World & Cosmology
The world is not made of matter. It is made of memory. Every stone, every person, every law of nature is a story written into a script, a great and shimmering tapestry called the Istopis. This was not a perfect creation. The script is flawed, a draft left unfinished, and those with the talent or the tools can learn to edit it. They can reach into the fabric of what is and pull out a thread—the memory of a defeat, a debt, a betrayal. This is the art of Excision, a clean and terrible surgery on the soul of the world.
But a story, once told, cannot be untold. A severed memory does not vanish. It becomes an orphan, a fragment of what was, anchorless and full of a phantom pain. These fragments drift and curdle, accumulating like a sickness. They are the Echoing Blight, a cancer on reality. Where the Blight takes root, the script of the world unravels. The memory of sunlight forgets itself, and summer fields freeze. The memory of silence breaks, and the whispers of a thousand forgotten conversations bleed into the air. The world forgets its own laws.
This is the bill that must be paid. Every cut, no matter how precise, feeds this decay. The great powers of 19th-century Europe, locked in a conventional war of cannon and steel, wage a second, secret war. Russia’s Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle cuts with ritual precision to preserve the memory of their Empire. Napoleon’s Grand Armée Occulte cuts with brutal abandon, seeking to erase all history but their own. They believe they are carving a new world from the old. They are wrong. They are unwriting the story of everything, and in the process, they are summoning an age of absolute oblivion. Far from it all, a mythical machine, the Janus Engine, is said to archive all that is and was. It is rumored that if the weight of severed memories becomes too great, the Engine will not preserve. It will Unravel.
Core Systems & Institutions
The Art of Memory
The manipulation of the world’s script is not magic. It is a science, an art, and a sin, practiced in many forms. The Russian Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle favors Excision, a clean and precise act of will that severs a single memory-thread. It is a chirurgeon’s cut, cold and exact, leaving a neat wound on reality. Their French counterparts in the Grand Armée Occulte practice a cruder art. They do not cut; they annihilate. With weapons like the Lethe Mortar, they burn memories from the script entirely, leaving behind a cancerous void, a Lacuna that actively consumes the world around it. This is not surgery; it is butchery.
Other factions walk different paths. The Alchemical Carbonari, revolutionaries who despise all empires, use resonance to shatter memories, corrupting them into useless, painful fragments. The British Sterling Compact, ever the bankers, do not destroy memory but transfer it, locking it away in silver objects like a deposit in a vault. The Chiffre Bureau acts as neutral scribes, copying memories onto vellum to be sold to the highest bidder. Each method carries its own cost. The clean cut of the Lodge breeds detachment in its users. The annihilation of the French accelerates the Blight. The shattering of the Carbonari creates psychological chaos. Every practitioner, from the noblest defender to the most nihilistic destroyer, pays a price in mind, body, or soul. And with every use, the world grows a little sicker.
Oaths & Orders
In the shadows of the Napoleonic Wars, the true conflict is waged by secret societies bound by oath and ideology. The Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle is the soul of the Russian defense, a fraternity of nobles and mystics who see themselves as the sacred guardians of the Empire’s memory. They act from a principle of podvizhnichestvo—the belief that heroism is a voluntary, sacrificial choice made for a higher cause. Their rituals are slow, their doctrines rigid, their purpose holy. They are the bulwark against the tide.
Opposing them is Napoleon’s Grand Armée Occulte, an instrument of conquest that seeks to forge a new world order on a blank page. They are pragmatists and nihilists, wielding memory-annihilation as a tool to unmake nations, erasing their histories, their heroes, and their will to fight. Between these titans move smaller, unpredictable powers. The Alchemical Carbonari, a network of Italian and German revolutionaries, see both empires as two heads of the same beast. They fight not to preserve or control history, but to shatter it, hoping a better future can rise from the chaos. These orders are the true movers of the war, their doctrines shaping the fate of millions who will never know their names. Their battle is not for land, but for the very definition of reality.
Empires & Courts
To the common man, the world is one of empires. The great Russian Bear stands against the French Eagle, and the fate of Europe is decided on fields like Borodino. Armies march, cannons roar, and gazettes print news of victories and defeats weeks after they occur. But the true seat of power is not the battlefield; it is the ballroom. In the glittering halls of the Winter Palace, a silent war is fought through the coded gestures of the Tsar’s Waltz. Here, an alliance is sealed with the subtle snap of a fan, and a rival’s career is ended with the adjustment of a cravat. Influence, secrets, and even the memories of men are the currency.
This hidden conflict directly shapes the overt one. A general is promoted or disgraced based on the outcome of a silent trade in the Malachite Gallery. A military strategy is leaked not by a spy with an ink-pot, but by a courtier who copies a memory with a hidden device during a dance. The overt war of nations is merely the bloody stage upon which the covert war of memory is performed. The aristocrats who play this game believe they are masters of the world, pulling the strings of armies and states. They are blind to the fact that their games, their trades in stolen moments and excised truths, are fraying the very fabric of the world they seek to rule.
The Shadow Market
Beneath the formal economies of rubles and francs, a second, more vital economy thrives. Its currency is memory. In the slums and canals of St. Petersburg, the criminals of the Ligovka Ring perform brutal, back-alley memory extractions for desperate clients, trading the memory of a guard’s patrol route for coin, or excising a murder for a fortune. Their work is dirty, dangerous, and leaves festering wounds in the minds of their clients and the script of the city. They are the bottom-feeders of this new market, scavenging the scraps left by the great powers.
Further east, the Circle of the Golden Horde operates on a different level. They are not butchers but brokers. Believing memory is a river, not a stone, their shamans trade in secrets and histories as a neutral power. They offer their services to all factions, their price a forgotten song, a rare artifact, or a future favor. Their neutrality makes them an indispensable and unpredictable force, a bank of secrets where even warring empires must come to make a deal. This shadow market is the great secret of the age. A promise to erase a rival’s victory is worth more than a thousand kilograms of gold, and a single, perfectly blank memory-vial is a treasure beyond price. Every transaction, however, is a small tear in the world, a debt that will be paid by all.
The Unseen War
The war of memory is fought with tactics that defy conventional understanding. It is a conflict of psychic assaults and metaphysical sieges. The Grand Armée Occulte does not merely bombard a fortress; it deploys the Lethe Mortar, a siege weapon that fires shells filled with weaponized oblivion, erasing a town’s memory of its own history and rendering its people docile. Their infantry can unleash an Annulling Fusillade, a synchronized volley where soldiers collectively erase a memory from their own minds, projecting a wave of negation that causes enemy formations to forget their orders and their allegiance. Their heavy cavalry performs the Lancet’s Rush, a charge that does not break lines with steel, but with a focused psychic wave that severs a unit’s courage before the first lance strikes.
The Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle responds with rituals of defense. They perform the Patriarch’s Sanction, a rite that reinforces a territory’s memory of loyalty, making it resistant to occult influence. They deploy the Sovereign Hymn, a vast auditory phenomenon that broadcasts feelings of dread or valor across the battlefield. This is a war fought not for inches of mud, but for the conceptual integrity of armies and nations. The cost is written not in casualty lists alone, but in the permanent, paradoxical scars left upon the land itself. Each grand working, each fusillade and hymn, releases a torrent of chaotic energy that poisons the world, ensuring that even the victor will inherit a kingdom of ghosts.
The Echoing Blight
The Echoing Blight is the price for the art of memory. It is the world’s slow death, a cancer born from the accumulated grief of every severed story. It begins where memories are cut, especially where they are annihilated. These wounds, called Lacunae, are not empty; they are voids that pull at the edges of reality. Over time, they curdle and fester, becoming gateways for the Blight. The land itself begins to forget. The first sign is a draining of color, the world turning a uniform, joyless grey. Then comes the silence, an unnatural quiet that presses on the ears. Finally, the paradoxes begin. The memory of a harsh winter bleeds into a summer day, freezing the air. The whispers of forgotten arguments echo in empty fields. A road forgets its destination, twisting back on itself overnight.
The Ashen Tract, a vast corridor carved by Napoleon’s occultists, is the Blight’s most terrible manifestation. It is a pacified wound in the land, hundreds of kilometers wide, where the very idea of life has been erased from the soil. No birds sing, no animals hunt, and the trees are brittle skeletons. This is the ultimate consequence of the secret war. The Blight does not distinguish between friend and foe. It is a slow, creeping oblivion that spreads from its heartlands, a ghost sickness that threatens to consume all of history and leave behind a world of meaningless, whispering chaos.
Peoples, Factions & Cultures
The Alchemical Carbonari – Driven by a righteous, furious energy, the Alchemical Carbonari are a revolutionary network of inventors and radicals who see the memory-cutting of empires as the ultimate act of tyranny. They operate from hidden workshops smelling of ozone and hot metal, forging bizarre steam-powered contraptions and volatile alchemical weapons. Their foundational tragedy is personal and universal: their families, their histories, their very existence "unwritten" by the casual decree of a distant nobleman. This fuels their core ideology: they do not seek to preserve or control history, but to shatter it. They believe that only through chaos, through the destruction of the old, oppressive order, can a new, unwritten future emerge. They are a force of pure disruption, viewing the Lodge and the Grand Armée Occulte as two heads of the same monstrous beast, and they will burn the world to the ground to build a better one from the ashes.
The Augustan Curators – The Augustan Curators are the world’s secret bankers, but their currency is not gold; it is memory. Operating from discreet, granite-vaulted offices beneath the financial centers of Europe, they practice a cold, precise art called Mnemonic Escrow. They do not cut or destroy memories; they extract them whole, sealing them in vacuum-packed glass cylinders for safekeeping. Their core ideology is one of absolute, transactional neutrality. They see themselves not as players in the great game, but as its archivists, protecting the world from the Blight by quarantining dangerous memories rather than casting them into the void. A king might store the memory of a secret treaty, a merchant a disastrous trade deal. The Curators serve any faction with the wealth to pay their astronomical fees, making them a stable, yet dangerously amoral, force in the shadow war. Their greatest fear is not defeat, but a vault breach—the catastrophic release of a thousand raw, potent histories at once.
The Chiffre Bureau – The Chiffre Bureau is a ghost in the system, a decentralized network of spies with no headquarters and no allegiance but to the transaction. Its agents, known as Readers, blend into society as clerks and merchants, their only identifying mark an iron ring showing a broken key. They do not cut or alter memory; they copy it. Using a Mnemonic Lens, a Reader can view the memory-threads of a target and transcribe them onto special vellum with a Memory Quill. The resulting Cipher-Script is an untraceable piece of intelligence, sold to any and all factions for a high price. The Bureau’s methods are safer than cutting and do not directly fuel the Blight, but they are not without cost. The act of copying leaves a faint psychic residue, a "ghost print" detectable by powerful sensitives. For the Readers themselves, constant exposure to stolen histories erodes their own sense of self, a slow descent into paranoia and madness. They are the story-thieves of the secret war.
The Circle of the Golden Horde – Operating from mobile trading posts that rise from the steppe like a mirage, the Circle of the Golden Horde views the European powers with ancient distrust. They see the memory-cutters as "butchers," carving up the sacred flow of history. Their philosophy is different: memory is a river, not a stone. Their shamans and traders do not seek to control this river, but to navigate its currents, bartering in memories, secrets, and possibilities as their primary currency. They are a neutral power, offering their services as information brokers and shipping contractors to any faction for the right price—a price that is rarely simple coin, but rather "value for value." A forgotten song, a rare artifact, or a future debt holds more worth than gold. This neutrality, backed by a deep and patient wisdom, makes them a dangerous and unpredictable element, a third pole of power in a world tearing itself apart. They do not forget their accounts.
The Ligovka Ring – The Ligovka Ring is not an order but a cancer, a sprawling criminal network festering in the slums and canals of St. Petersburg. Its members are the desperate and the disgraced: beggars, rogue artisans, and broken soldiers. They are the black market of the memory trade, scavenging for fragments left by the cleaner cuts of the great lodges or performing brutal, back-alley excisions with crude tools. Their currency is the stuff of life: a thief trades the memory of a patrol route, a starving man sells the feeling of a full stomach, a murderer pays to have the memory of his crime carved out of his soul. They have no ideology, no loyalty beyond the coin. They serve anyone—Tsarist agents, French spies, desperate nobles—making them a useful but utterly treacherous resource. Dealing with the Ring is a final, desperate measure, for their work is imprecise, often shattering minds and leaving behind pockets of the Echoing Blight in their wake.
The Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle – The Lodge is the sacred shield of the Russian Empire, a secret society of nobles, officers, and Orthodox mystics bound by a holy duty to preserve the nation’s memory-scape. From hidden sanctums in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they practice a slow, ritualized form of memory-cutting, believing each precise Excision is a necessary sacrifice to prune weakness and protect the historical narrative from Napoleon’s nihilism. Their core belief is podvizhnichestvo: that true honor is a voluntary choice forged under fire, a principle that guides their every action. Yet, this devotion to tradition is also their greatest weakness. Governed by the rigid, protocol-obsessed Memory Duma, the Lodge is dangerously slow to adapt. They see the world as a sacred text to be protected, and their operatives as instruments of that will. They are the old world, powerful and pious, but perhaps too brittle to survive the coming storm.
The Sterling Compact – The Sterling Compact is the hidden hand of the British Empire, a secret society of bankers, industrialists, and officials who apply the cold logic of commerce to the art of memory. They do not cut or copy; they practice a meticulous craft known as Bullioning. A memory is isolated whole and then encoded into an object of pure sterling silver—a coin, a watch fob, a signet ring. The memory is held in perfect suspension, accessible only with a paired "key-fragment" held in an agent's mind. This method is used for defense and intelligence, protecting the minds of Britain's key assets and creating untraceable dead-drops. Their workshops resemble jewelers' ateliers, their methods precise and slow. The Compact embodies the British approach to the secret war: pragmatic, defensive, and built on the unshakeable value of a secure asset. The cost is paid by their agents, whose minds are slowly isolated from their own authentic pasts by the key-fragments they carry.
Vessels, Constructs & Locations
Alchemical Fire Projector
This Carbonari weapon is terror given liquid form. It is not a subtle tool but a brutal instrument of chaos, designed to project arcing streams of a volatile, adhesive chemical. The fire it unleashes is a sickly, brilliant green, spreading with unnatural speed across wood and flesh, and it cannot be extinguished by water. The air after its use smells of ozone and burnt chemicals, a testament to its heretical nature. For the revolutionaries, it is a great equalizer, a way to sow panic and break formations without needing the disciplined armies of an empire. It embodies their willingness to use horrific and unstable methods to achieve their goals. The question of its fuel source is a closely guarded secret, as is the terrible risk of a catastrophic malfunction that could consume the wielder as easily as the target.
The Amber Synodicon
Hidden beneath a Moscow merchant house lies the Amber Synodicon, an octagonal chamber that acts as a mnemonic resonator for the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle. The room is paneled in dark wood set with nine massive plates of raw, cloudy amber that glow with a faint, trapped light. These panels are saturated with the essential memories of the Russian soil—ancient forests, forgotten victories, the resilience of the earth itself. During rituals like the Patriarch’s Sanction, Lodge members chant in resonant tones, causing the amber to vibrate and amplify a memory of faith or loyalty, which is then focused by a central malachite table and projected across the land. The chamber is a tool of profound defensive power, but it cannot create; it only strengthens what is already there. The cost is paid by the chanters, who offer their own potent memories as fuel, leaving them drained and hollow for days.
Ancestral Records
The Ancestral Records of the Bielski line are not living memories but their written ghosts. Housed in the dusty, two-story library of the family manor, these heavy, leather-bound volumes chronicle three hundred years of history. The paper is dry, the ink faded, but the stories within are a testament to a lineage defined by justified rebellion. Here, Sineus Bielski finds the precedents for his treason: Kaelan, who forged a truce instead of burning villages; Anya, who bought and freed serfs against the Tsar’s law; Dmitri, who defied a governor to save thousands from a flood. These are not just family histories; they are a moral framework, a record of ancestors who chose a higher duty over institutional loyalty. They are the source of Sineus’s resolve, proof that his path, while lonely, is not untrodden.
The Ashen Tract
The Ashen Tract is a wound in the world, a vast corridor of land stretching for hundreds of kilometers where Napoleon’s occultists have murdered reality itself. They did not just burn villages; they used their craft to sever the memory of life from the soil and loyalty from the people. Now, it is a landscape of uniform, joyless grey. The trees are brittle, the ground is a fine, cold dust, and the rivers flow with an oily sheen. No birds sing. The very idea of growth has been erased. This is the Echoing Blight made manifest, a place that operates on a broken logic where the memory of winter can freeze the summer air. It is a pacified corridor for the French armies, but the Blight is uncontrollable. It drives their own garrisons mad and serves as a permanent, spreading scar on the face of the world, a monument to the cost of their war.
Athanor Engine
The Athanor Engine is a mobile weapon of the Alchemical Carbonari, a two-meter-tall contraption of black iron, polished copper, and spiraling glass tubes that hums with heat and hissing steam. It weaponizes history through a crude alchemical process. Operators feed it artifacts with strong memories—a regimental banner, a holy book—which are burned to ash in its furnace. The object’s core memories are distilled into a volatile, gas-like Aether, which is then pressurized and released as a thick, swirling fog. Those who breathe it in do not lose their memories; instead, their minds are violently scrambled with the fragmented history of the burnt artifact. It is a tool for breaking social order, turning disciplined soldiers into confused individuals. Indiscriminate and notoriously unstable, an overload can trigger a memory detonation, creating a small, permanent pocket of the Echoing Blight.
Bielski Manor
Sealed for a generation and standing just twenty kilometers from the encroaching grey of the Ashen Tract, the Bielski Manor is a place of sorrow and forgotten history. It is a physical manifestation of Sineus’s isolated lineage, a home he can only enter with a key that requires not a shape, but a memory—a family lullaby. The manor is both a sanctuary and a prison. Within its decaying walls, Sineus finds the ancestral justification for his treason, but its very existence, saturated with the stable, potent memories of his line, makes it a target for his enemies. For the Unwritten Alliance, it represents a desperate hope: a potential laboratory and a source of untainted memory that could be studied in the search for a cure to the Blight, a place only Sineus himself can access.
Bielski Manor Library
The heart of the Bielski ancestral home is its two-story octagonal library. A place of dark wood and deep silence, it smells of dust, decay, and old paper. This is not a repository of living memory icons, but of written history, housing the leather-bound Ancestral Records of the Bielski line. For Sineus, it is a refuge and a crucible. Here, surrounded by the ghosts of his ancestors, he searches not for orders but for precedent, a justification for breaking his sacred oath to the Lodge. The library is a symbol of a different kind of power—not the Lodge’s institutional authority, but the moral authority of individual conscience, passed down through generations. It is here that Sineus’s decision to defy the Duma hardens from a desperate impulse into a cold, certain choice.
The Borodino Anomaly
The Battle of Borodino was not just a clash of armies; it was the site of a massive occult working, a synchronized act of memory-cutting on an unprecedented scale. The Grand Armée Occulte targeted the very concept of Russian courage, and the sheer volume of violent memories being severed at once overwhelmed the fabric of reality. The sky turned a bruised violet, the ground was covered in a shimmering film of raw, unformed memory, and the sounds of battle became distorted and layered with whispers. This was the Borodino Anomaly, a storm of paradoxical phenomena where a soldier might forget his allegiance or the ground beneath his feet might forget its own solidity. It was a weapon of immense power that shattered the Russian army’s ability to function, but it left behind an incurable, ever-expanding zone of the Echoing Blight, a permanent wound on the soul of the land.
Bronze Sentinel
A Bronze Sentinel is a tireless, unthinking soldier of the Grand Armée Occulte, a two-meter-tall automaton of bronze plates, iron rivets, and hissing pistons. It has no face, only a smooth helmet-like shell and a glass porthole in its chest revealing a core of swirling, glowing light. This core is its mind: a single, potent memory extracted from a living being and sealed in a crystal matrix. A memory of discipline creates a perfect sentry; a memory of rage creates a fearsome shock trooper. The Sentinel is immune to fear, empathy, and most mnemonic assaults. It will follow its core directive without question, guarding a bridge even as it collapses. But the memory core degrades with use, and when it finally fails, it shatters, releasing a localized wave of the Echoing Blight and leaving the machine an inert husk.
Campaign Tent (Coalition)
A world away from the gilded halls of the Winter Palace and the sterile sanctums of the Lodge, the headquarters of the Unwritten Alliance is a spartan campaign tent. The air inside smells of wet canvas, mud, and the damp wool of its occupants. Lit by a single oil lamp, its only furniture a central campaign map and crates for seating, it is a symbol of a new kind of war—a desperate, ground-level struggle for survival. For Sineus, it represents his fall from grace and his rebirth as a leader of traitors and revolutionaries. For the coalition, it is the grim, functional hub of their alliance, a place where arguments born of fear and mistrust are hammered into desperate, collaborative plans. It is the birthplace of their new duty.
Carbonari Command Post (Wine Cellar)
The Unwritten Alliance was born in a cramped wine cellar south of Paris, a secret command post smelling of damp earth, sour wine, and the cold sweat of its thirty occupants. Here, in the tense, lamplit dark, the desperate coalition of Alchemical Carbonari, ex-Lodge loyalists, and refugees forged their suicidal plan to destroy the Vaucanson Atelier. This cellar was their crucible, a place where the Carbonari’s doctrine of chaotic action was fused with the Lodge’s knowledge of precision strikes. It was a nest of traitors and revolutionaries, united by a common enemy and a shared, desperate hope. For a brief moment, it was the most dangerous room in Europe, the heart of a rebellion that aimed to strike at the very center of Napoleon’s occult war machine.
Carbonari Hideout (Ashen Tract)
Hidden in a collapsed cellar beneath a former tannery on the edge of the Ashen Tract, this secret workshop is a den of creation and rebellion. The air is a mix of damp earth, ozone, and hot metal. To the Alchemical Carbonari, it is a sanctuary where they can forge their strange devices and plan their disruptive strikes against the empires they despise. Cluttered workbenches are covered in alchemical tools, half-finished inventions, and blueprints for a new, chaotic world. It is here that Sineus Bielski, the aristocratic agent of order, first finds common cause with Alessandro Volpe, the revolutionary agent of chaos, forming a fragile, transactional alliance born of a shared enemy and a dawning understanding of the world’s true sickness.
Carbonari Hideout (Root Cellar)
This temporary sanctuary is nothing more than a small root cellar, a cramped, claustrophobic cage with walls of damp earth and rotting timbers. It smells of cold dirt and mildew, a grim and spartan refuge for the Alchemical Carbonari after a mission. It was here, in the aftermath of the disastrous decoy ambush at Khavron Pass, that Sineus and Alessandro took shelter. Surrounded by crates and potato sacks, their victory revealed as a perfectly orchestrated trap, the cellar became a space of silent, grounding support. It was a moment where their partnership of pure utility began to evolve into something deeper, a shared burden in the face of a vast, chilling intelligence that was now hunting them personally.
Carbonari Safe House (Klyuchi)
In the small, grimy town of Klyuchi, the local bakery, marked with a symbol of a crossed rolling pin and a key, served as a vital node in the Carbonari network. The public shop, smelling of warmth and honest bread, concealed a small back room where agents could rest. Its most critical feature was a hidden escape tunnel in the cellar, leading to a drainage ditch on the town's outskirts. For the network, it was a place of safety and respite. For Sineus and Alessandro, it was a brief, lost paradise, a moment of warmth before it was discovered and purged by joint French and Lodge forces, its baker-owner becoming another piece of collateral damage in their desperate flight.
The Chronos Telescope
Housed in a deep, lead-lined vault within a Lodge sanctum, the Chronos Telescope is not a tool for viewing stars, but for viewing time. It is a complex apparatus of brass, silver, and precisely ground lenses that can be calibrated to focus on the memory-script of a distant location, revealing ghostly echoes of past events. It is a tool for observation only, providing fleeting, silent images of what once was. It was through this device that Sineus Bielski first witnessed the true horror of the Lethe Mortar, watching it not just sever, but completely annihilate the memory-scape of a Russian village, leaving a cancerous, spreading Lacuna in its place. The psychic shock of this vision was the catalyst for his rebellion, the moment he understood the true stakes of the war.
The Desecrated Church
After the death of his mentor, Sineus’s "dark night of the soul" took place in a ruined church. With its collapsed roof open to the elements, the air smelling of damp earth, rot, and the ghost of cold incense, the church was a convenience of ruin, not a true sanctuary. Its desecrated state was a perfect mirror for Sineus’s own sense of spiritual and moral collapse, a place where his grief and despair left him hollowed out and without the will to continue. It was here, provoked by Alessandro’s own story of loss, that Sineus’s grief hardened into a clean, hot anger, and he forged a new purpose—a duty not to the institution of the Lodge, but to the living, breathing people of the Empire.
Discordance Engine
This palm-sized circular device of polished brass and copper is a mnemonic disruptor used by French occultists. When wound and activated, its intricate internal gears spin at incredible speeds, producing a high-frequency, chittering whine. The engine generates a 20-meter field of chaotic resonance that does not cut memories but violently agitates them, disrupting their connection to the present. For unprotected individuals, this causes severe nausea and vertigo. For memory-wielders, it is an intense sensory overload, the world blurring and warping before their eyes. It is a tool of area denial, affecting friend and foe alike, and its repeated use can weaken the fabric of reality, attracting the Echoing Blight.
Farmer's Barn (Blighted Field)
A temporary, insecure shelter on the run, this derelict barn offered Sineus and Alessandro a grim respite from their hunters. The structure was unsound, the air thick with the smell of wet rot, cold earth, and damp straw, the only sound the drumming of rain on a broken roof. It was a place stripped of the warmth of its former life, a hollowed-out memory of shelter. In this cold and miserable refuge, the fugitives’ supplies finally ran out, marking a new low point in their desperate flight. The barn stands as a symbol of their grinding attrition, a place where they were stripped of everything but their shared resolve and the hunt that defined their existence.
Gniloye
Gniloye is a village being slowly digested by the Ashen Tract, a place of rot and bad memories defined by a heavy, sorrowful silence. A single muddy track cuts past houses with collapsed, pulpy thatched roofs. To most, it is a place of poison that no sane person would enter. For Janusz Kurov, it was the perfect, unlikely place to set an ambush, correctly predicting his desperate prey would seek refuge in the one place a hunter would not think to look. For Sineus and Alessandro, it was another trap in a long line of them, a place where their flight from one hunter led them directly into the arms of another, forcing them to fight their way out of a collapsing ruin.
Golden Horde Trading Post
This is not a fixed place, but a temporary city of hide-and-felt yurts that materializes from the fog in neutral territories. The air smells of damp wool, horse dung, and brick tea. Run by the Circle of the Golden Horde, it is a place where the only law is the bargain. Here, agents from rival empires can trade information and occult goods without drawing blades. It is a hub for those who treat memory and secrets as the ultimate currency, a world away from the formal courts and battlefields. It was at one such post that Sineus Bielski, in a desperate bid for intelligence, traded one of his last, priceless Blank Memory-Vials for the shipping manifests that would lead him to the Lethe Mortars.
The Janus Engine
Floating in an unknown void, the Janus Engine is a myth, a god-machine, the central archive of the world’s script. It is a perfect, ten-meter sphere of interlocking black iron rings that turn in slow, silent harmony. In its Preservation mode, it gathers and archives all memories, even those severed by practitioners, upholding the laws of reality. But legends claim a catastrophic overload of severed memories could trigger its second mode: Unraveling. In this state, the rings would grind erratically, and the Engine would broadcast a wave of pure chaos, erasing not memories, but their meaning. Water would become poison, air would become liquid, and the world would dissolve. It cannot be controlled, only influenced from afar, a silent, ticking clock counting down to oblivion.
Khavron Pass
A natural fortress and a deathtrap, the Khavron Pass is a jagged scar in the mountains, its high rock walls funneling all traffic onto a single, narrow road. The air is thin and cold, smelling of stone and snow. Believing a large French convoy carrying Lethe Mortar components was being rerouted through it, the Alchemical Carbonari planned a suicidal ambush. Alessandro Volpe devised a plan to weaponize the pass itself, using explosives to bring the mountain down on the convoy. The ambush was a spectacular success, a massive rockslide that completely obliterated the French forces. But the triumph was short-lived. The convoy was a decoy, a sacrifice orchestrated by Lucien Lacroix to lure his true target, Sineus Bielski, into the open. The pass became a stage for a devastating psychological blow.
Klyuchi
Klyuchi is a small, grimy town huddled in a fold of the hills, a place that smells of wet coal smoke and believes itself too insignificant to be noticed by the war. This belief proved to be its undoing. The town’s bakery served as a secret safe house for the Alchemical Carbonari, a vital node in their network. When the joint forces of Lucien Lacroix and Janusz Kurov began their systematic purge of the network to isolate Sineus and Alessandro, Klyuchi became a target. The town that hoped to be ignored was put to the sword, its safe house burned, its baker-owner killed, another casualty in a war that had finally found it.
The Lacuna
A Lacuna is a visible wound in reality, a scar left by a memory’s removal. It appears as a shimmering distortion, like heat haze on a winter day, where the air feels impossibly cold and a profound, unnatural silence presses on the ears. Only those with the Sight can perceive it clearly, seeing the hollow, negative impression of what was erased. A Lacuna created by simple Excision is a clean wound that slowly decays, becoming a gateway for the Echoing Blight. But a Lacuna created by Annihilation is far worse. It is not a static scar but a cancerous void, a self-fueling reaction that actively expands, consuming the memory of the surrounding area at a measurable, terrifying rate. It is a hole in the world that grows.
The Lazarev Scriptorium
Located in the west wing of a remote country manor, the Lazarev Scriptorium is a laboratory where the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle analyzes and catalogues memories. The circular chamber is filled with shelves of books, scrolls, and artifacts, all coated in a fine layer of shimmering grey dust—the harmless residue of naturally decayed memories. Here, archivists use tools like the Oculus Speculum to view the memory-threads of captured items, transcribing their findings into coded ledgers. It is a place of quiet, meticulous analysis, vital for the Lodge’s intelligence operations. However, it is a controlled environment, and a powerful, violent act of memory-cutting performed within its walls could ignite the contained residue, turning the library of dead memories into a virulent, localized Blight.
Lethe Mortar
The Lethe Mortar is a heavy siege weapon of the Grand Armée Occulte, a tool of psychological warfare that weaponizes memory through a crude, rapid form of alchemical distillation. Its crew feeds an object with a target memory—a royal banner for loyalty, a holy book for faith—into its boiler, which violently strips the memory and condenses it into a liquid agent. This agent is loaded into a hollow shell and fired over a target area. The resulting cloud does not merely sever memory; it annihilates it, creating a cancerous, spreading Lacuna. It is this weapon that created the Ashen Tract and destroyed Elina Petrova’s hometown. It is the physical manifestation of the French doctrine of total erasure, a weapon that does not just win battles but unmakes the enemy’s world.
Lodge Armory (Moscow)
The Lodge Armory in Moscow is the secure heart of the order’s military and occult power. The air inside is cold and sterile, smelling of gun oil, beeswax, and the faint, electric tang of contained mnemonic energy. Behind multi-layered mnemonic wards and mechanical locks lie racks of conventional rifles, archives of neutralized memories, and, in a deep, lead-lined vault, the Lodge’s forbidden artifacts. It is a symbol of their protected strength and rigid order. This makes Sineus Bielski’s breach of the armory an act of profound treason. By bypassing its wards and stealing the forbidden Orphic Compass, he not only compromised the Lodge’s security but also declared war on its most fundamental principles of control and secrecy.
Lodge Sanctum (Moscow)
Hidden beneath a Moscow fur trader’s shop, the Lodge Sanctum is a silent, circular archive, a sacred library dedicated to safeguarding the memories the Lodge has collected. The air is dry and sterile, smelling of deep earth and old vellum. Here, thousands of Memory Icons—excised memories transcribed onto gesso-coated wooden boards—are stored in perfect, sterile rows. Access is controlled by a unique iron door that seems to recognize an individual’s very essence. This is the heart of the Lodge’s mission to preserve the Empire’s history. It was here that Pyotr Orlov, Sineus’s mentor, would perform his sacred work, and it was from here that the first intelligence of a new, terrible threat on the western front emerged, setting the entire tragedy in motion.
The Malachite Gallery
The Malachite Gallery in the Winter Palace is a vast hall of massive, deep green malachite columns and gilded mirrors. It is the capital’s primary arena for social espionage. The unique crystalline structure of the malachite acts as a passive resonator, amplifying the ambient memory-threads within the room, especially when "tuned" by an orchestra playing the Tsar’s Waltz. For those with the Sight, a person’s surface thoughts become faint whispers, their emotions a visible, shimmering aura. The gilded mirrors capture and reflect fleeting, ghost-like images of these amplified memories. Courtiers gather here to subtly read their rivals' intentions, and the Lodge uses its properties to vet members for treachery during grand balls. It is a place of immense beauty and suffocating paranoia, where a single undisciplined thought can betray a critical secret.
Memory Duma
The Memory Duma is the high council of the Lodge, a twelve-member body of masters who set the faction’s grand strategy from a windowless, dark oak chamber. They are the embodiment of the Lodge’s institutional power, tradition, and fatal flaw. Their rigid adherence to protocol and their fear of causing a Schism—a formal division within the order—makes them dangerously slow to react to unconventional threats. They dismissed Sineus’s frantic, unverified report of the Lethe Mortar, opting for slow, traditional Fortification Rituals instead of decisive action. Their caution, born of a desire to preserve order, allowed the threat to fester. They are the old men, trapped by their own rules, sending young men to fight a war they no longer understand.
Memory Icon
A Memory Icon is the final resting place of an excised memory, a physical prison for a piece of a person’s soul. It is a linden wood board coated in smooth, white gesso, upon which an archivist like Pyotr Orlov transcribes the complex, spiraling pattern of a memory-thread using a silver stylus. The finished icon smells faintly of wood and chalk. For the Lodge, these are sacred texts, preserved pieces of the Empire’s history, safely archived in their sanctums. For their enemies, they are a treasure trove of stolen secrets. For a philosopher, they are a profound tragedy—a story locked away, unable to be told, a life reduced to a pattern on a board.
The Monastery
A ruined monastery on a hill, its skeletal stone walls crumbling like old teeth, served as the stage for Lucien Lacroix’s most personal trap. The air smelled of wet earth and the metallic tang of old sorrow. Believing he was meeting his mentor, Pyotr Orlov, to be offered a path to exile, Sineus walked into a perfectly designed ambush. The location offered visibility and cover, its ruined nature allowing Lacroix’s forces to lie in wait. It was here that Sineus’s hope for an escape was shattered, and he was forced to watch his mentor sacrifice himself to save him. The monastery became a tomb and a crucible, the place where Sineus lost his last connection to his old life and was set on a final, hardened path of vengeance.
Paradox-Construct
The internal defense system of the Vaucanson Atelier is not made of men or machines, but of memory itself. A Paradox-Construct is a shifting, unstable amalgam of the psychic residue of fallen soldiers whose lives were consumed to power the workshop. It is a fractured ghost, one moment appearing as a soldier, the next a whirlwind of screaming faces and grasping hands. It is announced by a low, discordant whisper of a thousand forgotten voices. These constructs can phase through a person, inflicting the memory of a grievous wound that renders a limb useless without a physical injury. They are a horrifyingly efficient security system, recycling the dead to protect the factory that consumes them, and can only be dispersed by alchemical agents that disrupt the logic of memory holding them together.
The Preobrazhensky Citadel
Standing on a hill outside St. Petersburg, the Preobrazhensky Citadel is a massive complex of dark grey granite, a Mnemonic Fortress that serves as the ultimate bastion for the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle. Its very stones are an anchor for a single, powerful memory: the oath of loyalty sworn to the Tsar at its founding. This foundational memory projects a one-kilometer field of historical permanence, a stabilizing zone that actively repels and negates any attempt to cut or alter memories within its radius. It is a perfect shield against occult assault, allowing the Lodge to train initiates and conduct sensitive rituals in absolute security. But this perfect defense comes at the cost of stagnation. The fortress resists all change, for good or ill, making innovation or tactical flexibility within its walls nearly impossible.
Reality-Scrambler
The Reality-Scrambler is a masterpiece of Carbonari heretical science, a device designed to temporarily disable mnemonic wards through paradoxical interference. Alessandro Volpe, its creator, theorized that by creating a paradox within a fortress’s temporal-looping wards, he could trigger a catastrophic feedback effect, causing the ward to tear itself apart from the inside. The effect is a "flicker" in reality, a moment where a fortress forgets its own integrity. It was this beautiful, dangerous machine that allowed the Unwritten Alliance to breach the outer defenses of the Vaucanson Atelier, opening a fifteen-minute window for their suicidal assault. It is a key that does not pick a lock, but convinces the lock to unmake itself.
Refugee Camp (Ashen Tract)
This temporary, desperate settlement is a stark, ground-level reminder of the human cost of the occult war. Located on the edge of the Ashen Tract, the camp houses some 150 souls who have lost their homes, their pasts, and their hope to the Blight. The air smells of damp wool, sickness, and wet wood smoke. It is a place of hunger and despair, where children like Anya clutch faceless dolls, a perfect symbol of the memory-annihilation they survived. For an aristocrat like Sineus, the camp is a profound shock, forcing him to confront the suffering his class so often ignores. It is here that his mission begins to shift from an abstract defense of the Empire to a personal fight for its people.
Schism Cask
The Schism Cask is a tactical disruption device of the Grand Armée Occulte, a hand-sized, cast-iron sphere that functions as a non-lethal grenade. When its igniter is pulled, it does not explode with shrapnel but ruptures, releasing a shimmering, colorless vapor. Anyone within the ten-meter cloud is overwhelmed by a storm of conflicting memory fragments, causing immediate disorientation and confusion. A soldier might feel both terror and courage at once, their will to fight neutralized for several minutes. It is an indiscriminate weapon, affecting all within its radius, and its use contributes unstable memory fragments to the world, subtly worsening the Echoing Blight with every deployment.
Steam-Craft
The Carbonari’s primary naval weapon is a low-profile, armored assault boat powered by a hissing, roaring steam engine. Capable of reaching twenty knots, its armored bow is designed as a battering ram, a key instrument of the revolutionaries’ disruptive warfare. It was one such craft that Alessandro Volpe’s cell used to ambush a French convoy on the river, successfully ramming and destroying three barges carrying Lethe Mortar components. The raid was a success, but a costly one. The violent collision and ensuing firefight left the Carbonari with four dead and six wounded, a heavy price for a small victory and a prelude to the greater losses to come.
The Vaucanson Atelier
Hidden in a cramped Parisian courtyard, the Vaucanson Atelier is the heart of the Grand Armée Occulte’s war machine. The air inside smells of ozone, hot metal, and sharp chemicals. Here, engineers and occultists work side-by-side, using a central forge that burns artifacts to power their lathes and presses. They manufacture the weapons of the new age: Abscission Blades, Lethe Mortars, and the memory cores for Bronze Sentinels. The workshop is a place of terrible creation, but its operation poisons the very city it serves, creating a localized Blight in the surrounding district. It was the primary target of the Unwritten Alliance, a symbol of the enemy’s power that had to be destroyed, no matter the cost. Its destruction left a stable Lacuna, a clean void where once there was only death.
The Winter Palace
The Winter Palace is the glittering center of the Russian Empire, a world of grand masquerade balls, stiff military uniforms, and opulent facades. But behind the splendor, it is a battlefield of whispers. It is the primary stage for the Tsar’s Waltz, a silent game of power where secrets and memories are traded through coded gestures. It was here, amidst the swirl of a grand ball, that Sineus Bielski received his orders from Count Valerien Orlov to neutralize a foreign agent, a clean, simple mission that marked the beginning of his descent into a far more complicated war. The palace is a place of immense power and suffocating paranoia, the center of the web the Lodge fights to protect, and a perfect symbol of the beautiful, hollow world they are losing.
Notable Characters
Alain Varenne
Alain Varenne is Napoleon’s chief memory archivist, a tall, thin man with a pale, translucent complexion and flat, dispassionate grey eyes. He does not cut or destroy memories; he extracts them whole. Using a set of specialized Mnemonic Needles, he punctures the memory-scape of a person or place and draws out the targeted history, storing it in a labeled glass vial. His vast, mobile archive travels with the high command, a library of stolen national identities and heroic tales. Varenne is a strategic weapon, analyzing these memories to find cultural weaknesses to be exploited. His process is slow and leaves deep voids in reality that attract the Blight, and the constant exposure to raw, stolen histories has eroded his own mind, leaving him with a cold, inhuman detachment.
Alessandro Volpe
An Italian inventor and a core member of the Alchemical Carbonari, Alessandro Volpe is a man of lean build and righteous fire. His hands are stained black with grease and his sharp brown eyes peer from behind protective goggles. His rebellion is born from personal tragedy: his family and their workshop were "unwritten" by a nobleman's decree, an act that forged his revolutionary ideals. He fights not with a blade but with his inventions, like the Resonance Catalyst that shatters memories into useless, corrupted fragments. Initially viewing Sineus as just another aristocratic butcher, their transactional alliance evolves into a true partnership forged in shared loss and desperation. Alessandro is the pragmatic, chaotic heart of the rebellion, a man who would tear down the world to avenge the one that was stolen from him.
Annelise von Brandt
A Baltic noblewoman of German descent, Annelise von Brandt possesses a unique and gentle mnemonic ability. She does not cut or alter, but perceives the silent, hollow wounds left by memory-cutting. She is a healer of reality. Entering a deep trance, she gathers latent, positive memories from the environment—the warmth of sunlight, the scent of pine—and carefully weaves them over the voids in the world’s script. This acts as a patch, a containment measure to stop the Echoing Blight from festering and spreading. Her work is slow, draining, and requires immense concentration, leaving her vulnerable and exhausted. She cannot restore what was lost, only cover the wound. Annelise represents a third path, one of mending rather than breaking, a quiet, desperate attempt to hold the world together as it is being torn apart.
Anya
Anya is a child of about seven, a living ghost found wandering the Ashen Tract. Her village, her family, and her voice were all annihilated by a Lethe Mortar. She is a symbol of the profound, innocent human cost of the occult war, a silent testament to the suffering that lies beneath the grand strategies of empires and lodges. When found, she clutched a rag doll with a smooth, featureless head, a perfect, heartbreaking effigy of the oblivion she survived. Her brief, silent connection with Sineus Bielski—when he shares his last ration of bread with her—is a turning point for him, the moment his abstract duty to the Empire becomes a visceral, personal need to protect its people. She is the face of what he is fighting for.
Anya Bielski (Ancestor)
An 18th-century ancestor of Sineus, Anya Bielski provides a crucial precedent for his moral rebellion. In 1721, she defied the established social and economic order by using the family’s immense wealth to buy and free a shipment of serfs destined for a Siberian mine. This illegal act of compassion resulted in her exile from the Tsar’s court, a sacrifice of personal standing for the sake of a higher moral truth. Her story, discovered by Sineus in the family’s ancestral records, reinforces the idea that the Bielski line has a history of prioritizing conscience over conformity. She is one of the ghosts at his shoulder, giving him the strength to choose his own path.
Corporal Mathis
A disciplined soldier of Napoleon's Grande Armée, Corporal Mathis is a grim portent of the future of the war. After becoming lost in the Ashen Tract, his desperation for survival made him vulnerable to a new and terrifying threat. He became the first known individual to be psychically commanded by the disembodied consciousness of Lucien Lacroix, now a ghost in the machine of the Blight. Lacroix guided Mathis to a supply cache before subverting his will entirely, turning the soldier into a puppet. Mathis now acts as Lacroix’s hands and voice in the physical world, his own thoughts and volition subsumed by the will of the Blight itself. He is a living demonstration that Lacroix was not defeated, merely transformed.
Count Valerien Orlov
A master of the Tsar’s Waltz, Count Valerien Orlov is a handsome, ambitious courtier who views the world as a chessboard and people as pieces. He sees Sineus not as a man, but as a powerful, sharp-edged tool to be manipulated for his own advancement at court. His currency is influence, his weapons are secrets, and his battlefield is the ballroom. It was Orlov who, with a few coded gestures during a ball, gave Sineus the order to neutralize a foreign agent, setting the story’s events in motion. As the real war intensifies, however, Orlov finds his games of intrigue becoming increasingly irrelevant, his power fading in the face of a threat that cannot be seduced or blackmailed.
Dmitri Bielski
Sineus Bielski’s great-grandfather, Dmitri, is the most direct and powerful inspiration for his defiance. A military engineer in 1775, he correctly identified an imminent flood threat that his superior, the local governor, dismissed. In a heroic act of treason, Dmitri defied a direct command, seized government supplies, and used his own fortune to evacuate twelve villages, saving three thousand lives. For this, he was arrested, stripped of his commission, wealth, and social standing, avoiding execution only because of the testimony of those he saved. His story, of choosing to save lives at the cost of his own, provides Sineus with the final, cold certainty he needs to break his oath to the Lodge and act on his own.
Elina Petrova
A former university student whose hometown was annihilated by a Lethe Mortar, Elina Petrova is the fierce, idealistic heart of the Alchemical Carbonari. She fights not for chaos, but for the chance to build a future free from the tyranny of empires, a future that is "unwritten." Her unwavering conviction often clashes with the cynicism of her comrades and the cold duty of Sineus, but her courage inspires them all. In the assault on the Vaucanson Atelier, she made the ultimate sacrifice, overloading the Carbonari’s primary disruption device and turning herself into a weapon to clear a path for the team. Her final act was a testament to her belief, a terrible and beautiful choice that ensured her sacrifice would not be in vain.
Foma Volkov
Foma Volkov is a memory courier for the Lodge, a man whose appearance is so deliberately unremarkable that he is easily forgotten. He possesses a minor but highly specialized talent: he can subtly alter the memory-script of inanimate objects. Using a set of small brass styluses, he can lightly engrave a piece of information—the number of rifles in a crate, the time of a patrol—into the memory of a brick or a fence post, creating a hidden message that a friendly agent can later read. His work is slow, requires intense focus, and leaves a faint, detectable trace of altered memory. Each message he leaves is a small tear in the fabric of reality, and the strain of his work gives him severe migraines and trembling hands.
Golden Horde Envoy
The transactional heart of the Golden Horde’s trading operations is an envoy of indeterminate age, a woman with a face like a mask of fine wrinkles and eyes as dark as polished river stones. Receiving clients in a large yurt smelling of brick tea and burning dung, she embodies her faction’s philosophy. She dismisses gold, seeking "value for value"—secrets, possibilities, or rare artifacts like the Blank Memory-Vial Sineus offers her. Her voice is low and melodic, and her expression is unreadable, hinting at a personal history that has seen empires rise and fall. She is a keeper of accounts, a neutral broker in a world at war, and the debts owed to her could shift the balance of power in an instant.
Grigori Levin
A senior member of the Lodge’s Memory Duma, Grigori Levin is a man of sturdy build and unnerving calm. He is a mnemonic chirurgeon, a specialist who uses a silver-rimmed monocle and delicate scalpels to perform Memory Annealing, a process that breaks down harmful memories into inert, harmless residue. He is the voice of tradition and caution within the Lodge, arguing for slow, defensive rituals over decisive action. It was Levin who persuaded the Duma to dismiss Sineus’s warning about the Lethe Mortar, fearing a schism based on an unverified report. His rigid adherence to protocol and his failure to recognize the new, existential threat make him Sineus’s primary antagonist within the very order he once served.
Hélène Rochefort
Hélène Rochefort is a strategic oracle for the Grand Armée Occulte, a tall, gaunt woman with clouded, milky-quartz eyes. She does not see the future, but perceives the Echoing Blight directly, her mind a receiver for the chaotic whispers of discarded memories. She interprets these fragmented visions—a forgotten duel suggesting an assassination, a severed memory of a shipwreck foretelling a bridge collapse—to guide Napoleon’s memory-cutting operations, identifying which memories to sever for maximum disruption. Her connection to the Blight is a terrible symbiosis; it gives her immense strategic power, but it slowly erodes her physical body and her sanity, making her less human with every vision she receives.
Isabelle Moreau
A pale, slender woman with startlingly light grey eyes, Isabelle Moreau is a weapon of psychological warfare for the Grand Armée Occulte. She does not cut memories; she weaves new, false ones into the minds of her targets. Using deep focus, often amplified by a small silver music box, she can make an enemy general relive his worst defeats in vivid nightmares or sow dissent in a command staff with fabricated memories of betrayal. Her creations are unstable phantoms of memory, preying on existing fears to erode certainty and morale. The cost of her art is a blurring of her own mind; she sometimes struggles to distinguish real events from her own fabrications, leading to bouts of intense paranoia. She is a weaver of lies, a saboteur of the soul.
Janusz Kurov
Janusz Kurov is a rogue enforcer of the Lodge, a tall, lean man with cold eyes and a jagged, violet-glowing scar on his face. He rejects the Lodge's precise methods as weak, preferring his own technique: "Mnemonic Shattering." Using a set of steel needles, he violently smashes a target's memory into fragments that corrupt their entire memory-scape. He is a hunter, a brutal pragmatist who was tasked with bringing Sineus in. He employs "herding" tactics, manipulating the environment to force his prey into a trap. His coordination with the French occultist Lucien Lacroix shows his willingness to abandon all loyalty for the sake of the hunt, making him a relentless and unpredictable threat. The scar on his face is a physical manifestation of the backlash from his own destructive art.
Kaelan Bielski
A 17th-century ancestor of Sineus, Kaelan Bielski is a foundational figure in the family’s history of justified disobedience. As a military officer in 1648, he defied a direct order to burn several Cossack villages, choosing instead to forge a secret truce that saved hundreds of lives. For this act, he was officially declared a coward and stripped of his rank, sacrificing his reputation for a higher moral duty. His story, which secured peace on the border for fifty years, is one of the four precedents Sineus discovers in the Ancestral Records. It provides a powerful model for choosing conscience over command, reinforcing Sineus’s decision to defy the Memory Duma.
Kazimir Rudaski
Kazimir Rudaski is an occult saboteur employed by Napoleon’s armies, a tall, gaunt man with a perpetual sneer and fingertips blackened as if by intense cold. He destroys the core memories that define important objects through a process called "deconsecration." Striking a regimental standard or a religious icon with his iron rod, the Resonance Breaker, he shatters its keystone memory, causing its entire mnemonic structure to unravel into chaos. A blessed sword might forget its purpose and turn to rust. He can destroy a city’s spirit before a single shot is fired. The act is incredibly draining, sending agonizing vibrations through his body and eroding his own memories, leaving him hollow and disconnected from his past.
Konstantin Raskolov
Konstantin Raskolov is a human embodiment of the Blight, a tall, gaunt man whose memories were so completely and violently cut away that the void left behind became a vessel for chaos. Discarded, paradoxical memories are drawn to him, possessing him and dictating his actions. In his presence, the laws of reality fray. He is a walking nexus of paradoxical phenomena, drawn to sites of great historical trauma like battlefields and ruined cities. He cannot be reasoned with, controlled, or affected by memory-altering abilities, as he has no personal history to target. He is a weapon that can be unleashed but not directed, a catalyst for the world’s unmaking who accelerates the spread of the Blight wherever he goes.
Ksenia Zima
Ksenia Zima is a gaunt old woman who lives alone in a small wooden house near the edge of a Blighted forest. She cannot see or cut memories, but she possesses an innate and vital ability: she perceives the voids they leave behind. These wounds in reality appear to her as shimmering patches of cold air, their size and brightness indicating the strength and recency of the cut. By touching an object, she can sense the echo of what was removed. This allows her to track the movements of the Grand Armée Occulte and identify the targets of their operations, providing critical intelligence to the Lodge. Her power is a heavy burden, causing intense headaches and a deep, shaking chill that leaves her exhausted for days.
Luca
A veteran Alchemical Carbonari, Luca embodies the faction's doctrine of direct, violent action. A puckered burn scar across his jaw marks him as a survivor of intense conflict, and his arguments are punctuated by a fist slammed on a nearby table. He believes in "no half measures," his reckless courage a stark contrast to the cautious traditions of the Lodge. In the formation of the Unwritten Alliance, he was the voice of immediate, overwhelming force. He successfully led the chaotic diversionary attack on the Vaucanson Atelier, creating explosions on the river to draw the attention of the conventional guards, a critical part of the coalition's synthesized plan. He is the clenched fist of the revolution.
Lucien Lacroix
Lucien Lacroix is the antagonist, a tall, gaunt French officer who serves as Napoleon’s chief agent of oblivion. He does not cut or collect memories; he annihilates them with a device called the Mnemonic Cauter, incinerating them from the script of reality. His philosophy is one of nihilistic perfection: to create a "perfect future" on a "blank page" by erasing the "flawed past." He is a man of vast, chilling intellect who views the world as a set of principles to be manipulated. After orchestrating a series of brilliant traps that revealed Sineus as his true target, he was defeated not by a blade, but by a Mnemonic Bridge that turned the pain of his own victims back on him. His consciousness was shattered and cast into the Echoing Blight, where he now endures as a disembodied mind, learning to command the chaos he created.
Marco
A young, wiry scout for the Alchemical Carbonari, Marco is a swift messenger who delivers critical, often devastating, news. He moves with the agility of a mountain goat, but the grim realities of his missions can quickly erase his youthful energy. It was Marco who, after the triumphant rockslide ambush at Khavron Pass, was sent to inspect the wreckage. He returned pale and shaken, carrying not spoils, but a single, untouched sheet of folded white paper. His report that the convoy was a decoy filled with rocks and scrap metal turned the Carbonari’s victory to ash, revealing they had been perfectly outmaneuvered. He is an unwitting harbinger, a young soldier forced to bear the heavy burdens of a war fought with lies as much as lead.
Mikhail
A pale, thin man with trembling hands, Mikhail is a disillusioned Lodge loyalist who joins the Unwritten Alliance after witnessing the order’s failure. Still wearing a torn coat showing the faint outline of the Lodge’s insignia, he is a man caught between two worlds, a traitor to his old masters and an uneasy ally to the revolutionaries. His knowledge of Lodge security protocols, particularly the temporal wards of the Vaucanson Atelier, was crucial to the coalition’s plan. He survived the assault on the Atelier but was left deeply traumatized, seeing ghosts of the paradox-constructs in the lamplight. He is the voice of Lodge doctrine, believing the restoration of severed memories is impossible, a symbol of the institutional despair the alliance must overcome.
Mikhail Voronin
Mikhail Voronin is a young man with a face unnervingly smooth and symmetrical, a person with no past. His defining memories were completely cut away, leaving a void in reality that makes him a walking null-space. New memories cannot be implanted in him; they find nothing to anchor to and simply dissipate. This makes him immune to memory-based weapons and illusions, a valuable asset for reconnaissance in Blighted areas. He sees the world without the filter of experience or bias, his observations perfectly objective. However, he has no personal drive, understands no social rules, and must be taught everything like a child. He is a perfect tool and a hollow man, a unsettling symbol of what is lost when a person is completely unwritten.
Pavel
Pavel is a young, nervous acolyte in the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle, his pale skin a testament to a life spent in subterranean sanctums. He assists senior members with the operation of complex occult devices like the Chronos Telescope. Though dutiful, Pavel is acutely aware of the dangers of their work, often voicing his concerns about psychic backlash and other risks. His anxiety and instinct for self-preservation stand in stark contrast to the stoic, hardened demeanor of operatives like Sineus. He represents the human fear that lies beneath the Lodge’s rigid, sacrificial doctrines, a reminder that not all who serve do so with blind obedience.
Pyotr Orlov
Pyotr Orlov was Sineus Bielski’s mentor, a thin, elderly archivist for the Lodge with ink-stained fingers and the scent of beeswax and old vellum about him. He was a man of quiet wisdom who believed that "duty without choice is slavery," a philosophy that planted the seeds of rebellion in his protégé’s mind. After defending Sineus before the Memory Duma, he was used as unwitting bait in a trap by Lucien Lacroix. In the ruined monastery, he made his final choice, shoving Sineus aside and taking the full force of a Mnemonic Blast meant for him. His mind was instantly annihilated, his body becoming a mindless Husk. His sacrifice was the final, terrible catalyst that hardened Sineus’s resolve and transformed the war into a personal vendetta.
Sineus Bielski
A tall nobleman with piercing blue eyes, Sineus Bielski is the protagonist, a man born with the unique and terrible gift of seeing the world’s true script. Initially a loyal and perfect instrument of the Lodge, his duty was to perform precise, surgical memory Excisions in defense of the Empire. But after witnessing the absolute annihilation wrought by the Lethe Mortar, he chose to defy his orders and hunt the threat alone, becoming a rogue agent. This act of podvizhnichestvo—a voluntary moral choice—begins his transformation. His alliance with the revolutionary Alessandro Volpe, his encounters with the victims of the war, and the loss of his mentor strip away his aristocratic detachment, forging a new duty to protect people, not institutions. The cost of his choices is written on his body, his right arm a numb, crystalline monument to the man he has become.
Stefan
Stefan was a stout baker in the town of Klyuchi, a loyal sympathizer of the Alchemical Carbonari who operated a safe house from his shop. A man of futile, hopeless courage, he used coded phrases like "The fire is always hungry" to verify contacts, offering a place of warmth and honest bread to agents on the run. When joint French and Lodge forces raided his bakery to capture Sineus and Alessandro, Stefan fought back with a rolling pin, a desperate act that bought the fugitives precious seconds to escape through a hidden tunnel. He was killed in the effort. To the Carbonari, he was a trusted contact; to Sineus, he became a symbol of the innocent collateral damage his personal war was causing.
Stepan Borodin
Stepan Borodin is a tall, gaunt man with a shaved head and a heavy iron hammer, a solitary fanatic on a personal crusade. He seeks out memory-idols—objects like regimental flags or statues that anchor painful or dangerous histories—and annihilates the memory within them with a single, focused blow of his hammer. He believes these objects radiate suffering and poison the present. His work is direct, final, and irreversible. He can free a community from a paralyzing trauma, but his judgment must be perfect. He is an outcast, trusted by no faction, viewed by many as a dangerous desecrator of sacred relics. He walks his path alone, a destroyer who believes he is a healer.
Items, Weapons & Artefacts
Abscission Blade
This is the classic tool of the mnemonic chirurgeon, a heavy, 30-centimeter-long stylet of dark, non-reflective steel. It has no physical edge, for it does not cut matter, but memory. An operator with the Sight touches its tip to a subject and, channeling their will through the blade, severs a single memory-thread with a faint, high-pitched ringing sound. The cut is clean, but the memory is not destroyed; it is released into the world as a chaotic fragment, fuel for the Echoing Blight. The blade is a tool of precision, but each use is an act that sickens the world and exacts a toll of mental fatigue on the user.
Aetheric Resonator
A handheld diagnostic tool of the Alchemical Carbonari, the Aetheric Resonator is a complex contraption of brass, glass, and nested copper rings. At its center, a crystal needle quivers in the presence of paradoxical energy. It is a vital instrument for quantifying the "sickness" of the world, providing a measurable reading of Blight saturation and the instability of local reality. It was with this device that Alessandro Volpe confirmed the utter lifelessness of the Ashen Tract, its needle barely moving, proving that the very idea of growth had been erased from the land. It is a tool for measuring the dying of the world.
Alchemical Grenade
This Carbonari weapon is a small, brass sphere designed to disrupt non-corporeal or memory-based entities. It does not detonate with shrapnel, but with a flash of corrosive green light and a sound like shattering glass. Its purpose is to disrupt the very logic of memory that holds constructs like the Paradox-Constructs together, causing them to dissolve. The Unwritten Alliance had only a limited supply of these vital tools during their assault on the Vaucanson Atelier, and Alessandro Volpe was forced to use his last one to no avail, just before Elina Petrova made her final sacrifice.
Artificer's Panoply
This is the essential protective gear for the occult engineers of the Vaucanson Atelier. It consists of a heavy, floor-length apron of chemically-treated leather, a brass and steel chest piece containing a clockwork null-resonator, heavy gauntlets, and goggles with smoky quartz lenses. The suit dampens ambient mnemonic radiation and scrambles the chaotic whispers of the Echoing Blight, allowing its wearer to build and repair memory-weaponry in a hazardous environment. Its protection is limited, however, and it cannot defend against a sudden, powerful release of memory. It is the uniform of those who work at the heart of the world’s decay.
Bastion Cutaway
A gentleman's formal tailcoat of heavy charcoal wool, the Bastion Cutaway is a tool of social concealment. Its true function lies in its lining, a quilted black silk woven with a dense lattice of fine, alchemically-treated silver thread. This lining generates a low-level interference field, a form of mnemonic chaff that scrambles the wearer's surface thoughts into chaotic noise. An observer using an Oculus Speculum would perceive only a confusing storm of unrelated images, the wearer's own intentions hidden within. It is essential for navigating the treacherous social arenas of the court, but its protection is only skin-deep.
The Bielski Cipher-Key
This is not a key of metal, but of memory. A small, handheld clockwork cylinder of brass and silver, it is the only way to open the sealed ancestral lock of the Bielski Manor. The user must press the device to the keyhole and hum a specific, complex family lullaby. The key analyzes the mnemonic vibrations of the song, and if they match the memory embedded in the lock, the mechanism opens. It is a lock that requires not a shape, but a story, making it impossible to breach by conventional means and ensuring that only a true Bielski can enter the family’s sanctum.
Blank Memory-Vial
A small cylinder of flawless, spun crystal, the Blank Memory-Vial is a vessel of pure potential. Its function is to serve as a perfectly clean slate for the inscription of a new or excised memory. In the occult world, it is rarer and more valuable than a flawless diamond, as it represents an untainted possibility, a story yet to be written. The Lodge does not part with them lightly. Sineus Bielski, in a moment of desperation, traded one of his last vials to the Golden Horde for critical intelligence, a sign of the immense value placed on information in the shadow war.
Carbonari Disruption Device
The heart of the Carbonari’s alchemical science, this primary Disruption Device is a machine designed to unmake reality. When activated, it hums with volatile energy, rising to a piercing shriek before detonating in a silent wave of absolute nothingness that consumes light, sound, and memory. It is a tool of last resort, but Elina Petrova turned it into an instrument of final, decisive sacrifice. By deliberately overloading its core, she transformed herself and the machine into a paradoxical bomb, unleashing a massive blast that annihilated the wave of Paradox-Constructs that had pinned down her comrades in the Vaucanson Atelier.
Compact Signaling Mirror
An intricate, handheld device of brass, glass, and delicate clockwork, the Compact Signaling Mirror is a vital tool for Carbonari command and control. It allows agents to send and receive coded messages over long distances using precise flashes of light. It can also receive a unique, single repeating pulse—an emergency broadcast signal indicating a catastrophic, total network collapse in a sector. After a series of coordinated raids by French and Lodge forces, the mirror received this grim signal, and was later damaged beyond field repair, leaving Sineus and Alessandro technologically isolated and truly alone.
Deflector's Redingote
This floor-length, double-breasted greatcoat of charcoal-grey wool is a tool of passive defense for occult intelligence operatives. Its lining, a complex brocade of silver and lead filaments, absorbs ambient memory fragments and constantly projects them in a thin field of mnemonic chaff around the wearer. This "noise" distorts any attempt to perceive the wearer's memories from a distance, hiding their surface thoughts in a storm of unrelated images and sounds. It allows an agent to move through hostile territory without their purpose being easily discovered, but it offers no protection from direct attacks and must be periodically cleansed.
Feintweave Cloak
A heavy, black wool cloak, the Feintweave is a defensive tool for duels and close combat. Its silk lining is woven with fine silver threads that act as a mnemonic capacitor, passively absorbing ambient memory fragments. With a sharp, rotational flick, the wearer can discharge the stored energy, projecting a life-sized, flickering afterimage of themselves that lasts for one or two seconds. This feint can draw an opponent's attack, creating a critical opening for a counter-strike or escape. The cloak can only hold a single charge and must be passively recharged over several hours, making its use a tactical, one-time gamble.
Holdfast Boots
These are heavy, knee-high riding boots of blackened leather, their utilitarian appearance belying their critical function. The unusually thick soles contain a plate of a mnemonically inert metal alloy. This plate acts as an insulator, shielding the wearer from the chaotic memories corrupting Blighted ground. They effectively ground the wearer's personal memory-script, allowing them to cross corrupted territory without their identity or physical form unraveling. They are essential for travel through places like the Ashen Tract, but they are heavy, loud, and blind the wearer to any historical memories held within the earth, trading awareness for safety.
Labyrinth Brocade Gown
This formal dress of deep indigo silk is a passive memory-collection device. Its surface is covered in a complex, maze-like pattern woven from silver-treated thread. This resonant thread passively absorbs weak, ambient memory fragments from its surroundings—stray images, sounds, or emotional residues from conversations at a grand ball. The gown’s pattern acts as a storage matrix, holding the collected impressions in a stable state. After an event, a skilled practitioner can use a tool like an Oculus Speculum to interpret the stored fragments, turning the gown into a record of the evening’s secrets.
Lodge Signet Ring
A silver ring bearing the emblem of the Double-Headed Eagle, this is a symbol of membership and loyalty within the Lodge. More than just a piece of jewelry, the ring can hold the faint, dying echo of its former owner's strong emotions. After Janusz Kurov killed a Lodge agent, he left the man’s severed ring as a brutal message for Sineus, the silver still carrying the psychic residue of its owner’s final terror. Later, after Pyotr Orlov’s death, his own ring slipped from his finger and clattered onto the cobblestones, a small, cold testament to a great man’s fall.
Mnemonic Bridge
A Mnemonic Bridge is not a physical object but a psychic construct, a new and terrible application of Sineus Bielski’s power. It is a conduit of will that connects a target's consciousness directly to the Echoing Blight. The effect is a tsunami of pure, undiluted consequence, forcing the target to experience the collective agony and grief of every memory they have annihilated. Sineus developed this ability in his final confrontation with Lucien Lacroix, refusing to use Excision and become like his enemy. Instead, he turned the pain of Lacroix’s own victims back on him. The backlash was severe, permanently crystallizing Sineus’s right forearm.
Memory Shield
A Memory Shield is a psychic defense woven from stolen, severed memories. Lucien Lacroix used one in his final battle, creating a shimmering wall of agonizing light, a chorus of a thousand stolen lives—a boy's first kiss, a mother's lullaby, a soldier's dying oath. It is a desecration, a barrier built from the refuse of a butcher’s work. The shield blocked conventional psychic attacks, but it became Lacroix’s undoing. When Sineus forged the Mnemonic Bridge, the shield did not protect Lacroix, but instead acted as a lens, focusing the agony of the Blight through the senses of every person he had unwritten.
Oculus Speculum
This is a vital tool for those who cannot naturally see the world’s script. It is a complex handheld instrument of brass and mahogany, or sometimes a simple silver-rimmed monocle with an obsidian lens. By looking through its specially prepared quartz or obsidian, an operator can perceive the memory-threads that constitute reality. It reveals the ghostly afterimages of past events, the health of a memory-thread, and the dark, flickering voids left by memory-cutting. It is a tool for investigation, quality control, and reconnaissance, but its use is taxing, causing severe headaches and blurred vision. It is a window that can strain the eyes of the soul.
Orphic Compass
A forbidden artifact stolen by Sineus from the Lodge Armory, the Orphic Compass is a flawless, featureless sphere of solid black stone, twenty centimeters in diameter. When attuned to a target, intricate lines of silver light race across its surface, creating a living map of the object’s entire history. It shows stable memories as bright constellations, cut memories as dark voids, and the Echoing Blight as a chaotic, cancerous growth of light. It cannot write or edit memory, only observe. Deciphering its complex, flowing script requires years of study, and the flood of raw information it provides can shatter an operator's perception of reality.
Podvizhnik's Cherkesska
This is a heavy, knee-length coat of coarse, dark grey wool, a garment of last resort. Across its chest are two rows of narrow pockets, each holding a sealed bone cylinder. These are Mnemonic Anchors, each containing a single, purified, primordial memory—the memory of solid granite, of deep silence, of cold iron. When in a Blighted area, a user can unseal an anchor and focus on its simple, stable memory to ground their mind against the psychic chaos. Each anchor is single-use. The coat is a symbol of grim preparedness, a tool for those who know they will have to walk through hell.
The Scabbard's Verdict
This is not a weapon, but a combat technique, a slow and deliberate drawing of a blade from a special scabbard lined with resonant silver plates. As the blade scrapes against the lining, it creates a low hum, transferring a "priming" memory—of absolute sharpness, of unerring purpose—to the steel. The blade becomes temporarily attuned to the world's memory-threads, a surgical instrument ready to sever one specific memory with a single, perfect cut. The process is slow and leaves the user vulnerable, and the scabbard must be re-imprinted after each use, but it allows for a level of precision that is crucial in delicate operations.
Sentry's Shroud
The Sentry's Shroud is the standard-issue uniform for the line infantry of the Grand Armée Occulte. It appears as a simple coatee of heavy, dark grey wool, but its fabric is woven with fine, alchemically-treated silver threads. These threads create a weak field of memory resistance, a mnemonic buffer that dampens the emotional charge of nearby phenomena. It mutes the chaos of a Blighted zone and dulls a soldier's own fear, helping them hold the line. The protection is limited and degrades with each exposure, but it allows conventional troops to function on the paradoxical battlefields of the new war.
The Severed Thread of Atropos
When a memory of a truly binding oath—a marriage vow, a blood pact—is severed, it does not always dissipate. Sometimes, it solidifies into a physical object: a shimmering, razor-sharp filament that drifts on the currents of the world. This is a Severed Thread, a weapon and a curse. It is drawn to those with strong emotional bonds, and if it touches someone, it forces the agonizing memory of the original broken promise into their mind, a psychic attack of profound betrayal and grief. It is a tangible echo of a promise that was unmade, a ghost of a bond now weaponized.
Sobornost Cuirass
Worn by officers of the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle, the Sobornost Cuirass is a heavy cavalry breastplate of dark, blued steel. It is forged with the powerful memory of a unified, famous last stand, which projects a stable field of unbreakable unity around the wearer. This field does not stop bullets, but it dissolves hostile memory-altering energies, overwhelming incoming attacks with its own narrative of collective resolve. Each neutralized attack degrades the imprinted memory, causing the faint, shimmering pattern on the steel to fade. When the memory is spent, the armor is just a piece of metal, and must be returned to a sanctum for a costly re-imprinting ritual.
The Somnus Ledger
A small, hand-sized book bound in unmarked black leather, the Somnus Ledger is a high-security transport for sensitive information. An invisible force seals its vellum pages, and it can only be opened when a user presses their thumb to the silver stud on its cover and sacrifices a specific, chosen memory. The Ledger consumes the memory completely and permanently, then clicks open. To a normal person, the pages are blank, but to one with the Sight, shimmering script floats above the vellum. The memory-key cannot be stolen or copied, but if the user forgets the specific memory they sacrificed, the book is sealed forever.
The Sovereign Dyad
This is a two-part system for ranged memory cutting, consisting of a matched pair of pistols in a case of polished Karelian birch. The first pistol, Sol, fires a silent, invisible pulse that tags a chosen memory with a unique resonance. The second pistol, Luna, detects this resonance and, when fired, releases a focused energy wave that travels instantly to the target, severing only the marked memory-thread. The system allows for memory-cutting at a range of 25 meters, but it requires immense concentration. A slight distraction can cause Sol to mark the wrong memory, leading to catastrophic consequences.
Tricorne Ductoris
This black felt military hat is a tool for mnemonic command used by officers in Napoleon's Grand Armée Occulte. Three silver threads are woven into its lining, each connected to an amber bead at one of the hat's three points. An officer can impress a simple command memory—"advance," "halt"—into one of the circuits, then physically aim that point of the hat. The amber bead projects the memory as a non-verbal urge felt by trained soldiers in the target area. It allows for silent coordination on the battlefield, but its use causes significant mental fatigue and contributes to the Echoing Blight.
Witness Stylet
Appearing as a refined gentleman's walking cane of polished birch with a silver wolf's-head pommel, the Witness Stylet is a tool for mnemonic espionage. A twist of the pommel reveals a hidden, needle-like steel stylet. When pressed against a target's skin, the user can channel their focus to copy the most dominant surface memory, which is then stored in a silver wire at the stylet's base. The target feels only a faint, cold sensation. It is a tool for discreet intelligence gathering in social settings, allowing an operative to learn immediate plans or thoughts with a simple, unnoticed touch.
