under a craftsman and are learning their responsibilities and trade. An apprentice who graduates from the academy immediately becomes a journeyman. Apprentices do the work they are given and are paid directly by their immediate superior, who collects it from those that they do work for. Apprentices can't do any other work, giving them less freedom in that regard than applicants.

Journeyman: The overwhelming majority of the members of a guild never rise higher than this rank. At this point, they are no longer bound to a craftsman or journeyman, having attained this rank. They are free to pick a section of the city to work (so long as it's not saturated with workers already), as well as chose most of their own hours and collect their own pay. A journeyman is given a block or building to manage most of the time, and in the militia, they are given a small squad of hands and apprentices.

Craftsman: A craftsman holds authority over all the journeymen in a given district. They work the papers that allow journeymen to set wages for apprentices and oversee the hiring of hands and laborers, which they then assign to their journeymen. A given craftsman might also hold authority over the journeymen in a small town within Aspirian territory, as well.

Master Craftsman: A master craftsman holds authority over the craftsmen on a given “level” of the city. The surface of the city has four master craftsmen for each guild, and four for each “floor” series below that, making a total number of sixteen master craftsmen in Aspiria at any given time. There are others in border towns, holding authority over a few of those border villages who fish and trade for resources with the outside world, but for the most part these sixteen make up those who directly work with and under the guildmaster of their respective guild.

Guildmaster: The guildmaster is the leader of each individual guild and the master crafstmen report directly to him. Guildmasters rarely conduct ceremonies, being busy with the day-to-day affairs of the paperwork of the guild; most master craftsmen and guildmasters are better at putting together laws and making sure they're seen through than they are at their craft.

Duties of the Clergy

The members of a given guild are more beholden to their specific areas than to the guild itself, but they are expected to offer something to the guild at least once a year, be it a new book, new invention, or a new method for doing something (anything, really; a new recipe suffices). From community to community, however, there are a few services that a guild member is expected to be able to perform.

Life Quests: At the culmination of a life quest, a guild member is expected to listen to the petitioner's story and judge his or her duties accordingly. This is anything from opening a shop to giving birth and even changing careers. Seeing a unicorn's mark in a naturally occurring object that no one else can see is also

Looking After Country: The Proficient believe that if the land and the dreams of it are not maintained, it will fade away. They are expected to repair the world-machine as they go, ensuring that the balance of nature stays as it is, initiate creative development, and sing to the world. They travel to the sacred places they find and mark and maintain them, telling stories or performing ceremonies at them in order to make certain that the dreams of the area aren't left to shimmer and vanish. Proficient believe that every act of ceremony or acknowledgment leads to the stabilized existence of their reality.

Working the City: The Proficient operate the academy, the clock tower, the guard, and the factories of the City of Dreams, making certain that citizens who have not joined the guilds have places to live, work, play, and grow. Honestly, this is part of Looking After Country, but it is much more direct and involves getting greasy and dirty among the gears and cogs of the city proper. The guard does its rounds and duties, and the various other guilds see to their own tasks with everything ranging from righteous glee to lukewarm satisfaction. Working with one's hands is seen as a noble task, and even wizards are considered to be working hard when they shape aetherstuff into invisible servants or clouds of steam.

Protecting the Dream: Some seek to maliciously devour The Dream, from the nightmare beholders and other terrors to people who seek to psychologically harm others through action and word. This intervention might be physical, from the blademarks who fill a psychopath full of lead to a cogmaker who sprays steam in the face of an invader, or it might be spiritual, such as passing through the Dreaming to the sleeping world to battle one's own doubt and fears. This includes protecting the other cities in the nation and performing services, such as songs and storytelling.

Quests

Quests, termed Walkabouts within the confines of the country of dreams, are commonplace among the people. They wander the ice floes and frozen forests seeking out knowledge and wisdom in the patterns of the frost, seeking to know and understand more of the universe at large, puzzling out its secrets as best they can. The Proficient also quest to know more about themselves, and in knowing the world, they can better understand their place within it. Other quests might involve the slaying of nightmares, monsters that devour and destroy, or the spread of creative ideas. Still other quests seek to uncover some aspect of The Dream that lays hidden in the Dreaming itself, such as finding an artifact that can control the weather or thwarting an agent of nightmares.

At the time of their coming of age, all of the Proficient go on a Walkabout to seek out their adulthood, to anchor their Dreaming and form it into something concrete. Most of these trips don't go too far outside the country of dreams, but some go far past the ice floes and into the places where the Dreamer's Guild and the Blademark's Guild look after country.

Prayers

The Proficient pray in almost every way imaginable; the universe's existence is a religious experience in and of itself, and deserves to be alerted at every opportunity. Prayers include songs and incense burning, storytelling, and dance. Face painting and construction of small shrines or devices is also a form of prayer, and any act that could conceivably be devoted to the dream of the item is a holy act. A given guild member is empowered to pray only for specific things; someone with a raven-dreaming or a beetle-dreaming can pray for death, knowledge, or the carrying of a soul into The Dream, but would not be able to pray for matters of an infant. He would need to find a tree-dreaming for that. Proficient can include other things in their dreaming, and they might quest for it or talk to someone with it, perhaps by trading Dreaming with him or her or by getting permission; this is encouraged in the city, for whenever one gives knowledge, it only increases in power. Not getting permission is a serious crime, as much as stealing; it is, after all, a form of property that is more personal than even one's childhood possessions. It is an inimitable part of who that person is.

Minor Rites

Small ceremonies are a part of life for the Proficient. These range from minor bloodletting before a battle to show the blades of the Proficient that he is not afraid to meet battle to the building of a device or carving of a sculpture to present to a grove to show that you mean no harm.

Burials: The death of a Proficient is not a somber affair; instead, the deceased is treated as if he or she had gone on an extremely long Walkabout. His or her Dreaming is divided up among attendees, and the body is dumped into the incinerator or whatever the Proficient's wishes were in life. They see death of the body simply to mean that the person's Dreaming-soul had gone off to explore the deepest parts of The Dream to study and create there, projecting itself to the distant past or future where those in their current life cannot go.

Death of an Enemy: When a Proficient slays an enemy in battle, it is customary to offer that enemy the same thing a Proficient is offered. This is a small drink or toast to the enemy, the eating of food, and the burning of yams or some other offering. The Proficient is obligated to take his enemy's tools and clothes and attempt to harvest the enemy's Dreaming, that it might not fade away. Some Proficient claim that performing these rituals causes the knowledge of the fallen to rush into their minds, at least temporarily, allowing them to grasp at the knowledge that it might never fade.

Marriage: The union of two people is a complicated affair; the list of people that an individual can marry is short indeed, and must be drawn from one of the eight houses or be from outside the city. A marriage is both a somber and joyous affair taking place outside the couple's home, where participants burn offerings in copper and brass vessels throughout the day while a journeyman tells stories and gives tokens and gifts to the couple. There are no restrictions on premarital behavior (in fact, many parents prefer it; no one wants to share complete Dreamings with someone they can't stand to be around).

Injury & Sickness: When someone is bedridden, it's customary to keep at least one person in the room at all times, constantly working to build something. While not always possible, this is to show the sickness that has taken them that the people are constantly at work, and that their efforts to hamper the dreamers will come to no fruition. Other such ceremonies include the melting of gears and the application of cinnamon to the sick person's forehead.

Artwork: The creation of a work of art as an important religious experience to the Proficient cannot be understated. When depicting something as art, it is not simply drawing a picture of that object, person, or thing, it is that thing. A drawing of a raven is a raven, and treating it with disrespect could cause the bird to come to swift life and punish you. Drawing someone else requires their permission, as does drawing the Dreaming soul, and is considered theft if you do so without it. Artwork ensures continuity with the present and the past, from The Dream of Creation to the now, literally recreating those events under the artist's hands.

This includes the construction of chimera, which serve to show the nature of the Proficient's Dreaming and to provide the Proficient with a way of showing his or her skill at manipulating aetherstuff.

Major Rites

The big ceremonies of the guilds are holy days attended by as many as can come.

Carnival (January 13): The Aspirian new year festival has only three rules. No one is to die through malicious acts, no revenge can be taken for harassment (nobles and members of the guilds have no legal recourse), and above all, have fun. A few unspoken rules do exist. Certain individuals are off-limits, specifically those who have stated in friendly terms as possible that they'd like to be left alone or are not participating, and those who have stayed indoors. Otherwise, the day is meant to let off the stress of the year and generally leaves everyone drunk and happy. It has the side effect of creating a lot of September births.

Day of Descent (March 19): This day marks the first day the original builders of the city went into the mines to seek out the pools of creation and met with the aspect of the Unicorn of Creation they met there. All work stops on this day, and the miners come up among the people of the first three layers of the city; most remain far below, but a good number of them do come to the surface and spend their day off with their families.

Harvest of Aetherstuff: This is a ritual that involves the majority of a guild, at least as much of the guild as a district can allow within its confines. It is the ritual used to harvest the dream-mists of the city for use in steam engines or the construction of chimera. The guildmaster and a majority of journeymen sing the songs of their personal Dreaming to attract as much aetherstuff as possible, and send in children with bellows, pumps, and jars to scoop up all the aetherstuff to be crystallized into machines and devices mounted on carriages. When the task is done, the guild distributes food and candy to the district, whose streets are now clear save for small traces of steam billowing up from below. Eventually the aetherstuff returns, but the harvest prevents it from making it impossible to navigate the streets.

Crafting Aetherstuff: According to the cogmakers and dreamers, one can craft aetherstuff into physical objects by making contracts with the world-machine or The Dream. Wizards do this by making the contract written. Sorcerers do this by contracting directly with aspects of the creator unicorns. Conjuration magic makes new raw things out of The Dream, evocation forges The Dream into cataracts or rushing lightning. In Aspiria, the cogmakers do it much more directly, making promises on the aether and The Dream itself, grasping at the gears of the world-machine and forging toolmakers' bonds. These bonds are usually for money, as that is what one exchanges for resources and parts, and so the gear spirits devour it like so much dreams into waking life. Other deals are possible as well, and the constructs formed from it are called Chimerae. The Proficient practice this form of ritual mostly alone, but it is a large part of the society.

The Houses

The Proficient believe themselves to be the heirs to the legacy of the fey present at the time of The Dreaming, or the act of creation. They are few and far between, their blood distilled into human bodies and their souls provided by the aid of the Dreaming-beasts. The Proficient have arranged themselves into a number of houses to aid their blood in becoming stronger and to prevent inbreeding from becoming a great problem. The houses are not families, however, they often have ties similar to those found in family bonds. A given person has a select list of people with whom they can marry or procreate with in accordance to the houses of their parents.

Male House	Female House	Children's House	Dreaming Totem
Tasni	Stalvagen	Diadi	Shooting star, egret
Diadi	Linstrom	Tasni	Sleeping turtle, rushing water
Mesili	Ajra	Anefdar	Albatross, grey shark
Teschaket	Anefdar	Ajra	Wildflowers, songbird, steam
Stalvagen	Tasni	Linstrom	Flying, ice, remorhaz
Linstrom	Diadi	Stalvagen	Frozen tree, diving beetle
Ajra	Mesili	Teschaket	Vines, teeth, raven
Anefdar	Teschaket	Mesili	Forests, acorn, wyvern

A male member of a house can only marry or have children with a member of the designated female house and vice-versa. Any children produced are of a different house, and children learn to identify houses with embroidery and other such patterns on a given individual's clothing as early as possible so that when the situation arises in their teenage years, as all do, for experimentation, they know which houses to turn to in order to find a potential mate.

House alliances are not uncommon, as are the formation of house-only gangs. The proper term for referring to another member of the same house in the same generation is brother or sister, and older or younger generations of the same house are referred to as mother or father and son or daughter, thus it is not unusual for a great-grandparent to refer to his or her descendants as their mother or father, and for the younger generations to call those same relatives son or daughter.

The Mark of Creation

With all this fey blood being tossed around, it happens that in some cases it's particularly strong. While not outright producing a true scion, these individuals are marked by the locks used to hold The Dream inside the unicorn. They grant the bearer some measure of the power of creation, to repair, fix, or even, in some cases, bring raw materials from the aetherstuff into reality. The cogmakers say they have seen similar marks on others reflected deep within the pools of aetherstuff and dream-water that lie far below the city, but the reason for this is not yet known.

Those with the mark are given rank in the cogmaker's guild, as the guild believes that these individuals are chosen for some destined purpose or another within The Dream, and they are urged to travel farther than normal on their walkabout, that they might recreate the journeys of their ancestors.