The seven royal families — Thrarhix, Akturus, Kymanix, Fannix, Rowan, Segir, and Lunaris — are
They are frequently in conflict. This is not a malfunction of the system. The conflict is the system. The families compete over trade licenses, property claims, channeling contracts, marriage arrangements, and the interpretation of legal precedents that were written before anyone currently alive was born. Nobody quite agrees on how those conflicts are settled. What is generally acknowledged is that they are, somehow, settled — and that the inner districts are still standing.
The Thrarhix family’s authority is difficult to articulate precisely and impossible to ignore. They hold no single domain — no trade monopoly, no military command, no specific infrastructure contract. What they hold is older than any of those things. Those who know better describe Thrarhix as the family that the other six remember to be careful around.
Heiran Thrarhix is the current patriarch. He is very old, even by High Caste standards, and those who deal with the family report that he is still sharp — a fact the other families find more uncomfortable than reassuring. No one has seen him directly in decades. Correspondence arrives. Decisions emerge. The patriarch’s absence from visible life has not, by any observable measure, reduced his family’s influence.
Whether Heiran Thrarhix is in excellent health and simply prefers not to be seen, or whether something more complicated is occurring, is a question that circulates in private conversations in the inner districts. Nobody asks it where the Thrarhix household staff might hear.
The Akturus family supplies and commands the city’s inner guard — the soldiers who patrol the central districts, staff the checkpoints between caste zones, and appear in significant numbers whenever two other families are conducting negotiations that might go badly. Whether this makes them defenders of public order or the most expensive insurance policy in Soltherra is a matter of interpretation.
Their reputation is one of deliberate, practiced competence. Akturus does not do things carelessly. Akturus does not make public threats. What Akturus does is be present, consistently and in force, at moments when presence alone communicates the point.
Veran Akturus is the current patriarch. He is one of the younger patriarchs by High Caste standards, a relative term that still implies several centuries. He is said to be methodical and personally unpleasant in the way of people who have had nothing to prove for a very long time.
The Akturus-Kymanix relationship is the coldest of the major family rivalries. Kymanix controls information; Akturus controls force. Each finds the other’s domain illegitimate in a way that is never directly stated and always present.
The Kymanix family controls Soltherra’s legal record. Title deeds, trade contracts, debt instruments, memory vessels used as binding witnesses in disputes — if a document has legal standing in this city, there is a reasonable probability that a Kymanix-licensed notary sealed it. Kymanix does not own this function officially. They simply own every institution that performs it, and have done so for long enough that the distinction has stopped mattering.
This makes them extraordinarily useful and exactly as dangerous as that implies. A Kymanix debt record does not expire. A Kymanix contract clause is precise in ways that often only become apparent years after signing. Several other families carry long-standing obligations to Kymanix that they have never fully discharged. Whether this is because the obligations are unpayable or because Kymanix finds them more valuable outstanding is unclear.
Soran Kymanix is the current patriarch. He is notably young by High Caste standards — which is to say, other patriarchs remember a time before him, and find this fact worth remembering. He is described as pleasant in conversation and unhurried. People who have signed agreements with him describe him the same way, later, with different emphasis.
The Kymanix-Rowan tension is the most publicly observable of the family conflicts — Rowan carries documented debt obligations that Kymanix has never called in, and both families are aware that this is not generosity.
The Fannix family controls caravan licensing and import rights. Goods entering the city from outside the walls route through Fannix-approved channels, and Fannix-approved channels extract a percentage. This is legal. It is also the closest thing to a private taxation authority that any family openly maintains.
Their reputation is pragmatic. Fannix does not claim to be doing anything other than business. They will negotiate. They will accommodate. They will find terms. Whether those terms are reasonable depends entirely on how much you need what they are moving and how few alternatives you have. In practice, most people have limited alternatives.
The family’s connection to Soltherra’s black market trade is suspected and unprovable. The suspicion is old enough that some consider it simply part of the Fannix profile — the way that a river is suspected of being wet. The family responds to such suggestions with polite disinterest.
Orik Fannix is the current patriarch. He is large for inner-caste norms, which is itself considered a mild statement of intent.
The ongoing Fannix-Segir conflict concerns dock access fees and the right to prioritize certain cargo in harbor loading. It has been in formal dispute for eleven years, with no resolution in sight.
The Rowan family owns land. Specific, documented, uncontested land — or land that was uncontested until some development shifted the boundaries, at which point Rowan’s position is that the original documentation supersedes subsequent interpretation. Their holdings include several major buildings in the inner districts, the primary Roof Garden leases on the central mountain’s upper tier, and a number of property claims in the middle districts that are technically under ongoing review.
This gives them a particular quality of wealth: slow, unglamorous, and very difficult to erode. Rowan does not chase trade. Rowan does not control armies. Rowan waits. The patience is generational, and in a family of near-immortals, generational patience is a strategic posture.
Daric Rowan is the current patriarch. He is old even by High Caste standards. Those who have met him describe someone who is not in a hurry and who considers most disputes to be, ultimately, a question of who is still present when the noise stops. He is not wrong that this strategy has served the family well.
Rowan’s debt to Kymanix is one of the open facts of inner-district politics. What it covers and why it has never been called in are questions that other families ask privately and Rowan declines to answer publicly.
The Segir family controls the southern docks and the infrastructure supporting Soltherra’s fishing industry. This makes them unusual among the royal families in one specific way: they have regular, unavoidable dealings with the lower castes and with the outer districts. The docks employ Lower Caste and Casteless workers. Fish is the cheapest protein in the city. The people who make both of those facts possible work for Segir-managed operations.
Their reputation splits cleanly along caste lines. In the outer districts, Segir is understood as the least-bad option among families that are not good options — the one that needs the docks to function and therefore needs the workers to function and therefore has a structural incentive toward not making the workers’ lives impossible. This is not affection. It is a calculation. But in Soltherra, a structural incentive toward not making your workers’ lives impossible is a more meaningful distinction than it might first appear.
In the inner districts, Segir is considered coarse. They smell of the docks. Their patriarch speaks to lower-caste workers in person rather than through intermediaries. This is found distasteful.
Maret Segir is the current patriarch. He attends the Roof Garden markets in the morning on Earth Day without a visible escort, which other family heads regard as eccentric at best. He claims this is because you learn things by moving through the city. Nobody argues the point directly.
The Segir-Fannix dispute over dock fees and cargo prioritization is the most active formal conflict between the families, and has been for over a decade.
The Lunaris family licenses channelers. Specifically, they control the examination and certification process that determines which channelers are permitted to perform work on the city’s major magical infrastructure — the whisper-stone relay network, the light-bearer circuits, the lifting frames used in construction, and the memory vessel witness-sealing apparatus that Kymanix depends on to do its work. Lunaris does not build any of this infrastructure. They determine who is qualified to maintain it.
The power this gives them is structural and subtle. A channeler who is not Lunaris-certified can practice in limited contexts. A channeler who is Lunaris-certified can work on the infrastructure that the entire city runs on. The certification process is thorough, difficult, and administered exclusively by Lunaris-approved examiners. Their standards are rigorous. Their pass rate communicates those standards clearly.
This creates a recurring conflict with Akturus, who maintains its own corps of military channelers and has historically sought to expand their operational scope into infrastructure maintenance — arguing that trained military channelers should be interchangeable with certified infrastructure channelers. Lunaris holds that these are different certifications for good technical reasons. The dispute has been raised, reviewed, and raised again. Akturus’s position has not changed.
Isara Lunaris is the current patriarch. The name causes occasional pause among those meeting the family for the first time. Isara Lunaris is a man. The name’s origin is not discussed publicly and the patriarch shows no interest in discussing it privately. He is described as precise in conversation and impatient with questions about anything other than the matter at hand.
See also: Society and the Caste System · Culture: Roles · Culture: Names · Culture: Intimacy · The Arena · Corruption
© Soltherra RPG System