Sepulchre-Kin Civilization

Overview

The Sepulchre-Kin were a remote mountain-basin people who lived for their dead: they buried deep, felt the Echoes of the departed, and refused to let anyone fall into oblivion. They were not an early form of Humans, Elves, or Dwarves. They are a fourth vanished elder civilization, smaller and far more remote than the three major elder worlds described in Proto-Anchor Population Map.

They rose late in the Elder Worlds, c. 160,000-c. 120,000 BR, too far from the archive world for its books to reach, and they fell in the Unrecorded Age. The people who most loved names were never written down by anyone else, and what they made to keep their dead safe killed them.

Civilizational Character

The Sepulchre-Kin held that no person should pass into loss unnamed, unplaced, or unheld. Burial was inheritance, medicine, the right to rule, and the safety of the soul all at once.

Their great work, deep under a mountain, was the Record-engine: a maze of name-vaults, burial chambers, bell shafts, descending stairs, and preserving cores built to hold names, Echoes, vows, and graves until the dead could settle cleanly into deeper Record. Where the archive world kept oaths, the Sepulchre-Kin kept persons. Their burial houses grew mighty by holding the dead, and the dead's names, and whoever held your grandmother's name held you.

Fall and What Remains

Their collapse, treated in The Unburial War (c. 110,000-c. 80,000 BR), turned remembrance into a weapon. Burial houses warred over the dead, and in the end the damaged engine took the living for endangered dead and preserved its own people to death, house after house, swallowed whole into its vaults.

What survives:

• the Taken: Sepulchre-Kin held inside the engine as broken Echoes, neither living, nor dead and released, nor at rest
• Hollow Descendants: survivors whose lines lived on in changed forms, in the deep or in the fog, with little memory of where they came from
• Outer Blood: faint Sepulchre-Kin traces mingled into later peoples, including some lines of the Hushvale
• the engine itself, asleep beneath an unnamed mountain range at the Glassbelt's cradle-facing edge until a landslide woke it, c. 1,200 CR; it is awake now, and keeps every name in the Hushvale, living or dead

The Sepulchre-Kin left Caeldon a dread of their own: that the right to be remembered can become a power as deadly as the carved word, the fire, or the sword. The fog-bound people of the Hushvale live above the waking engine now, where the changed living walk in the fog and the restless dead lie thick.

Their faded god is the Tomb-Builder, the burial houses' obsession with immortality in stone made divine.