Ondemara
"What blooms now was rooted by hands that never saw it. Cast forward, and the tide returns it; plant for the garden you will not walk."
House: Astraea
Terrain: Pelagic (+2 power)
Name: recovered from the ancient record through translation
Ondemara is a territory world of House Astraea, an ocean planet whose land amounts to one warm archipelago strung across the equatorial sea. The previous civilisation charted these same islands, and the charts survive.
Naming voice
Ondemara carries four syllables where most Astraea names carry three, and the extra length gives it a rocking rhythm, rising in the middle and settling at the end, a name the house likes to point to when it explains what the old register sounded like at its best.
The inscription
One of the 54 edicts: the inscription this world carries, protected under the Stratagem Accord.
Theme: Patience / legacy.
Discovery. On an island of the equatorial archipelago a terraced garden still grows where the previous civilisation planted it. It has gone untended for two hundred thousand years and grown on regardless, its old stone planters overrun by the descendants of what they once held. At the centre of the terraces stands a stone bench, and the edict is cut into the seat itself. The survey crew who found it had to lean over their own shadows to read it. Anyone who sits there reads the words between their own hands.