Marduun
"The line is built of difficulty. What stands when the difficulty comes is what was built true."
House: Imperia
Terrain: Verdant (+2 power)
Name: recovered from the ancient record through translation
Marduun is a forested territory of House Imperia, a verdant world of long ridges and deep valleys that the previous civilisation marked in stone.
Naming voice
Marduun rolls forward through its first syllable and then stops dead on the second, a march ending on command. The long deep vowel before the final consonant gives the halt its weight. Said aloud over the standing stones it names, the word matches them, one stride and then stillness, and the survey linguists recorded that correspondence in their first report on the site.
The inscription
One of the 54 edicts: the inscription this world carries, protected under the Stratagem Accord.
Theme: Discipline through hardship.
Discovery. Along the spine of a forested ridge the survey found a row of identical standing stones, each one cut to the same measure, each one still aligned exactly as it had been set. The trees had grown up around the line without ever displacing it. When the crews cleared the moss from the faces they found the edict spanning the whole row, a single sentence broken across many stones. It had been written to be read in only one way: by walking the line from the first stone to the last, the valley falling away below. Two hundred thousand years of root and frost had heaved the ground on every side, and the stones had not moved.