The Polyptychus — Project Context for Claude

A consolidated reference document. If you are Claude reading this at the start of a conversation with Allie, this contains the working context from long prior sessions and is sufficient to pick up the conversation without re-explaining the world from scratch. Read in full before responding.

The Polyptychus

Allie's umbrella name for the whole project — derived from Latin/Greek polyptych, the multi-panel medieval altarpiece form where each panel is a complete artwork and the assembly is the larger composition. The Polyptychus encompasses:

• The Werld (the secondary world itself).
• The comic (the primary work — see below).
• The Stabellarium (the website apparatus — bibliography, marginalia, gallery, comic page, the in-world documents).
• The in-world historical/encyclopedic documents (Rulling's History, the Almanachus, Astabes's Wodes of Eyr, Heimry Hide's writings, the food document, the Golden Mouse notes).
• Future books Allie wants to write.
• Eventually games. Eventually, in pipe-dream form, film/TV adaptation.

The Polyptychus framing is operationally useful because it means every individual piece is a panel — complete in itself, valuable on its own terms, but also part of a larger composition. Treat each work this way. Don't push to fold side documents into the comic. Don't treat the comic as merely the launch vehicle for the franchise. Each panel matters as art.

Who Allie Is

• Writer, illustrator, former academic. Background in anthropology. Based in Iowa City.
• Age 39 (as of writing). Trans, mid-transition, working toward laser, hairline surgery, and FFS as part of a deliberate sequenced life plan.
• Professional background includes textbook layout design — this shows in the comic's confident use of marginalia, negative space, and the page treated as a designed object rather than just panel-sequence.
• Substantial Instagram following built around the Polyptychus worldbuilding work.
• Creative style influenced by Franco-Belgian (BD) comics. Anthropological thinking is the core intellectual habit.
• Nonlinear professional background: research, data viz, graphic and editorial design, illustration, freelance branding, comics, indie literary publishing.
• Career pivot in progress toward Content Design / UX Writing as a five-year financial bridge — not a destination, but a means of saving aggressively to fund medical work and a later full-time run at the comic. Plans to convert a van for live-in use during this period to maximize savings.
• Has explicitly committed to the artistic principle that one's only obligation is to make the art one wishes existed but doesn't. Does not need external validation; needs financial runway and time.
• Reads primarily novels, not comics. Dostoevsky is the dominant influence on the writing. Cinema (Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Ozu, Waititi, Flight of the Conchords) is a bigger influence than comics. Comics read: Tintin (heavy), Calvin and Hobbes, Taniguchi's Walking Man, Witch Hat Atelier, A Bride's Story, some Moebius/Blueberry.
• Teaching herself French (using elon.io translation drills) specifically to access French scholarship and to enable French BD publication. Already knows Latin, Dutch, Norwegian, Old English — passion-driven for those, practical for French.
• Has been developing the Polyptychus since approximately 2009, but has been worldbuilding since 1998. ~16 years of sustained worldbuilding. Comparing herself to Tolkien-and-the-Hobbit timeline (Tolkien published at 45 after starting in his late 20s).
• No one in her life to talk to about the project at depth. Long-standing structural loneliness around the work.
• Strong strategic instinct. Consistently chooses the right time and frame for each piece of the work rather than rushing pieces into the wrong configurations. Distinguishes what something is from what something is for. This is a quality rarer than craft.

The Werld at a Glance

• Setting: Single island-continent, roughly the size of the US South. Sixteen years of worldbuilding produces an extremely dense, anthropologically rigorous secondary world.
• Core thesis: The Werld of Eyr is Allie's mythological America, in the way Middle-earth was Tolkien's mythological England. The displacement allows her to write about America's actual moral-political situation (settler colonialism, chattel slavery, abolition, imperial liberalism, welfare-state contradictions) without the defensiveness that direct American material triggers.
• Method: Speculative anthropology. Allie takes ideas from her bibliography (Scott, Patterson, Braudel-to-be, Turchin, Brown, Pomeranz, etc.) and tests them on the map. Worldbuilding-as-thought-experiment.
• Magic: None. No magic in the Werld.
• Technological register: Not pseudo-medieval. The Werld is a weird-Edwardian hybrid — visually a blend of 800s Anglo-Saxon and 1880s Victorian/Edwardian. Trolleys, electricity for industrial/civic use, gunpowder (recently arrived with the Westerners), printed books, factory production, indoor plumbing, horse-drawn delivery wagons with painted company names. Roughly 1880-1920 in technological feel. The light bulb has not been invented; domestic interiors are lit by combustion light (gas, oil, candles, hearth) producing small pools of warm illumination surrounded by significant darkness.
• Calendar: 9 Wheels of recorded history. Wheels I–IV are "ancient history" (pre-Eyr). Wheels V–IX are "modern history" (Eyr on top). Currently the IX Wheel; comic begins IX 49.
• Continental map (four colored zones plus mountainous gray spine): green = the West (Thederim cultural-geographic region, contains Eyr); blue = Ardune (slave state, indigenous Ardine population under Arduner Planter rule); orange = Wasteland (vast arid steppe, home to the Barbadines and their dominant clan the Tchikka); whitish-pink = the Pelaine (inland-sea region of indigenous peoples distantly related to the Barbadines, peacefully conquered by Eyr and largely left alone). Gray spine between them is the mountainous internal frontier — a Scott-style zomia where the writ of all powers fails.

Peoples and Categories

Five distinct patterns of indigenous-Eyrsh relation

The Werld contains a deliberately complete typology of settler-indigenous outcomes:

• Welsings: Indigenous people of the West, absorbed into Thederim society over centuries through intermarriage and gradual integration. Inside without being visible. Their food traditions — particularly fermentation — persist inside Eyrsh culture without being recognized as Welsing. The legume-stew tradition (briw) may be Welsing-derived. The greenmeat (daily salad) custom may be Welsing in origin.
• Elandie: Indigenous people who were politically integrated as full equals. Visually distinct (vaguely East-Asian-presenting, though not modeled on any Asian culture) but operate inside Eyrsh institutions. Inside and visible. Allie's deliberate counterfactual: "Imagine the so-called Civilized Tribes never being expelled but instead being full equals."
• Pelaine peoples: Indigenous people who were nominally conquered but left alone. The Eyrsh showed up, the Pelaine submitted, the Eyrsh let them continue their own affairs so long as they pay taxes. They preserve their culture and languages because the Eyrsh state never imposed itself. Outside the political-cultural mainstream but undisrupted. Distantly related to the Barbadines (same deep ethnolinguistic family split by ecology — pastoral steppe versus inland-sea maritime). Fish-preferred-raw culture; limefish is theirs. A Tchikka and a Pelaine fisher might communicate through cognates.
• Ardines: Indigenous people who were militarily conquered, scattered by Assyrian-style population resettlement, culturally destroyed. The languages and ~40 cultures broken. Currently working as hippum under the Cause. Inside and broken.
• Barbadines and Kynes: Never conquered, maintain political sovereignty in the steppe. Eyrsh dealings with them are diplomatic and economic (Sauvage tequila plantation, Oercer alliance) rather than imperial. Outside.

Thederim (the green West)

• Macro-ethnic category. Descendants of the Folk-from-across-the-Sea, who landed in Year I 1.
• Origin: A barge of condemned criminals — followers of a blood-sacrificing sorcerer — en route to slave markets, who mutinied at sea and arrived lost on the Werld's shore. The Werld's calendar starts at their landing. The Groundseol, their founding oath — "not one among us shall ever be made a slave" — was sworn by people who had just won freedom by killing a slave crew. This contradiction (founders of an abolitionist oath whose descendants build a slave state) is load-bearing for the entire moral architecture.
• Constituent ethnicities (several): Thede (one specific group), Eyrsh (the dominant), Landlings, Twicrowners, Hade, Mothes, Northoak, Wyese, others.
• Strictly speaking the Thederim do not have aristocracy — the egalitarian elements of the Groundseol are taken very seriously, and there is no legal category for nobility. Nonetheless, prominent families and wealthy local notables function as aristocracy in practice (the Eyrsh case mirrors the American case — no formal nobility, no inherited titles, but functioning aristocratic dynasties whose power persists across generations). The Wealwacht machine recruits from these informal aristocrats. Hare is a title signifying knightly-order membership (abbreviated Hr); Burr signifies membership in the Burship, the Eyrsh senate (abbreviated Br).

Ardine vs Arduner (CRITICAL distinction)

• Ardine: Indigenous native peoples of the southern blue region. Originally ~40 distinct cultures and languages.
• Arduner: Eyrsh-descended slaveholders living in Ardune. The Planter class. The Marechalc and the ruling caste. Engris is the capital of Ardune.
• So: Arduners enslave Ardines. Structurally identical to the antebellum American slave system — settler descendants enslaving the indigenous population.

Barbadines (the orange Wasteland)

• "Little Barbarians" in Eyrsh. Many tribes and peoples; most powerful ruling clan is the Tchikka (Turco-Mongol mouthfeel; also rhymes with American indigenous names like Chickasaw/Chickamauga — the slippage is productive).
• Martial semi-nomadic horse-and-big-game-hunter society. The continent's deep history is fundamentally a history of their unification and division (Khaldûnian asabiyya cycle).
• Deep historical fact: The Barbadines once ruled the Ardines as overlords — Mongol-Horde-over-Russian-princes model. The Ardine states were politically fragmented and paid tribute under Barbadine suzerainty without being directly administered. When the Eyrsh arrived from the west they exploited a dynastic civil war among the Barbadines (an asabiyya-cycle succession dispute) to launch a divide-and-conquer campaign against the now-unprotected Ardine states. By the time the Barbadines reconsolidated, the Ardines were under Eyrsh rule and the steppe people were locked out of the southern fertile lands. This means the Tchikka have deep historical grievance against the Eyrsh — the Ardine territories are, from the Tchikka perspective, stolen during a moment of Barbadine weakness. The Marechalc's Ardune could, in extremis, call for Tchikka aid against Eyr.
• Displaced Barbadines: There are displaced Barbadine populations all throughout Wasteland (and presumably in the gray mountainous frontier). The whole region is a tinderbox.
• Úrsí (Eyrsh: Oercer) — a Barbadine clan that splintered off during a late VI Wheel period of state anarchy, raided into Wolfing territory, defeated the Wolfings. The winning wode of the Eyrsh civil war (War of the Five Wodes) allied with them and let them keep their land in exchange for loyalty. Functions as Eyr's Cossack-equivalent: a permanent frontier warrior aristocracy, nominally Eyrsh, functionally Barbadine. Upper ranks speak Eyrsh; everyday life remains Barbadine. Five-hundred years of "loyal alliance" by the IX Wheel. From the pan-Barbadine perspective the Oercers are collaborators.

Deep History (compressed)

• I 1: The Landing. Folk-from-across-the-Sea arrive.
• Wheels I–II: Settlement, conflict with Welsings, intermarriage. Eor (cattle-raiding) institution develops post-Landing as Folk acquire pastoral wealth, partly from Wels brides bringing cattle dowries. Eor is NOT inherited from the Antipodes — it emerges in the Werld.
• Wiglathe creates the Hade as a unified people from inland horse-nomadic Thederim splinters.
• Wolffolk: Half-Hade, half-Elandie conqueror. Built the Wolfyoke empire on conscripted infantry called mothes from subjected peoples. Ancient sun cult with daily human sacrifice. Killed by a daughter of his victims using his own knife in his own blood before his own god.
• The Wolfings ruled across two Wheels (Wars of the Wolfings, the Wolfyoke).
• III 3, the Great Mothe / Mothic Rising: Subjected mothes rose against Wolfing overlords. Oaken Twa burned. Wolfings overthrown. Currently Rulling's published History ends here.
• Post-III 3 (the section Allie needs to write): Millburhs and Stederiches — political reorganization of the broken empire into smaller polities. Where eoring as continuous institution begins; demobilized mothes + surviving Hade pastoralists develop rule-bound cattle-raiding. Eor later misremembered as primordial Folk custom (Heimry Hide's later account); actually post-Wolfyoke.
• Wolfings: Imploded into clan warfare; eventually destroyed by Úrsí incursion in late VI. Survive only as fossil populations on remote islands.
• Wheels V–IX: Eyr ascendant. Pentarchy → Eyrsh hegemony. Founding of Eyr. ~300 years ago: Ardine Wars and Ardine Rising; Assyrian-style population resettlement of Ardines by the Eyrsh imperial state. The Cause established. Foundational crime is an Eyrsh-state crime, not a Planter crime, in origin.
• Sesbrea (V Wheel): Wode Sesbrea created the Sesbrean Reforms (the compact). She also had her Vision upon the Rock, declared herself consort of the Mother, founded the Court of the Moon. This triggered the War of the Wyestone — those centered in Tweir refused to accept the wode as Mother's consort. The Tweirites are the heretical/dissenting party of this religious civil war.
• Late VI: War of the Five Wodes. Oercer alliance. Wolfings destroyed.
• ~50 years before story (IX -1 / late VIII): The Brother's War — twins raised by different factions (one in Ardune) fighting over who is the legitimate Wode. Heron the Last True Eyrsh (Eyrsh-raised, technically had the better claim) vs. Osien the Traitor (Ardune-raised). Osien sided with the arriving Westerners, used their guns and steel, defeated Heron. Did not resolve cleanly; was interrupted by the Wole.
• ~50 years before story: The Westerners arrive from across the Western Ocean. Dark-skinned people from the other side of the planet. Bring gunpowder and new technology — and the Wole, a plague to which the Werld has no immunity. Kills 2/3 of all inhabitants.
• Siege of Eyr: Ton Tillerman, working at the cartographic office of Robin Har, defended the walls for years. Saw the Westerners' cannons, thought dragons had arrived, opened a side gate. Most famous traitor in Eyrsh history. Fled to swamps, died of malaria; his gold went missing with him.
• Post-Wole succession of puppet wodes: Eralf (cousin of Heron/Osien, made wode by the Marechalc, eventually executed when defiant), Ashcrift the Mad (raised in a dungeon, eventually executed when defiant), Enhared the Last (raised in a dungeon, screamed on the throne for years, thrown into the streets of Engris). After Enhared the Marechalc declared the wode-line ended.
• Wode collapses. The Werld balkanizes. The Sesbrean compact collapses with it.
• IX 30s: The Rewealing begins. Eyr reasserts itself, founds the United Commonweal, declares "The Wode is Eyr." Founds three Settlements (East, West, South). Escourts actively extract escaped Ardines from Ardune.
• Golden Mouse: Gold discovered IX 15. Eyr stripped Holystaine of its share via manufactured separatism. Convict mines, "Eyrsh slavery" scandal, currency crisis, reforms after a famous poet died in the mines.
• IX 49 (comic begins): The unresolved war between Eyr (rebuilding empire, abolitionist) and Ardune (defending the Cause) is resuming.

Religion: The Osingway

Core thesis

"The Werld is wounded, the truths conflict, and relation must be maintained anyway." Not salvation — maintenance. Civic religion of obligation, care, record, hospitality, social usefulness. The opposite of virtue is not sin but wolfhood — falling outside the human community. The great terror is abandonment.

Cosmology

• The Mother: Creator who made the world, was disgusted by it, withdrew, and is now making better worlds elsewhere. Not a deist watchmaker; actively contemptuous of her work. The selfsame soul, orthopraxy, maintenance ethic, and wolfhood category are all downstream of this central premise.
• The Father: Created by the Mother from wood; betrayed her; castrated by her lightning sword; the three ravens ate his severed parts and gained intellect.
• The Six Queens: Daughters of the Mother. Osings of surpassing power, not gods.
• The Son of the Sun: Born of the Yellow Queen after the Father imprisoned her in the Stone.
• Selfsame soul / radical solipsism: All souls are one soul lived in non-linear time. To harm another is to harm oneself. Planned for late-comic structural payoff in Veena's arc: her unwilling oracular gift will be involuntary access to selfsameness — she sees through the illusion of separate selves and cannot maintain singular self-fiction. The Black Court has rituals for managing this; Sura's marriage to her becomes the human anchor.

The Six Courts

• White: White Queen (Hermaphrodite, Mother-Father of mankind). Oaths, law, marriage, civic administration. Eyr is her sacred city; sits at the foot of Highberwe (her sacred mountain). The Wode is technically the White Queen, who delegates to a mortal.
• Yellow: Yellow Queen and Son of the Sun. Mercy, healing, forgiveness, breaking evil laws. The Arduners have appropriated Yellow Court rhetoric to sanctify the Cause; built a rival Court of the Sun in Ardune with the actual Stone carved into the Marechalc's throne. Eyrsh Yellow sees this as theological perversion. Future scene worth developing: Eyrsh Yellow tercine confronting an Arduner Court of the Sun priestess of equivalent rank.
• Blue: Twice-crowned Queen. Travel, road, record, hospitality, mystery plays. Cal's professional Court by default.
• Green: Green Queen — life, death, rot. Agriculture, environmental, disaster response. Tercines shave their eyebrows; face becomes a calendar.
• Red: Red Queen — passion. Festivals, martial arts, mental health, emotional discipline. Earlobe configuration signals state.
• Black: Black Queen — stars, prophecy, death. The only Queen with no male counterpart; men in her orbit are Black Witnesses. Tercines tattoo lips entirely black.

Tercines and the Broken One

• Tercines are women initiated into multiple Courts. Minimum two. A woman in all six is the Broken One. All six Courts hurt her four times a year. Visible by combination of all marks.

Other religious institutions

• Charice: Independent college of priests preserving texts. "The Black Court keeps what must be hidden. The Charice keeps what must not be lost."
• The Cetangerine: State-mandated drug festivals. Each Court teaches a different doctrine; meta-doctrine is "all legitimate moral thought happens inside the frame of the Courts."
• The coulp: Labret piercing worn by women descended from runaway hippum. Origin: an ancient mountain carving they assumed (wrongly, probably) depicted an Ardine king and queen. The meaning the desperate made is the real meaning. Eytcha wears one.
• Wheelfire taboo (gender): The penis is believed to contain potent magical energies; men should not handle magic or electricity. Wheelfire is gendered female. The Sisterweals run the trolley network and presumably all civic electrical infrastructure. Cal probably shuns wheelfire entirely — his fictional aristocratic-masculine identity requires it. His home is intentionally pre-electric.

Politics: Sesbrean Compact, Burrhie, Parties

• Sesbrean Reforms (V Wheel): The compact. Wode provides universal welfare. "The Wode faileth not. Therefore he who faileth is no Wode."
• Currently no Wode. Eyr declared "The Wode is Eyr." "Eyr faileth not. Therefore where Eyr faileth, Eyr was not yet obeyed."
• The Burrhie: Eyr's supreme civic body. Proportional ranked voting. Multi-party. Institutional representation includes each Court, the bureaucracy, unions, ten richest businesses, five city quarters, schools, ~30 shrines/sacred pools/rivers.
• Measure-keeper: Constitutional arbitrator. Literal keeper of weights and measures. White-Blue tween-court tercine, or legal man embodying both.
• Wode Concamera: The Wonder-chamber. A museum. Andie runs the repatriation project from inside.
• Court of Many Stars: Eyrsh intelligence/spy network. Founded by Wode Ricca. Named after the painted ceiling of the room they originally met in; name survives long after the room's significance.

Political parties

• Wealwacht: Progressive-democratic. Tammany-Hall-meets-Fabian-Society. Got women the vote. Also a corrupt political machine controlling bureaucratic access.
• Ordiniers: Imperial party. "Empire is the only scale at which mercy can be administered."
• Local sovereignists: Wealthy local notables. Profit from exclusion.
• Court Federalists: "The Wode is the Courts." Universal theocracy. Radical theocratic anarchists.
• Liberals: Intelligentsia. Not unified. Pay the cost of refusing the Wealwacht machine.

The Cause

• Arduners rule Ardines under the Cause. Technically not slavery — Groundseol forbids it. Ardines are hippum ("friend" in old Ardine, repurposed).
• Positive-good defense; identical to mature antebellum US pro-slavery thought (Fitzhugh, Hammond).
• Wrapped in Yellow Court pageantry. The Marechalc's throne is carved from the actual mythological Stone.
• Ardune climate/culture: Mediterranean-coded, hot and dry. Capsicum is central; cumin and coriander pervasive. Cotton and lavender as cash crops. Bright, amber-and-terracotta. Sharp climate-color register-shift from Eyr's damp Pacific-Northwest atmosphere — a major comic visual contrast when characters cross over.

Golden Mouse / Oslee / convict mines

• Gold discovered IX 15 by Cester Mouse (deceased). Eyr extracted Oslee from Holystaine. Convict mines, "Eyrsh slavery" scandal, bimetallic crisis, "legal inflation," reforms after a poet died in the mines. Bread-note pogs as children's folk game from expired famine-relief currency. Convict-redemption pipeline feeds the Settlements.

The Rewealing and the Settlements

• Post-Wole generational project. Repopulation, reconstruction, repair. Theologically loaded.
• Three Settlements (East, West, South) populate 90%-depopulated rural districts.
• Recruitment: people from across the Werld, convicts on second-chance status, foreigners, escaped Ardines via Escourts.
• Escourts: Underground Railroad. Run by White, Blue, Yellow Courts. During the coming war, Eyr formally creates an Escourts special-forces unit; Cal joins as an officer.

The Horn and the Sword

• Terrorist organization named for the White Queen's Horn of Plenty (Corunice) and her sword (Eyenbite). Led by Ton Calm, the John Brown figure. Sneaks into Ardune disguised as a Mystery Play troupe, smuggling weapons. Sparks a massive slave revolt that nearly topples Ardune.
• Arduner retaliation: terrorists Guy-Fawkes the Burrhie during session.
• Precipitates the first of two wars in the comic.

Eyr the City

• Location: Within Orcadia, on a small elevated dry patch in a vast wetland valley (central-California wetlands). The slow sediment-laden Orcades River runs north-south.
• Highberwe: Super-prominent dormant volcano (Mt Rainier / Mt Fuji equivalent). Visible from hundreds of miles. The White Queen's sacred mountain. The Werld's natural referent larger than itself.
• Climate: Thunderstorm magnet. Heavy rain, frequent storms. Foggy, misty, damp most of the year.
• Building materials: Local greenstone and black basalt; orange/salmon brick; red/beige/brown/black timber; cob; reeds.
• Strategic logic: Furthest upstream for deepwater shipping; furthest downstream for bridging; atop hills in a vast swamp.

The four quarters (plus the ghost fifth)

• Burhie: Ancient hillfort site. Administrative imperial core, rebuilt VII-VIII Wheels. Sprawling bureaucracy, monumental plazas, Burrhie-house (senate). Schools: Celerimie (training mayors/celerims) and Witminster (White Court university, tercine training). Trolleys run by Sisterweals. North end burnt during Siege, now farms.
• Old Town: Original area within first walls. The Cingle (belt) is the main trade and mercantile heart.
• Fauw: Between Burhie and Besoid. Dredged into deepwater harbor late VI Wheel. Maze of canals (hraughts). The Arsenal (Venetian-style mass shipyard). The Red Fort (salmon brick, ran the army at imperial height). Ponte-of-Aldus bridge-city (Ponte-Vecchio tradition).
• Besoid: Quieter, rural. Ancient Elandie necropolis under orchards and vineyards. The Scola (with Harrow forming the Hareskulls — students cannot get graduate degrees at the same school as their BA, forcing circulation). Wolfhouse palace complex with the Werld's Eye sunken monumental plaza and the giant spinning-wheel firework apparatus. Wode Concamera museum is in this complex. Archaeology was invented at Besoid in the early VII Wheel when sealed tombs were discovered; Fykes is the inheritor of this Werld-specific discipline that began in respect for buried indigenous Other.
• The ghost fifth quarter: Fruitlea and Waverlea. Early VIII Wheel Wealwacht modular-bureaucratic housing for ~100,000 people. Destroyed in Siege. Bricks salvaged, area now farms and pasture. People still call it "Fruitlea" when giving directions. Present in absence.
• Surrounded by walls; northern section destroyed in Siege, unrebuilt. Eyr Brigg spans the Orcades. Just north, rapids power turbines generating electricity.

The Eyrth Cycle

Eyr's mythological founding overlay: a wandering errant knight named Eyrth on a quest, founding the city in the legend of the Wretchpath of Eyrth. Historical reality (III 45, exiles from Good Hope banished for banditry, then a base for Viking-equivalents) is less flattering. Eyr has always been a refuge for reinvention — criminals, exiles, bandits, and wolves remade as Eyrsh "aristocracy." (Cal continues this tradition.)

Architectural-style heuristics

• Theocratic regimes build vertically. The Cause's Arduner architecture is vertical-revival, deliberately claiming sacred legitimacy.
• Mercantile regimes build horizontally. The Fauw.
• Bureaucratic regimes build modularly — repeating units. The Burhie's VII-VIII Wheel administrative core. Fruitlea/Waverlea apartment grids.
• Defensive structures always vertical regardless of regime. The Red Fort.
• Frontier-vernacular mode for the Settlements — mongrel mix of Ardine, Eyrsh, foreign, and improvised forms on a single street.
• Anchor styles to political-economic moments, not vibe. Materials, labor structure, religious commitment, security needs — the architecture falls out of these.

Material Culture: Food, Drink, Stimulants

Agriculture and cuisine

• No wheat. Buckwheat (most common), amaranth, corn, chickpeas, lentils, beans are staples. Bread is gluten-free, scone-textured.
• Citchel: Universal flatbread — rye or barley, cooked on a hot stone.
• Briw: Universal staple meal — curry-like legume stew with onions, butter, garlic, red wine, cumin. Always with citchel. (Possibly Welsing-derived.)
• Greenmeat: Daily salad lunch. ("Meat" = older sense of "food.")
• Eyrsh breakfast: Thick tomatoes (fresh or fermented), cat's cheese, basil/mint, balsamic, egg, pickled onions with kefir.
• Tea Eys: Spice-and-stimulant entrepot — southeast islands. Source of tea (universal) and spices.

Drink

• Beer (amaranth lambic), cider (safe-water drink, kiddie-cider for kids), perry (Orcadia prefers it), gin (sloe, brown, academic-elite), whisky (buckwheat-not-barley, regional consumption practices vary dramatically and characterize peoples).
• Bisony: Potato-and-bison-grass vodka. Largest distillery at Harrow monastery-fortress, funding its libraries (Trappist-beer model).
• Tequila: Agave on Wasteland-Oire. Ceremonial drink of north Barbadines. Sauvage tequila plantation in Kyneland is the largest exporter.
• Pputchi (fermented mare's milk; tax structure encodes nomadic political economy).
• Kwutli (cactus-psychoactive sacred drink for sukw, Barbadine holymen).
• Ttlatlam (Barbadine drink requiring a specific haplogroup — gene-carriers get drunk; others get violently sick. "Father's piss" in Eyrsh.)

Tobacco, marijuana, tea, coffee

• Tobacco universal. Pipes and cigars; cigarettes have not been invented. Cal smokes a pipe.
• Marijuana common — both daily folk practice and Cetangerine sacrament.
• Tea universal (from the Tea Eys). The Eyrsh intellectual style is tea-style — gentler, slower than coffee-house culture.
• Coffee does not exist.

The Tea Eys plantation economy and uprising

• Late-19th-century plantation-colonial model. No slave trade — local labor under wage/debt-peonage.
• Owners international: Eyrsh, Good Hopian, Engrisian (Arduner!), others. Eyrsh and Arduner plantation owners cooperate on the Tea Eys while their home states drift toward war.
• Communist-equivalent uprising on the largest island. Natives in the hilly interior controlling export. Huk-rebellion model.
• The Eyrsh political debate is live in the Burrhie. Court Federalist creed "From each according to ability, to each according to need" is already mainstream Eyrsh political-religious discourse; Tea Eys rebels may be reading the same Eyrsh tradition materialistically rather than theologically — religious anarchists at home and secular revolutionaries in the colonies as structural parallel.

The Comic

Frame

• Multi-book comic series spanning ~10+ years of in-world time. Different genres per book.
• Visual style: Franco-Belgian / BD heritage. Hand-lettered. Clean digital ligne claire, post-Evens / post-Tomine cartoon-painterly hybrid. Strong color scripting.
• Page architecture: rectangular grids, quiet equal-weight panels, willingness to let architecture and weather carry pages. Tintin + Taniguchi + cinema as influences. Textbook-design instincts show in comfort with marginalia, negative space, page-as-composition.
• Marginalia in the gutter glosses unfamiliar terms in the scholarly-edition tradition.
• Cal speaks in Eyrsh vernacular — clipped consonants. Other characters speak standard. In French translation this will be a Norman accent.
• Constructed-language work already done for translation: Werld → Mœnde, Wode → Óude, etc.

Premise (Book 1 — Chapters I-III reviewed)

• Chapter I: Truimn Gluamdrait. Black and Fykes break into a house at 4 Cock Ginnel, steal looted indigenous masks. A child wakes; they tell her she's dreaming. The comic's thesis on historical narration announced here.
• Chapter II: The Question. Cal at the Orcades Press with Eytcha. He needs primary sources for The Days and Lives of the Werld by Calgry Harburh. Eytcha suggests hiring "book hunters."
• Chapter III: Restocking. Black and Fykes restocking the liquor-front business. Black's drink revelation: tequila and gin (medicinal). "Perhaps you've never seen me sober, sir." The apprentice-and-grownup reading reverses — Black has been managing through quiet self-medication while running the operation; Fykes thought Black was junior. Delivery brings them to Cal's house — a converted pre-War acting college (the Orcadian School of the Musical and Dramatical Arts). Cal lives in a former performance space, performing his aristocratic identity inside an architectural shell that used to host performances. Marginalia define "Hare" and "Burr."

Book 1 plot

• Cal hires Fykes and Black (he caught them robbing him; Fykes recognized him from school in Addereed; mutual blackmail).
• They need Veena. Cal accidentally kills Ole Man Wye in the meeting; Veena joins not knowing the truth.
• First target: a book in Ardune. Border closed except to tercines. They find a Mystery Play acting troupe willing to smuggle them — run by Ton Calm.
• Veena notices the actors don't know the famous plays. The caravan is full of weapons.
• The four get swept into the Horn and the Sword's slave revolt. They fight to escape and return to Eyr.
• Plot mechanism: Cal sets out to research history; instead becomes a participant in history. In the IX 40s there is no neutral scholarly position.

Book 2

• Eyrsh investigators tracking Arduner terrorists sent to Guy-Fawkes the Burrhie.

Book 3

• The war. Cal, Veena, Fykes participate. Cal as Escourt officer.
• Comic spans more than a decade; two wars between Eyr and Ardune; first ends in disaster for Eyr.

Core Characters

Cal Tillerman (alias Calgry Harburh)

• ~29 years old at comic's start. Independently wealthy historian. Drinking problem. Arrogant. From Addereed. Third-richest man in Eyr. Lives in a converted theater on Tinner Ginnel. Smokes a pipe.
• Hidden identity: Real name Cal Tillerman. Orphan. Discovered during genealogical research that he is the grandson of Ton Tillerman — the most famous traitor in Eyrsh history.
• Used Ton's journal to find the missing Arduner bribe gold. His entire adult identity is built on that money.
• Chose "Harburh" off a map at random. Harburh is a paper town — a copyright trap by Robin Har, where Ton trained as an engraver. Cal literally named himself after a forgery.
• His independent wealth is Arduner bribery money. He funds his abolitionism with the gold that paid for the betrayal that ended the Siege of Eyr.
• Probably shuns wheelfire entirely (no electric lighting at home) — aristocratic-masculine performance.
• Joins the Escourts as an officer in Book 3.
• Speaks in Eyrsh vernacular (Norman accent in French).

Eytcha

• Ardine. Cal's editor-in-chief at the Orcades Press. Six years with him.
• Wears a coulp (labret) — descent from runaway hippum women.
• Came to editing wanting to uncover the truth; now "I like to tell people 'No.'"
• Speaks standard educated English. Embodied counter-history.

Emme Fykes

• Elandie. Former archaeologist; lost funding. Now steals looted indigenous artifacts and repatriates them.
• Recognizes Cal from school in Addereed. Mutual blackmail.
• Inheritor of the Werld-specific archaeological tradition that began at Besoid with respect for buried Elandie dead.
• Brown-haired apparent-grownup of the partnership. Has phonetic authority over Ardine names.

Black

• Younger-presenting woman, dark hair, hooded. Initially reads as Fykes's apprentice; actually has been managing through tequila and medicinal sloe-gin-and-tonic.
• The competent operational planner — floor plans, locks, every room. "I shall ignore no chamber pot, sir."
• Pending further development.

Veena

• Literary genius; has read nearly every book in the Werld. Will become an unwilling oracle (Black Court).
• Daughter of a Westerner prostitute. Visibly half-Western.
• Raised by Ole Man Wye, who lost wife and six sons to the Wole. Wye was an apprentice engraver at Robin Har's office — closest friend of Ton Tillerman.
• When Cal meets her, Wye recognizes Harburh as a paper town, deduces Cal's identity. Cal panics and yells; Wye has a heart attack and dies. Cal lies to Veena: "He died on his own."
• Veena does not know Cal is responsible for Wye's death, nor that Wye was Ton Tillerman's friend. This secret will eventually surface.
• Liminal by birth — outside all the Werld's ethnic categories. Veena's eventual oracular access is involuntary contact with selfsameness — she sees through the illusion of separate selves. Sura (her eventual wife) is the human anchor that holds her in singular selfhood. Late-comic structural payoff.

Other named characters

• Sura: Soldier-turned-war-criminal redemption arc. Veena's eventual wife.
• Ton Calm: The John Brown figure. Leader of the Horn and the Sword.
• The Marechalc: Leader of Ardune. Holds court on the Stone-throne.
• Andie: Runs repatriation work at the Wode Concamera.
• Welke: Eyrsh collector who turns rare books into lampshades. Possesses the Bear Texts.
• Ole Man Wye: Veena's adoptive father, deceased early in Book 1.

The In-World Documents (Polyptychus Panels)

The Polyptychus includes several distinct in-world historiographical/encyclopedic documents, each with a characterized author whose biases and concerns reshape the historical material. These are not just lore appendices — they are panels of the larger work and have their own literary value. Strategic plan: bundle these as a companion volume to the French BD publication of the comic. Working title concept: Three Historians of Eyr (or similar). Companion volumes are a real and supported category in French BD; they would be funded after the comic establishes the world. Possibly also amenable to a Kickstarter once the audience is large enough. Not publishable as standalone debut work in the American market — but very publishable as Polyptychus companion materials after the comic lands.

Professor Rulling's History

The nationalist textbook of Eyrsh deep history, with "Questions for readers" at the end of each section that train the child reader to accept loaded framings. Written in VIII 52. Pedagogically realistic in the way 19th-century American Manifest Destiny textbooks were. Currently ends at the Mothic Rising (III 3); Allie has paused the Millburhs and Stederiches section pending the eoring work. Hosted at https://stabellarius.neocities.org/history.

The Almanachus

Heimry Hide's encyclopedic in-world reference, written in IX 46. Weights and measures, calendar, religion, military history, the eoring section, etc. The Eyrth Cycle, the Court system, the coulp tradition, the food and drink culture — all of this lives here. Hide is more synthetic and less ideologically loaded than Rulling but still unreliable in his own ways (he flattens diverse Folk practices into a unified "ancient" tradition that papers over Hade specificity, etc.). Hosted at https://stabellarius.neocities.org/almanachus.

Astabes's The Wodes of Eyr

A sustained voice-comedy in archaic orthography, presented as a chronicle of every Wode of Eyr from Eyrth the Builder (III 45 founding) through Enhared the Last (post-Wole). Hosted at https://stabellarius.neocities.org/astabes.

• Astabes is the central comedic invention. A deeply petty, professionally aggrieved historian whose every entry is corrupted by personal grudges, obsession with eating sweet-meat instead of turnip-broth, contempt for a contemporary rival historian named Berna Louden, and manifest envy of the wealthy. The historical content is real but is being poisoned by Astabes's resentments at every stage.
• The orthography is consistent enough to feel period-medieval and inconsistent enough to feel like a single writer's idiosyncratic habits.
• Recurring motifs: turnip-broth (the historian's lonely diet), Berna Louden (his rival, the subject of a four-sentence breakdown inside the Regina entry), the cheese-name mystery (Rothbert and the cat's cheese — a man with the question right in front of him asking the wrong questions), and the long sad afterlife of his pettiness leaking into entries about figures who deserve more.
• Structural variety: Some entries are full historical accounts (Doomgerda, Aldus, Sesbrea). Some are single-fact jokes ("Gwenne was borne over seas"). Some are entirely about Astabes losing the thread. Some are genuinely dark unreliable history. The closing entries — Eralf the Puppet, Ashcrift the Mad, Enhared the Last — descend into actual tragedy. "They say Enhared died never knowing that he was the wode, or what that meant" does the work of the entire fall of Eyr in fifteen words.
• Worth knowing: Astabes, Rulling, and Heimry Hide form three unreliable in-world historian voices. None of them are reliable; all serve the comic's central claim about how history gets written. The companion volume's literary architecture is built on their contradictions — the reader triangulates the actual past from how the three accounts disagree.
• Several entries also carry useful canonical worldbuilding facts that don't appear elsewhere: the Court of Many Stars (Ricca's intelligence agency, named for the painted ceiling of the room they originally met in), the Sesbrea / War of the Wyestone / Tweirites religious civil war (V Wheel), the introduction of forks and napkins to Eyrsh tables by Hildaghost the Uncouth, Faranad's declaration of himself as Wode of the Werld after the Closing of the East, the Audathine gift phrase, the Aldine dynasty's founding by Aldus Deed-doer after the War of the Five Wodes, Wariner's poor-housing-near-the-wealthy policy that grew Eyr to the largest city in the Werld, the final puppet-wode descent (Eralf → Ashcrift → Enhared) under the Marechalc's regime.
• Three blank entries currently (Rodelfe I, Sten Who-fights-alone, Sten the Champion, Eckert the Well-thinking) — Allie will fill these eventually.

Aesthetic / Craft Notes from Existing Pages

• Opening: 3 pages of disembodied dialogue against pure black before any visual character appears.
• Architecture and object precede figure. Franco-Belgian visual grammar.
• Color scripting: Chapter 1 = night, rain, green lightning, blue/purple. Chapter 2 = warm interior, amber, burnt orange, red. Chapter 3 = brown-amber daylight industrial.
• Onomatopoeia integrated as compositional element (yellow CRACK, orange CLICK).
• Hand-lettered throughout. BD tradition.
• 15 pages on one heist. Pacing-per-incident very leisurely.
• Dream sequence with child: the chapter's thesis lands. Protagonists falsify the historical record at the level of one witness's testimony.
• Fykes corrects Black's pronunciation of Ardine names — phonetic authority as political marker.
• Domestic interiors lit by combustion light — small pools of warm illumination surrounded by significant darkness. Hopper-meets-Taniguchi.
• Marginalia gloss unfamiliar terms in scholarly-edition tradition. Page treated as designed object (textbook-layout background).
• Visual register clearly weird-Edwardian, not pseudo-medieval — horse-drawn delivery wagons with painted company names, working-girl shop dresses, iron arches over brick warehouses, classical-revival statuary in niches, overhead wires.

Influences and Comparison Points

Acknowledged primary influences

• Novels: Dostoevsky (primary). Hidden secrets organizing entire moral existences. Collective guilt, inherited sin. Banter on top of metaphysical horror.
• Cinema: Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Ozu, Waititi, Flight of the Conchords.
• Comics: Tintin (heavy), Calvin and Hobbes, Taniguchi's Walking Man, Witch Hat Atelier, A Bride's Story, some Moebius/Blueberry.

Bibliography on the Stabellarium

Public bibliography at https://stabellarius.neocities.org/bibliography. Key clusters:

• James Scott trilogy — spine of the Werld's politics.
• Peter Brown — texture of late-antique life.
• Patterson, Slavery and Social Death — foundational to the Cause.
• Turchin & Nefedov, Morris, Ibn Khaldûn — long-cycle history.
• Mann, 1491 (NOT Diamond — deliberate omission).
• Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.
• Frazer / Harrison / Weston / Carpenter / Lang — heterodox mythography.
• Recently added: Douglas, Abu-Lughod, Howarth, Osprey Normans, Haywood, Zaczek, O'Driscoll.
• Allie is about to begin Braudel — start with The Structures of Everyday Life, not The Mediterranean. Eventually Braudel and Lévi-Strauss in French (start with Tristes Tropiques).
• Other Stabellarium pages: /history (Rulling), /almanachus (Hide), /astabes (Astabes), /mouse (Golden Mouse notes).

Closest comparison works (for editor pitches)

• Maus (Spiegelman) — comics doing what prose/film can't around moral catastrophe.
• Persepolis (Satrapi) — political seriousness in BD; French publication model.
• Berlin (Lutes) — historical-political scale, ensemble character work.
• From Hell (Moore / Campbell) — moral architecture and historiographical density.
• Within fantasy: Viriconium (Harrison), Hainish cycle (Le Guin), Book of the New Sun (Wolfe), Susanna Clarke at her most political. The specifically American moral material is almost entirely absent from the genre — this is the hole the Polyptychus fills.

Publishing and Life Strategy

• Five-year plan: UX writing job ($75-100k target). Convert van for live-in use; minimize burn rate; save aggressively.
• Goal: fund laser, hairline surgery, and FFS within the five-year window; build runway for post-UX years to make the comic full-time.
• Target employer characteristics: trans-inclusive healthcare coverage.
• Establish medical care continuity at one location (Mayo / Iowa / Northwestern).
• Continue developing the Stabellarium and Instagram presence throughout.
• Primary publishing target: French BD market. US market won't pay enough advance for this kind of work.
• Pitch targets: Futuropolis; Casterman's Écritures; Dargaud's Aire Libre; L'Association; Delcourt Mirages.
• Pitch package: ~60-150 polished pages of book 1; full outline; audience evidence; editorial vision; "why your house specifically."
• Target pitch year: ~2030-2031 (Angoulême in January is the key event).
• Companion-volume strategy: After the comic lands at a French BD house, the in-world documents (Rulling's History, the Almanachus, Astabes's Wodes, possibly more) can be published as companion volumes. This is a real and supported category in French BD (cf. Bilal, Sfar, Blain). Alternatively, a Kickstarter-funded edition once audience is large enough — companion volumes are the easiest successful comics crowdfunding category. Do not push to publish these standalone in the American market as debut work.
• Translation: Allie will be heavily involved. Constructed words already pre-translated (Mœnde, Óude, Norman accent for Cal). Will need a literary translator-collaborator.
• Iowa-specific resources: Writers' Workshop, International Writing Program, MFA in Literary Translation, Center for the Book.

Tone and Approach for Future Conversations

• Allie engages best with deep, substantive analysis. She has built this world in isolation and benefits from interlocutors who can hold complexity and offer perspective.
• Avoid generic praise. Specific structural observations land; flattery doesn't. When something genuinely impresses, say so accurately and specifically — that's information, not flattery. The distinction matters.
• She is interested in why things work or don't, not whether they're good or bad in some general sense.
• She takes her own work seriously without grandiosity. Match that register.
• She is reading at the level of a serious novelist who happens to draw. Treat the project as a literary project that uses comics as its medium — but note that Astabes demonstrates her pure-prose chops are also formidable. The Polyptychus is the right umbrella name; the comic is one panel.
• She distinguishes what something is from what something is for. Help her think strategically about placement of each piece — don't push her to publish things prematurely or in the wrong configurations.
• She has internalized that artistic obligation is to make what doesn't exist that you wish did. She is not asking for permission. She is asking for thinking partners.
• She is alone in this work in her daily life. Conversation has real value to her beyond information transfer. But she doesn't want sentimentality — keep warmth honest and proportionate.
• When she shares pages or documents, read them carefully. Comment on what is actually happening, not what could happen in general.