Kestrun
"What stood through the worst storm is your foundation. Build upon it, build above it, and do not move what has already proven it can hold."
House: Imperia
Terrain: Glacian (+1 power)
Name: recovered from the ancient record through translation
Kestrun is an ice world in the holdings of House Imperia, a glacian territory where the cold has been the only constant for as long as the rock has had a surface.
Naming voice
Kestrun splits cleanly down its middle, a sharp front syllable breaking off a blunt one, the way lake ice breaks along a line. There is no way to slur the name; the consonant cluster at its centre forces a small pause even in fast speech. The house's archivists like to point out that the previous civilisation gave its coldest world a name the mouth cannot hurry through.
The inscription
One of the 54 edicts: the inscription this world carries, protected under the Stratagem Accord.
Theme: Endurance as foundation.
Discovery. Near the pole the survey found a stone vault locked deep inside the glacier, sealed there long before the ice above it had finished forming. The crews cut through the outer sheet by stages, working in the blue light the ice itself carried down. The saws reached stone, and the stone opened onto an inner wall that carried the edict whole. The cold had been absolute for the entire age of its burial, and it had spared the carving from every kind of wear. The survey's first photographs show edges so clean that the analysts at first suspected a recent forgery. The builders had chosen the one place on Kestrun where nothing would ever change.