Aurelin
"The desert keeps nothing it cannot hold. Fortune runs to the open hand and the bold step, and is gone from the one who hesitates to close on it."
House: Solari
Terrain: Duneclad (+1 power)
Name: recovered from the ancient record through translation
Aurelin is a Solari desert territory, a world of dune-covered terrain where the old civilisation learned to gather light out of an open and unforgiving sky.
Naming voice
Aurelin starts wide, the broad double vowel of its opening taking up half the word, and then narrows step by step to the thin bright syllable at the end. Read aloud it tapers the way a desert horizon tapers toward a single point of glare. The house's linguists use it in teaching for exactly that reason, a recovered name whose shape can be heard before its meaning is known.
The inscription
One of the 54 edicts: the inscription this world carries, protected under the Stratagem Accord.
Theme: Boldness.
Discovery. Under the shifting dunes the crews uncovered a mirrored-alloy solar array, preserved whole by the dry sand that had buried it. The moment the last of the sand slid away, the collector surfaces caught the sun and threw it back at full strength. The workers in the cleared hollow shielded their eyes from a machine that had not seen light in geological memory. The edict was etched into the central collector at the array's focus, the exact point where all that gathered brightness converged. Across the whole span of its burial the surface had stayed bright. The first work the machine did with the returned sun was to light its own words.