Skip to content
Tales of Cross
Hell and the Heptarchy
Plus 8 min

The seven courts

Seven constitutions that tolerate and never coerce one another. Belkar feeds the other six and wants the warehouse, not the throne.

Seven forms of government, seven economies, seven cultures. The Heptarchy is not a bloc: it is a coalition of seven who detest one another and cannot separate.

Each file follows the same structure as the human files: who really rules · what it lives off · what the culture is like · what it can refuse · its own wound.


I · KARZHAR — Luzhar, Pride

the one that presides and does not rule

Real government: the Council of the Crowned of the Flesh — twelve members, the pactuary high clergy, beneath an empty throne since 1819. They decide by consensus because none of them has the authority to impose.

Economy: tribute. Karzhar produces almost nothing. It lives off what the other six hand over, and the proportion is renegotiated every decade, always at a growing disadvantage.

It continues

The rest of this entry is Plus

About 1,539 words remain. The almanac stays free and complete. The long text — contradictions, icebergs and everything the Curia would rather not explain — opens with a subscription.

US$ 3,50 per week US$ 15,17
US$ 6,50 per month US$ 6,50
US$ 55 per year US$ 4,58
Subscribe

The long-form wealth lives in the encyclopaedia. This is where you come to check a fact.

Go to the almanac →

Read this next

Seven Princes, seven courts, and forty million people paying taxes on the other side of the line.

Everything in this area →