Kessroth
"The ground shifts under the slow, so move, and move again before it sets, for every opening you seize opens two more."
House: Kael
Terrain: Verdant (+2 power)
Name: recovered from the ancient record through translation
Kessroth is the second of House Kael's forest territories, a verdant world that carries one of the edicts on the deck of an ancient launch site. The site has stood empty for two hundred thousand years, since the civilisation that built it vanished from the Solace system.
Naming voice
Kessroth catches in the middle and snaps shut at the end, a doubled hiss against a clipped final stop, and it carries the fractured rhythm the old Kael put into everything they named. It is a name built like their machines were built, for departure rather than for rest.
The inscription
One of the 54 edicts: the inscription this world carries, protected under the Stratagem Accord.
Theme: Speed / momentum.
Discovery. The clearing is not natural. A Drive-launch deck of fused alloy runs the length of it, a long flat ribbon of metal the forest has crowded but never managed to cover. At its far end the deck simply stops, the ground dropping away beneath it into open sky. The ancient Kael launched from here. The survey crews walked the deck to its edge and found the edict cut into the lip itself, the last metre a departing pilot would have crossed at speed. The words were placed for the final instant before the deck gave way to flight. The crews took them down on foot, kneeling at a lip every earlier reader had crossed too fast to stop.