Canon Core

Canon Core is the single source of truth for what the Terheia pipeline defines at every layer. Domain documents — Magic Schools, World & Society, Infrastructure & Life — expand individual layers in detail. This document states the rules those expansions must remain consistent with. When the two conflict, this document governs.

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Layer 1 — Cosmology

Moons

Five moons orbit the world. Each moon corresponds to exactly one magic school and sets an ambient emotional baseline that influences magical efficiency, ritual outcomes, and environmental resonance during its dominant period. Moon dominance alters what practitioners of the aligned school can produce and at what cost.

Magic Schools

Six traditions are documented in practitioner literature. The Accord's official taxonomy recognizes five. The sixth — Psionic — is excluded by institutional policy, not oversight. Because the school is unrecognized, its use cannot constitute a recognized violation under Accord classification law. Detection of Psionic residue requires attunement to the death boundary: the domain of the Hexe Bound.

Each recognized school has four tiers: Novice, Adept, Master, Guru. Tier progression is irreversible. Cost accumulates permanently. Practitioners are born attuned to exactly one school. Two signatures in a single body is categorically impossible under natural conditions.

Twenty-five percent of the population can use magic. Individuals are identified young and inducted into the appropriate guild.

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Layer 2 — World

Nodes

47 known subterranean magical reservoirs are distributed across the world, connected by underground channels. Node output determines regional magical intensity. High node proximity concentrates substrate, amplifies local magic, and strains channels in practitioners and environments alike. Nodes can shift from distant to accelerating — the proximity categories used in the Story Spine Validator (none, distant, regional, local, active, accelerating) are not merely descriptive but mechanically deterministic.

Substrate

Substrate is the biological and geological structure that holds magical channels. Channels degrade under surge; deep channels survive longer than surface channels. Stabilization ceilings exist — increasing node output can render a previously safe medical classification lethal. The baseline that defined safety can move. This is the central mechanism behind the contamination grade system at Layer 4.

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Layer 3 — Society

20 states and 13 cultures organize human civilization. Six primary ethnicities are recognized: Menneske, Renlei, Umutu, Tangata, Yamana, Unsaan. Nine wealth strata span peripheral subsistence through prestige elite.

Institutions

Three major institutions structure magical society. A fourth — the Hexe Bound — operates independently, tolerated by all, trusted by none.

Institutional failure results from incomplete understanding rather than malice. This is a canonical rule: institutions must be portrayed as failing through insufficient perception, not through cartoonish bad intent. The Accord withholds because it believes knowledge is dangerous. The Crown simplifies because it believes truth that fractures is not truth. The Reverie resists because it believes distributed knowledge is safer than concentrated knowledge. All three positions are internally coherent. All three produce harm.

Factions

Eleven factions operate across the three institutions, each oriented to one or more moons. Integration rules differ by institution: the Reverie integrates (factions share ethos, differ in practice); the Accord and Crown do not integrate (hostile internal factions compete).

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Layer 4 — Infrastructure

Infrastructure describes how magical civilization functions physically. Magic here is not spectacle — it is the industrial substrate of the world.

Materials

Transport and Communication

Transport operates through echo portals (node-connected rapid transit), airships, grand beasts for land freight, and river barges. Communication prioritizes accuracy over speed — the canonical priority ordering is a design constraint, not a contingent fact. Systems include courier networks, rune relays, memory crystals, and encoded scrolls.

Contamination Grades

Contamination is classified across three axes: clinical state, substrate trajectory, and triage weight. Grade alone is insufficient for triage under elevated node conditions. A grade 2 with a compressing trajectory outranks a grade 3 with a stable one. This is the structural error the triage system is designed to prevent and repeatedly fails to prevent under surge.

Grade 4 may reach a state where standard channel rebuilding cannot hold. Integration — widening channels to carry the dual signature rather than resist it — requires time the body cannot compress at crisis speed. Acute integration produces reversal. The variable is duration of exposure, not technique quality.

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Layer 5 — Life

Biological systems are generated through ecological filters applied to the world's geography and node distribution. Creatures are defined by their tier (novice through guru), moon attunement, and infrastructure role. They are not merely fauna — many serve functional roles in the world's logistics and economy.

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Layer 6 — Objects & Sensory Resonance

Every object that appears in prose passes through a nine-stage cascade before it reaches the page. The filters are applied in fixed sequence: moon alignment, biome, state, culture, faction, institution, wealth stratum, ethnicity, and material. An object that passes all nine is internally consistent with every layer of the canon above it.

The Sensory Resonance Matrix extends object generation by connecting objects to perception patterns derived from cosmology and culture. Objects are not merely visual — they carry texture, sound, scent, and emotional resonance. Four sensory filters apply: material sensation (tactile and auditory), moon resonance (emotional perception bias), cultural handling (patterns of use left on the object), and environmental wear (physical alteration by climate and use).

Example: a toy soldier filtered through Threnis, frontier mining culture, and peripheral wealth stratum becomes a chipped lacquer toy soldier with red paint worn smooth by small hands — smooth where countless thumbs had worn the paint away, making a hollow wooden tap when it struck the table. Each sensory element traces back to a specific filter.

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Layer 7 — Narrative

Narrative obeys seven structural invariants. Costs accumulate irreversibly within a volume. No clean victory. Something always remains unresolved. Hope is always specific and procedural — a new technique that works, a relationship that survived, a community that is damaged and still standing. Hope is always a person who continues.

Stories track escalating conditions through monotonic trajectories — numbers or states that trend in one direction and do not reverse without transformation. Each trajectory is assigned a POV owner, a direction, per-chapter values, and a terminal state. The reader counts with the healer. The numbers do the emotional work the narrators cannot articulate.

Escalation compresses through three acts: Act I gives space to observe systems. Act II introduces interference between systems — understanding arrives during the crisis, not after. Act III removes space entirely — the chapter ends before the narrator has processed the previous event.

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Technology–Magic Lexicon

The world replaces industrial technology with magical equivalents. This lexicon is a canon constraint — the listed substitutions are the canonical forms, not suggestions. Using the Earth term in narrative prose signals an anachronism.