Velthuun
"What you build for yourself falls with you. What you build for those who come after stands. Lay the stone you will never stand on."
House: Imperia
Terrain: Ignis (+2 power)
Name: recovered from the ancient record through translation
Velthuun is a volcanic territory of House Imperia, an ignis world whose surface has been resurfaced by eruption many times over since the previous civilisation built on it.
Naming voice
Velthuun sinks as it goes, the voice dropping through the soft opening into the long buried vowel of the second syllable. Finishing the word feels like setting something down below grade. No recovered Imperia name took the translators longer to voice correctly. The old script marked that closing sound with a sign used nowhere else in the register, as if the word's depth had needed its own letter.
The inscription
One of the 54 edicts: the inscription this world carries, protected under the Stratagem Accord.
Theme: Legacy through structure.
Discovery. Sensors picked out the geometry of a defensive complex buried under volcanic rock. The dig that followed worked down through the strata of successive eruptions, each layer a disaster the structure beneath had survived. The crews passed the collapsed upper works and kept going, because the soundings showed the complex grew more intact the deeper it went. At the bottom they reached the foundation itself, cyclopean footing stones still carrying the dead weight of everything above them. The edict was cut there, set into the deepest course where the structure bears its own load. After two hundred thousand years, the footing was the only part of the fortress still doing its work.