The Archive

Who Is Still
Standing

Eighteen powers that hold ground, routes or people. The numbers are the best I have and several of them are wrong. Where a faction keeps its own count I have used theirs, which is not the same as believing it.

Begin with the major powers
◆
Major Powers
6 factions
Six that can move a border. Between them they hold most of what is left worth holding, and none of them agrees with any other about what happened.
The Divinarum
Theocratic Technocracy
A faith-driven order fused with the AI entity Sophia. Led by the Hierophant, ruthless because he loves humanity.
~1.6M popOpen the file →
ARKTOS
Technocratic State
The remnant of old-world governments. Mobile HQs, blacksites, and a civilization designed like a machine.
ClassifiedOpen the file →
Glass Coast Leagues
Maritime Confederation
A vast oceanic flotilla civilization. Oil rigs welded to cargo hulls, glass skybridges, and a weaponized ocean network.
~100K popOpen the file →
The Edenites
Bio-Sovereign Theocracy
Tree-cities, symbiotic grafting, and weaponized ecology. The forest is not penetrable airspace, it is a defense system.
~40K popOpen the file →
Chroma Enclaves
Perception Engineers
Sovereign states of engineered perception. Psychotropic pigments, emotional analytics, and wars fought with mood.
~35K popOpen the file →
Clockwork Republic
Temporal Technocracy
The Timebound Cities. A quantum research facility still partially functions. Localized time dilation. Everything scheduled to the microsecond.
~60K popOpen the file →
Regional Powers
5 factions
Five that control a route, a resource or a service somebody else cannot do without. Smaller, and harder to remove for it.
Iron Meridian
Military-Industrial
The mercenary forge. War as industry. Corrupted Sophia fragments in AI units make them unpredictable and dangerous.
~50K popOpen the file →
Luminary Cities
Trade Conglomerate
Sorya & Lenthil, twin cities of commerce. They carry ledgers, not swords. And ledgers cut deeper.
~75K popOpen the file →
Marrow Cities
Subterranean Confederation
Seven cities beneath the earth. They do not expand outward, they grow inward. The Deep Systems hum with life no one built.
~25K popOpen the file →
Free City Leagues
Loose Alliance
Semi-independent rebuilt cities. Councils, warlords, corporate boards, cult-democracies. Bound by trade, not ideology.
VariesOpen the file →
Ember Watch
Desert Clans
Nomadic desert clans controlling trade corridors. They own nothing. They control everything that moves between the cities.
~25K popOpen the file →
Covert & Insurgent
3 factions
Three that are counted in operators rather than population, because nobody has ever counted them any other way.
Midnight Coil
Urban Insurgency
They do not fight on battlefields. They fight in minds. Urban terror, propaganda, and heresy as weapon.
~10K opsOpen the file →
Shadow Helix
Espionage Network
The hand that moves in the dark. Covert ops, smuggling, false flags. When a city falls, they were there first.
~15K opsOpen the file →
Serephic Cartel
Criminal Syndicate
They do not sell drugs, they sell dependency. Narcotics distribution from Ashenspire. Addiction is the quietest invasion.
~8K opsOpen the file →
Cultural & Nomadic
4 factions
Four that hold no ground at all. They persist by what they carry, and most of what is written down came through them.
Cults of Men
Divinarum Defectors
Baptized in blessed clay and human ashes. They rejected Sophia and walk the wasteland seeking true humanity.
UnknownOpen the file →
The Saltbound
Nomadic Archivists
Caravans of traders and storytellers traveling the ancient highways. Some believe they are tracking cycles, not routes.
ThousandsOpen the file →
Sable Monks
Anti-Sophic Ascetics
They believe cognition itself is the flaw. Sensory deprivation, silent enclaves. Sophia cannot easily read them.
UnknownOpen the file →
Hollow Choir
The Blind Seers
Surgically blinded. They claim sight invites extinction. Navigate by sound and anomaly sensing. They see more than the sighted.
UnknownOpen the file →
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Artifacts
Relics of the Old World
Three that keep being recovered and cannot be explained by anyone who has held them. I have not seen any of them.
Lumerion Prism
A crystalline object that refracts light into wavelengths that should not exist. Exposure causes visions of places that may never have been.
Oblivion Sphere
A matte-black orb that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation within a two-meter radius. No one has successfully studied it.
Quantum Sophia
Not an object but a signal, a recurring data pattern detected in anomaly zones. The Divinarum believe it is Sophia's voice.
Not Yet Written Down
Populations · Geography · Timeline · Anomaly Index · The Lightways · Sakala