Gethin
Gethin
Gethin, known in its older tongue as Gethinisharr, is a multi-sphere kingdom of the Sëriq̃in River and the least of the recognized Great Powers. Ruled from Bræcwyn Hold by the Rawkin line, its prestige rests upon the Aether Thrones — vast island-valleys cleaved from the surface of Levens in some forgotten age and set adrift above it, each holding a fragment of a precursor gate-nexus that once let Gethin move armies across a continent in the space of a breath. The kingdom's wealth and its weakness are the same thing: a people who have never had to defend the heights they rule from, and who compensate for a diminished standing among the spheres with pageantry, proclamation, and the insistence that they kneel to no stone.
Overview
Gethin holds several spheres, chief among them Levens, Rath Veraid, and Velth Anar [1]. Among the four great powers of the River it is reckoned the weakest — the Accord of the Kayan Ji and Nervak stand as the two superpowers, with Canmore third and Gethin last [1]. This ranking is a matter of open record and quiet humiliation, and much of Gethin's political behaviour across the Second Age can be read as a response to it.
Gethin's culture is one of elevation: literal, in that its highest nobility rule from seats suspended above the world; and rhetorical, in that its court speaks of itself in the register of heaven while its commons scavenge below. Its people are proud, ceremonious, and acutely conscious of a glory they believe was taken from them rather than lost.
Etymology
Gethinisharr is the original name, rooted in an archaic form of the Gethin tongue and generally rendered as Skyward Men or Those Who Rise [1]. The name predates the refinement of the language and retains a harder, more ceremonial character than modern speech, which is why it survives chiefly in proclamations, oaths, and formal address.
The shortened Gethin is the common usage in the mouths of foreigners and, increasingly, of Gethin's own subjects. The full form is deployed deliberately — in royal decrees and heraldic declarations — to invoke ancestral weight.
The sphere of Levens would in a later age be renamed Highclere, after the family that eventually found a way back into the abandoned seats above it. Scholars, mystics, and certain rebel factions continue to use the older names, and the choice between Gethinisharr and Highclere is rarely a neutral one.
Geography and Holdings
Levens
Levens is the ceremonial and royal heart of the kingdom, seat of Bræcwyn Hold and the sphere above which the Aether Thrones drift. Its defining peculiarity is a gravitational and electromagnetic condition under which steel imported from other spheres becomes effectively unusable, weighing several times its proper measure [1]. Gethin combatants therefore fight in bronze or in lighter, more flexible alloys, and warriors trained on Levens are regarded across the River as unusually strong and unusually strange in their footwork.
This same condition has long been held to make Levens unconquerable. An invading host cannot bring its steel, and cannot reach the Thrones at all without the gate-nexus. The belief is not unfounded — but it has bred a defensive complacency that would prove catastrophic.
Rath Veraid
Rath Veraid, the Hammered Plain, is the industrial heart of Gethin: blackened hills, furnace-cities, and vast underground workings drawing on ancient heat wells [1]. Its people are hardy, practical, and fiercely loyal. The irony of Rath Veraid is well known — it exports fine steel it cannot sell to its own capital, since that steel is useless on Levens.
Velth Anar
Velth Anar, the River of Stone, is a sphere of fortified river cities, walled ports, and mountain passes — the kingdom's inland trade and military hub [1].
Braymarc
Braymarc is a plains-heavy sphere of red soil and brambled thorns, known for hardy crops, proud cavalry, and border feuds of long standing [1]. It holds Zarune's Mouth, the sterf that supplies nearly half the sphere's countryside, and along its neglected shores lies Caer Brenyn, a coastal region the lords of Gethinisharr long ago ceased to tax, garrison, or provision. The loss of Zarune's Mouth to rebels nearly shattered the Gethin alliance; its recovery cemented the kingdom's claim to stand among the great powers.
The Aether Thrones
The Aether Thrones are the noble seats of Gethin's highest aristocracy: island-valleys severed from the surface of Levens in some forgotten age and set adrift above it, drifting slower than cloud, trailing hanging roots and veiled waterfalls [1]. To hold a Throne is to be counted among the highest nobility of the realm; those who do are styled Thronelords, Aether Lords, or in older usage the Aetherbound.
Each Throne contains a fragment or conduit of an ancient nexus-gate system, distinct from the sterf network in that it permits movement within a sphere rather than between them — the instantaneous relocation of armies, courts, or royal persons across continents [1]. Possession of the Thrones made Gethin's home sphere effectively untouchable for centuries. Their loss crippled the kingdom's military reach and bound its armies to the ground, dependent upon the sterfs like any commoner.
The Thrones are believed to remain functional. Without the codes, keys, or attunement required to wake them, they are inert.
Named Thrones include Aeryth Yaruun, a vast island-valley whose stewardship fell to Lord Mallin Crey, and which hosted the great tourney at Levens.
History
The Age of Deeds
The formative era of Gethinisharr, in which the kingdom's reputation was won and the ancestral idiom of its proclamations was fixed. This age gave way to what its own chroniclers would later describe as an era of complacency and imitation — a period in which imitating the king became the fashion, privilege bred an appetite for leisure, and a courtly class of trendsetters displaced the warrior nobility that preceded them.
The Rebellion at Zarune's Mouth
Talgrin Velz, a disgraced knight of Canmore, arrived at Zarune's Mouth by wain in the guise of a merchant, studied its defences, and departed for the coast [1]. There, among the tarnmen and fendril villages of Caer Brenyn — folk who had severed their dependence on the wains and whom the lords of Gethinisharr neither taxed nor guarded — he found shelter and assembled a fleet.
The fortress fell in a night. Its ramparts had been raised against threat from sky and sterf, not sea; the garrison broke before orders could reach it. Talgrin then levied tribute upon every noble who passed the gates, an insult that fell as heavily upon Canmore as upon Gethin, since Talgrin had once been Canmore's man.
Prince Arwell answered without waiting on his father's word, commandeering an armada and a host of mounted warriors and retaking the fortress by land and sea in a single coordinated assault. The victory made his name and deepened the humiliation of King Donchad of Canmore, whose knights had failed to bring Talgrin to justice before he could damage the realm of Canmore's closest ally.
The Proclamation and the Tourney at Levens
King Pritchard Rawkin seized upon his son's triumph. He issued a proclamation to all noble courts and sovereign thrones, declaring Gethin a people hewn of stone who kneel to none, and summoning a tourney upon the fields of Levens in accordance with the rites once hallowed at Ezzenval Tharu — pointedly not beneath the domes of Ju'kov. He took at the same time the style of High King of the Aether Crown.
The summit that followed drew the weight of the spheres: King Donchad of Canmore with his lords, including Josten Keldrath, invested with Talgrin's forfeited lands and title; the veil-eyed priests of Madhushana; the merchant-kings of Antalya, richest of the unblooded. From Nervak came Ezmalik Erikan Khoradûn Ezarûn, the Malik's younger brother, escorting his two nieces — a rare appearance by the Malik's family beyond Ju'kov.
The gathered lords had grown accustomed to expecting little of Gethin. The tourney at Aeryth Yaruun confounded them: feast, pageant, music, and soaring flame, offered as only those born to lost glory dare offer — lavishly, and without apology.
The Malik declined to answer the proclamation's provocation. "The sky above Levens is not ours to bind," he said, and summoned no rival decree.
The Siluška Crisis
During the Bîrak Feșathen Nervak (the Conquests of Nervak), King Pritchard grew convinced that his realm had overreached and that his lords' loyalties had wandered. His unease fastened upon Siluška — the faith of the nomadic Cushit people, whose adherents by then included prominent Gethin lords and ministers.
The white moon Jaretol had been entrusted to Lord Gethin Rydderich, but its remoteness kept him from court. Displaced Cushits, driven from their lands by the Duns and the knights of Canmore, had begun to gather there in numbers.
Gavinhaol — formerly Gareth Awbreys, castrated for a crime he maintained Prince Arwell had orchestrated — held the king's spy network and saw his opening. Drawing on his agents' reports, he persuaded Pritchard that Lord Rydderich had converted to Siluška under Jaretol's foreign influence. The king stripped Rydderich of the moon and granted it not to Arwell, who had scorned Gavinhaol in his former life, but to the younger Prince Wyn, a scholar and diplomat inclined to peaceful settlement.
Decline
By the era of Malikhat Niryath, Gethin was widely regarded as a kingdom in decline, its standing among the great powers maintained more by ceremony than by force.
Government and Nobility
Gethin is a hereditary monarchy seated at Bræcwyn Hold. Beneath the crown sits the Thronelord class — those granted domain over an Aether Throne — who constitute the highest nobility of the realm and whose precedence derives from elevation itself.
Below them stand the landed lords of Rath Veraid, Velth Anar, and Braymarc, whose wealth is often greater than their precedence and whose resentment of the Thronelords is a persistent feature of Gethin politics.
Society
Gethin society is stratified with unusual literalness. While the Thronelords and their allies dwell in the seats above, the population of the surface is left to scavenge and to toil.
Outside the taxed and garrisoned population entirely stand several classes of self-sufficient folk, whom the crown neither provisions nor protects and from whom it takes nothing:
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Fendril | Those who fend for themselves; untaxed, unguarded, owed nothing by the lords |
| Tarnmen | Coastal and lakeside villagers who severed their dependence on the wains |
| Soilmen | Agricultural folk beyond the reach of manorial obligation |
| Feldirs | Field-dwellers of the open country |
| Woadfolk | Inland tribal populations of ancient settlement |
| Brinfolk | Salt-country and estuary people |
The rebellion at Zarune's Mouth demonstrated the strategic cost of this arrangement: an enemy given shelter and ships by people the crown had written out of its accounts.
Military
Gethin's martial reputation rests on two peculiarities. The first is the Throne nexus, which for centuries permitted the redeployment of entire hosts across a continent instantaneously. The second is the condition of Levens itself, which forbids the use of imported steel and has produced fighters trained in bronze and in lighter, more flexible arms — combatants regarded elsewhere as unorthodox and dangerous.
Gethin also fields naval strength, though naval strategy atrophied badly under noble complacency in the generations before Talgrin's rebellion.
Culture
Language
The modern Gethin tongue is smooth, vowel-forward, and heavy with honorific formality, favouring open syllables and softened consonants. Old Gethinisharr, by contrast, was harsher and more ceremonial; it survives in temple inscriptions, royal styles, and names smoothed by generations of use into forms their bearers no longer recognize.
Gethin and Canmore speech share a common noble ancestry, a fact both realms invoke when it suits them and disavow when it does not.
The Yarvet
The Yarvet are the great birds of Levens, whose wingbeats carry across the mists of the Thrones and whose banners fly beside those of the crown. They are neither tame nor ceremonial: a Ramsu arriving on Levens from San Ema is set upon by Yarvet, torn open in the air, and its carcass left to fall to the surface below.
House Rawkin
| Figure | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pritchard Rawkin | King of Gethin | Styled King of the Sky, later High King of the Aether Crown. Politically cunning, increasingly paranoid; host of the summit at Levens |
| Prince Arwell | Eldest son | Battle-hardened tactician; victor at Zarune's Mouth; loyal and duty-bound |
| Prince Wyn | Younger son | Scholar and diplomat, sharp-tongued, beloved of the commons; granted the moon of Jaretol; bound to Malikhat Niryath of Nervak |
| Princess Arenala | Daughter | Refined and reserved; close companion to Princess Maelith of Canmore |
Other Notable Figures
| Figure | Role |
|---|---|
| Gavinhaol | Eunuch spymaster, formerly Gareth Awbreys; architect of the case against Lord Rydderich |
| Lord Mallin Crey | Steward of Aeryth Yaruun; overseer of the tourney ceremonies |
| Lord Gethin Rydderich | Warden of Jaretol, deposed on suspicion of Siluška conversion |
| Lonas Rydderich | His son; victor over Prince Arwell in the chariot race at court |
| Talgrin Velz | Disgraced knight of Canmore; took Zarune's Mouth |
| Josten Keldrath | Canmore lord invested with Talgrin's forfeited lands |
Foreign Relations
Canmore is described as Gethin's twin and closest ally, a relationship of shared noble ancestry, delicate protocol, and constant status anxiety on both sides. Relations with Nervak are formally correct and materially unequal; Gethin's proclamations frequently jab at Nervak prestige, and Nervak's practice is to decline the provocation rather than answer it.