DESHRET GUIDE / HELP / LORE / DESHRET In play: help deshret. Also setting, history, the burning, city, ac, primer, lore primer, founding. IN THIS TOPIC 6 The City Who Holds Power Loyalty The Burning The Founders Digging DownDeshret: the last city, built downward into the earth after the surface burned.
The City
After a solar catastrophe scorched the surface, the world went underground to survive. That was a long time ago, and nobody really remembers how long, or what the world before was like. What is left of humanity lives in Deshret, a megastructure of a city dug down into the earth.
The have-nots live near the top, close to the poisoned surface. The elite live far beneath them. The social ladder is turned upside down: in Deshret, if you want to rise in society, you have to descend.
Who Holds Power
The city is held by a regime that governs through scarcity. Not just scarcity of food and materials, though there is that too, but scarcity of knowledge. It decides which technologies exist and which are forgotten, which histories are taught and which never happened. The truth is a controlled substance in Deshret.
On paper, the city is ruled by the Pagos, a council dominated by the nine Great Houses. These are dynastic families who have spent generations building their power, each with its own culture that you can be born into or work for. Beside them stand the Six Guilds, the economic and industrial powerhouses of the city. Like corporations, each guild holds its own floors and its own trade, from bioengineering to the entertainment industry and its music, shows, vices, and blood sports.
The upper floors are a different world: chaotic, crowded, and half free. Farmers run the production floor with its fungal fields and protein vats. The tech bazaar packs stalls so tight you squeeze sideways between them to buy bootleg guild tech. The slums are underserved and looked down on, but they have built their own way of life, technically under the state's authority and practically on their own.
Loyalty
Whether you join a guild is up to you. Being guilded has its perks, and that is the core dilemma: is selling your soul and your individuality worth a better material life? The things that mattered in the old world do not matter here. Your ethnicity, your sex, where you came from: those are concepts of a dead world. In Deshret, a person is defined by their loyalties. The House you belong to or serve, the guild that owns you, the favours you are owed and the ones you owe back.
The Burning
This is the public truth, the version every lawful citizen is taught. About 400 years ago the world ended in what is called the Burning. Whatever exactly happened is lost. Sepulchre's version is that humanity grew too ambitious with technology: free-thinking machines, towers of light reaching the clouds, attempts to reach beyond the boundaries of the soul. The Earth was scorched. Cities melted, oceans boiled, soil turned to glass, and the air became unbreathable.
The calendar counts from that ruin, so the current year is 386 AC. From it comes the core doctrine of the city: technology must be kept under strict control so the catastrophe never happens again. Sepulchre keeps that duty. It preaches that to yearn for the world above is sin, and that one should aspire to dig deeper. The closer you live to the scorched sky, the more danger you are in, and not only spiritual danger. The hazards of the surface really do seep in.
The Founders
The city began when nine people, the Founders, saw the Burning coming and led a group down into the earth. Old slum poetry calls them the Argonauts, for reasons nobody can explain. They dug the first galleries and set down the first laws. Today they are gone, and the Church venerates them as Saints. Their leader was Marrow, the Prophet. His teaching is the heart of the city's doctrine: technology and greed destroyed the old world, the surface is damned, and the people must stay underground, safe under the loving thumb of the Founders.
Digging Down
The city started small and has dug ever downward. Deeper floors are more prestigious, safer, and further from the radiation above. The surface-adjacent floors are the slums, with farms, workshops, and the gate to the surface. The middle floors hold the commercial and guild districts, home to guild headquarters and the residential blocks of the sixers, the guild members. The deepest floors hold the estates of the Great Houses, a few of the richer lesser Houses, and the Cathedral.
Read next: help life in deshret, help districts, help guilds, help great houses, and help glossary.
NEARBY [P] COTERIE [N] DISTRICTS LORE 36 Abkal Cabiri Coterie Deshret Districts Diving Glossary Great Houses Guilds House Amari House Drepane House Kadesh House Morcant House Qamarat House Rook House Valcora House Varga House Vesalius Kolkhos Languages Law Life In Deshret Materials Mythos Ophirian League Outriders Pegasus Religion Saints Seals Sepulchre Splicers Symphony Technology The Hum Vulcani
On the Agora: https://agora.underspire.net/t/general-lore-primer/28 and https://agora.underspire.net/t/the-beginning-of-deshret/29