The Palleseen

The Palleseen are the occupying and colonising nation whose military, administrative, and ideological apparatus governs Ilmar, Bracinta, Jarokir, Usmai, Alkhalend, and other conquered territories across the series. They are the systemic antagonist of the narrative: not a single villain but a total structure of governance, conquest, and cultural erasure that every named character must navigate, resist, exploit, or be crushed by. Their governing principle - "moderation in all things save ideology" - produces a state whose "chief export is violent conquest" and whose civilisational project is dedicated to "obliterating mystery" from the world, because "to be perfect means to be fully known and understood." Across five books the Palleseen shift from a distant occupying force encountered at arm's length in Ilmar's occupied streets, to an embedded military and legal presence in Bracinta's markets and camp, to a fully articulated institution shown from the inside through the education and career of a Palleseen child, to a consular and diplomatic machine in Usmai whose agents compromise themselves in the attempt to hold territory, and finally to a besieging army dictating terms at the gates of a walled city. They are the condition against which every act of faith, magic, loyalty, and survival in the series is measured.

Their arc traces the logic of empire from the outside inward and back out. In the earliest material they are the unnamed structure behind a soldier's linked-baton weapon and an officer's shouted ultimatum; by the middle books the reader learns how a Palleseen child is educated to believe in the Sway, how the state's rank system encodes ideology into shoulder markings, how it incorporates demons into its chain of command, and how it responds to unranked gods in its own ranks with internment camps and the Dead Companies. In the final book the Palleseen are reduced to what they are at their origin: a body of soldiers surrounding a city, nailing a written demand to the gates, offering five days or annihilation. The series closes on the Palleseen as it opened them - an instrument of conquest, stripped of the bureaucratic elaboration that made them comprehensible as a state, restored to the single fact of military force pressing against a human wall.

The Group

Composition

The Palleseen are a nation-state on the Archipelago whose entire population is organised into a rank-and-department system designed to be "instantly comprehensible, for both practical and ideological reasons," with shoulder markings encoding rank, office, and department. The command tiers run Sage, Fellow, Companion, and Cohort; the branch arms include Invigilator, Monitor, Archivist, Broker, and Inquirer. Children attend institutions such as Thorntree House and Junior phal, follow a prescribed curriculum of philosophy, history, science, mathematics, and approved literature alongside officer skills, and are assigned to one of the Schools at sixteen before receiving a career posting. The Schools form the institutional backbone of the state: among them are the School of Correct Erudition (learning and magic), Correct Speech (language enforcement), the Invigilators (security and censorship), Outreach (diplomacy "that goes in ahead of the armies"), and Correct Appreciation. The governing body is the Temporary Commission of Ends and Means, seated in Pallesand, whose departments include Outreach, Correct Speech, and Correct Appreciation.

The Palleseen incorporate non-human entities into their command structure: a demon holding the rank of Cohort-Monitor commands a squad of approximately thirty demons and speaks in correct military address, having been "donated to the department" after his summoner's death. The Dead Companies, a separate military formation, are deployed when the Palleseen "wouldn't trust the living not to come out infected by one creed or another." Residents are stationed abroad as the Palleseen's principal diplomatic and administrative agents in occupied or adjacent territories; in Peor, Alkhalend, and Usmai the Resident's office anchors the Palleseen presence. Officers of Companion rank and above are served by civilian providers, a service economy that reorganises itself around the army's rank structure. The military employs linked-baton weapon crews, standard infantry in charcoal-grey uniforms, and utilitarian equipment such as "just Pal desk-lights with charged tablethi."

Purpose & Method

The Palleseen exist to extend the Sway - their term for the condition of being "brought into" Palleseen governance - across all inhabited territory, justified by an ideology of "perfection" in which grief, emotion, and "imperfection" are to be eradicated. Conquest is narrated internally as "the liberation"; the occupied, who still call it "the invasion," are drilled in the conviction that they are "innately less perfect." Palleseen time-reckoning (the Palleseen hour, the Palleseen week) and Palleseen ordnances are imposed on subject populations as a path to perfection, though the locals "never get better off under them." Religion is banned, temples defaced, and the occupied impoverished into conditions the occupiers themselves create. The practice of decanting - the extraction of magical power from captured practitioners - treats magicians as "magicians ripe for interrogation or decanting," and the School of Correct Erudition's remit includes "deconstructing primitive magical belief systems" and "deconstructing primitive magicians."

Internally, the state enforces ideological conformity through suppression of unranked religion: a healing cult that emerged within the army was declared anathema, its members rounded up for internment in camps run by the Sway, where inmates were stripped of batons, starved, beaten, and killed in groups. The resolution of why the Palleseen crush a genuinely miraculous healing faith is stated plainly: an unranked god is an existential threat to the Sway's logic. The Palleseen had also suppressed the Fisher King's cult before the period of the books, and its resurgence is described as "rushing about the ankles of the Palleseen state like an incoming tide." Externally, the Palleseen writ - invoked "by ordinance and paragraph" - asserts legal authority over combatants and intervenes in private altercations, though its practical enforcement depends on the intervening officer's ability to survive the encounter. Espionage is conducted as a matter of course; the Palleseen language, Pel, functions as the lingua franca of international business even among the Loruthi.

Standing

The Palleseen answer to the Commission in Pallesand, which sets policy for the Residents and to which local customs carry little weight. They fight the Loruthi, the Successor States, and the occupied populations of every territory they enter. They maintain a military and diplomatic presence on the Peor border, in Alkhalend, in Bracinta, in Jarokir, and in Ilmar, with camps, consulates, and garrisons fixed at identifiable locations. In Usmai the Palleseen project military force through camps near the frontier, with a second camp concealed beyond a screen of trees. They tolerate no rival sovereignty: in Alkhalend the Alkhand is reduced to "their prisoner," reachable only through petition to the Palleseen, effectively confined in his own palace. The Usrani's licence to operate in the city "ends where Pal writ takes up."

Across the series the Palleseen's standing shifts from structural to confrontational. In Ilmar they are the distant apparatus behind an officer's parlay and a linked-baton crew. In Bracinta they are soldiers in a market brawl, an officered camp on the city's edge, a legal code claiming authority over combatants. In Jarokir and the Archipelago the reader sees the full institutional logic from the inside. In Usmai the Palleseen are a Resident's paperwork, a prohibition weighed against local custom, a camp structure operating in full rank hierarchy. By the closing material they are a besieging army, Dead Companies waiting outside a square, an envoy nailing terms to a gate at dawn. The Palleseen also face internal fracturing: Residents are compromised by local entanglement, Agents run rogue outside the Resident's authority, and the state's own soldiers carry suppressed faith in their chests. The Seraphi's grievance over a "favourite uncle" being preferred to "our writ and our reason" signals cracks in the loyalty the Sway demands.

Known members

• Angilly - sage-invigilator

History

City of Last Chances

The Palleseen are the occupying and colonising nation whose military and administrative apparatus governs Ilmar and other conquered territories - ch 2. Their governing principle is summarised as "moderation in all things save ideology" - ch 2. Sovereignty over all occupied territories is exercised through the Temporary Commission of Ends and Means, an administrative body seated in Pallesand - ch 2. The Palleseen project power through five Schools alongside the Commission; among these, the School of Correct Erudition is charged with learning and magic, and its institutional remit includes "deconstructing primitive magical belief systems" and "deconstructing primitive magicians" - ch 2. A related Palleseen practice is decanting, the extraction of magical power from captured practitioners; the notes describe such captives as "magicians ripe for interrogation or decanting" - ch 2.

The Palleseen homeland is the Archipelago, to which Sage-Archivist Ochelby sends exacting specifications for the manufacture of a warding bundle - ch 2.

By the time of the confrontation in Ilmar's square, the Palleseen field command is held by Hegelsy, a Fellow-Inquirer of Correct Speech who will shortly be elevated to Sage-Inquirer; he directs the forces surrounding the square, communicates his terms through an intermediary officer, and upon receiving a warning from Fellow-Broker Nisbet orders Vorkovin arrested and a full immediate advance - ch 37. The Palleseen deploy a linked-baton weapon crewed by several operators; during the engagement one operator is killed, one wounded, and a replacement is shot before reaching the device - ch 37. An unnamed officer under a flag of parlay reads the Palleseen ultimatum aloud and is flummoxed by Vorkovin's demand for parlay terms - ch 37.

The Palleseen conquest of Ilmar has a recorded history of negotiated capitulation: the Gownhall university "has survived Ilmar being inducted into the Palleseen Sway," and the narrator recounts the Gownhall's historical bargaining with the invading Palleseen forces - ch 37.

House of Open Wounds

In House of Open Wounds the Palleseen is present as an occupying military force stationed in and around the city of Bracinta, its soldiers encountered in civilian spaces and its officers billeted in a camp in the city's outskirts. The Palleseen army maintains a camp near Bracinta, and a character walking back into that camp wears a borrowed Palleseen uniform as disguise, indicating that such uniforms are obtainable off-camp and that the encampment is a fixed, identifiable location on the Bracitan periphery - ch 49. Within the camp's hierarchy, officers of Companion rank and above are served by civilian providers; Mother Semprellaime, an Allorwen demon-procurer and bawd, caters specifically to officers at that grade and above, a role she came to hold as a consequence of the Palleseen invasion of Allor - ch 49. Her wagon stands inside the Palleseen army camp, and she finishes an evening's work serving those officers before receiving a visitor and answering questions about demon contracts - ch 49.

In the streets of Bracinta, Palleseen soldiers are a visible and contested presence. In a market crowd, locals fight one another and fight the Palleseen soldiers simultaneously; stray shots injure a woman's shoulder and a man's head, placing the Palleseen troops amid generalised civilian violence rather than in a controlled engagement - ch 31. Against this backdrop of street-level disorder, the Palleseen maintains a formal legal apparatus: the Palleseen writ, invoked "by ordinance and paragraph," is used to assert legal authority over a combatant and to intervene in a private altercation - when a knifeman attacks a pursuer, Cohort-Monitor Cosserby steps in citing the writ, an intervention that nonetheless results in Cosserby being thrown into the crowd, suggesting that the writ's authority, while formally invoked, does not guarantee physical compliance on the street - ch 31. The writ thus functions in this book as the instrument through which the Palleseen extends its jurisdictional claim into spaces of chaotic, multi-sided combat, though its practical enforcement depends on the intervening officer's ability to survive the encounter.

Across the two scenes in which the Palleseen appears, the force is consistently depicted as a foreign military presence embedded in Bracitan civic life - soldiers in market crowds, an officered camp on the city's edge, a legal code that claims authority over combatants, and a supply-and-service economy (in Mother Semprellaime's case, a demon-procurement and sexual-services economy) that has reorganised itself around the army's rank structure and the conquest that brought it to Allor's borders. No single narrative event in the book alters the Palleseen's institutional form; what shifts is proximity and consequence, from the distant, structural service economy of the officers' camp to the immediate, shot-riddled reality of a Palleseen soldier in a Bracite market brawl.

Lives of Bitter Rain

Two years after the Palleseen conquest of Jarokir, the state's presence in the occupied territory is total and unambiguous: temples defaced, religion banned, the Jarokiri impoverished into conditions the occupiers themselves helped create, and children drilled in the conviction that the locals are "innately less perfect" - ch 1. The occupation is framed within Palleseen discourse as "the liberation," a term the Jarokiri pointedly reject, still calling the conquest "the invasion" - ch 1. Palleseen time-reckoning is imposed through the Palleseen hour and Palleseen week, units distinct from local ones, while Palleseen ordnances are explained to the occupied as a path to perfection, though the chapter notes the locals never get better off under them - ch 1. Angilly, who attended Junior phal back on the Archipelago, recalls the rote instruction she received there: "Back on the Archipelago she had sat in Junior phal and learned by rote all the essential truths that explained why the Palleseen way was best, why the Palleseen Sway was necessary and the terrible, degrading conditions that people lived in, who hadn't been brought into it" - ch 1. The narrator states flatly that "most Pals believe" the Jarokiri are innately inferior, and that the "perfection that the Palleseen have brought to Jarokir" is the ideological justification for the Sway - ch 1. The Palleseen military compound in Jarokir, containing a refectory, an infirmary, and a compound yard, anchors the occupying force in daily life - ch 1. The Schools form the institutional backbone of the Palleseen state, with Correct Speech among them - ch 1.

On the Archipelago itself, the Palleseen state is described as one whose "chief export is violent conquest," governed by an ideology of "perfection" in which grief, emotion, and "imperfection" are to be eradicated - ch 2. Children in institutions such as Thorntree House follow a prescribed curriculum of philosophy, history, science, mathematics, and approved literature, alongside officer skills and specialities stripped of "ritual and nonsense," leading to assignment to one of the Schools at sixteen and then to a career posting - ch 2. The Palleseen rank and department iconography is designed to be "instantly comprehensible, for both practical and ideological reasons," with shoulder markings encoding rank, office, and department - ch 2. The Invigilators operate as the Palleseen security and censorship caste, with Austentarn office covering island nations before the ice within the Sway - ch 2.

The governing apparatus of Pallesand is the Palleseen Commission, whose departments include Outreach, Correct Speech, and Correct Appreciation - ch 6. Outreach is the diplomatic wing of the Palleseen Sway, the department that "goes in ahead of the armies," and has been run by Professor-Invigilator Flockersly since its founding - ch 6. Angilly's own relationship to the state shifts across this period: her loyalty moves from ideology to personal ambition while she remains within the Commission's structure, serving as an Outreach operative for the Palleseen Sway - ch 6. The Commission dispatches Angilly to fill the post of Resident in Usmai after the previous Resident is reported dead in a "hunting accident" involving a Tiger-Crab; Flockersly, when asked whether the explanation is genuine or euphemistic, replies "most likely the former" - ch 6. The Pals are described as a people "whose eminence the Pals might nudge along in return for concessions," the Commission extending leverage through diplomacy backed by military force - ch 6.

At the Palleseen Residence in Peor, Resident Palinet maps out Pal's military and economic control of the region, framing the Successor States' lingering attachment to the dead Moeribandi Empire as an obstacle and flagging Usmai as the real prize; he notes Angilly's youth for the post - ch 7. The Palleseen presence in Peor is thus an exercise of consolidated dominance maintained through the Resident's office - ch 7.

The Palleseen civilisational project is characterised as one dedicated to "obliterating mystery" from the world, because "to be perfect means to be fully known and understood" - ch 9. The state conducts espionage as a matter of course, and its language, Pel, is described as efficient and utilitarian, functioning as the lingua franca of international business even among the Loruthi - ch 9.

By the time Angilly operates in Alkhalend, the local influence of the Palleseen Sway is described as being "on the executioner's block," and Slate House serves as the Palleseen Resident's residence - ch 10. The Commission of Ends and Means is the Palleseen body that issues Angilly's commission and stamps official commands - ch 10. In the speech of Gorbudan, the Pals are denounced as "killers of gods, devourers of ways," a formulation that crystallises the occupied peoples' experience of the Palleseen state as an engine of total cultural erasure - ch 10.

Days of Shattered Faith

The Palleseen appear in this book as a foreign state projecting diplomatic, military, and bureaucratic power into Usmai and its border territories, and as a home nation whose institutional logic governs every aspect of its agents' lives from birth to death. In Alkhalend, the Palleseen maintain Slate House, a consulate named for its Palleseen-made slate roof, situated in a street of foreign merchants and emissaries that coils down toward the Sand Lanes - ch 3. The Resident stationed there, Gil, is described by Alkhand Dekamran as an entity one "probably wasn't supposed to claim" as a friend, and the Palleseen themselves are characterised by Dekamran as "a nation of the rational and the reasonable with no time for that kind of flamboyance" - ch 3. Colloquially the Palleseen are called "Pal" in local speech - ch 3. When Gil and two Palleseen women depart Slate House heading toward a duel, Dekamran's anxiety centres on whether Gil is already dead, and on the risk that news of his own covert visit to the consulate will reach Palleseen ears - ch 3.

By the time of Gil's daily routine at the Palleseen Residence, her function is explicitly administrative: she does paperwork, reflecting on what her report to the Commission of Ends and Means will say, the governing body of Pallesand that sets policy for the Residents and to which local customs carry little weight - ch 10. The Palleseen state imposes behavioural ordinances on its personnel abroad; Loret, a Cohort-Invigilator serving as aide to the Resident, weighs the "Palleseen prohibition" against the frog god's permitted intimacy in the Sand Lanes and ultimately chooses to engage in the act, then reflects that the Commission would give the matter no credence - ch 10. Loret also notes that the Fever Lodge alchemist Oathan refuses communion without a price tag, a transactional posture that sits uneasily with Palleseen sensibilities - ch 10.

On the Peor border, the Palleseen project military force. A Palleseen military camp stands near the Usmai frontier, with a second camp concealed beyond a screen of trees - ch 12. Within it, the rank and department hierarchy operates in full: Sage, Fellow, Companion, and Cohort tiers run parallel to Invigilator, Monitor, and Archivist branches, a structure shown in operational context when Croskin, a demon holding the rank of Cohort-Monitor, commands a squad of approximately thirty demons and speaks in correct military address - ch 12. Croskin was summoned by Galversty and "donated to the department" after Galversty's death, illustrating how the Palleseen incorporate non-human entities into their command structure - ch 12. The Palleseen homeland, The Archipelago, is referenced as the source of "troopers" and charcoal-grey uniforms, and as the place where Loret grew up - ch 12. The chapter also raises the question of whether the Seraphi will remain loyal to Flint, given their grievance over a "favourite uncle" being preferred to "our writ and our reason" - ch 12.

The most extensive Palleseen material concerns the state's internal treatment of religious dissent within its own armed forces. Loret confesses that, as a seventeen-year-old in the Palleseen army during the last year of the war against the Loruthi, a statlos introduced a company "pool" that was in fact recruitment for a healing cult; Loret signed a document swearing not to harm after healing - ch 36. The god of this cult heals non-fatal wounds in exchange for the pacifist oath, but does not heal fatal ones, and "doesn't have a rank badge and doesn't fit in the chain of command" - ch 36. After the war ended without Loret ever receiving healing herself, she saw genuine miracle healing performed on others, and the entire army was full of God - ch 36. The Palleseen state then declared the cult anathema and rounded up its members for internment - ch 36. The Palleseen internment camps were run by the Sway; inmates were stripped of batons, starved, beaten, and killed in groups - ch 36. When the cult camp was surrounded, the Palleseen "wouldn't trust the living not to come out infected by one creed or another" and sent The Dead Companies instead - ch 36. The Palleseen "keep them to the Sway, amongst the foreigners" in The Archipelago, a phrase Loret uses to describe the islands' segregation of the unranked and the faithless - ch 36. The Palleseen had also suppressed The Fisher King's cult before the period of the book, and its resurgence is described as "rushing about the ankles of the Palleseen state like an incoming tide" - ch 36. The resolution of why the Palleseen crush a genuinely miraculous healing faith is stated plainly: an unranked god is an existential threat to the Sway's logic - ch 36.

By the closing chapter, the Palleseen presence in Alkhalend has hardened into overt occupation. Alkhand Dekamran is now, according to street-rumours, "their prisoner," reachable only through petition to the Palleseen, effectively confined in his own palace - ch 40. A new Palleseen ship has arrived in harbour, and Palleseen military control extends over the monastery, the palace, and the harbour - ch 40. In the hold of a vessel, illumination comes from objects described as "just Pal desk-lights with charged tablethi," a utilitarian compromise rather than anything sacred - ch 40. The chapter raises the question of what the fractious city will do in the face of the full extent of the Palleseen military takeover, a question the book leaves open - ch 40.

Pretenders to the Throne Of God

In Pretenders to the Throne Of God, the Palleseen are the besieging military force surrounding Gaelensreach. The morning after a day of siege fighting, a Palleseen envoy nails a written demand to the city gates at dawn, an act the narrative records as a formal act of the besieging command - ch 13. The terms are blunt: five days to surrender with terms, or the city is taken without them - ch 13. This demand, referred to in the text as the Palleseen Ultimatum, is relayed to the inhabitants of the Pandaemonium by Kaele, a Left-city working girl and practising conjurer who owns the nightgown Kiffel ea Leachan had worn, and who reports to the breakfast table that the envoy's notice has been posted - ch 13.

The Palleseen besieging force maintains a physical presence in the streets surrounding the Pandaemonium. The Dead Companies wait outside the square, and Godsgift Square itself has become a contested interzone - "between the lines now. Nobody's and everybody's" - ch 13. The civic mood inside the Pandaemonium fractures along the line of whether to yield to the Palleseen or continue resistance; The Old Man in the Motley Dressing Gown, an older patron at the breakfast table, argues openly for surrender to the Palleseen rather than cling to civic pride - ch 13.

The Palleseen also figure in the background of Accessory 'Maric' Jack's revelations about his past. Jack discloses that he was formerly a Hospitaller and states that the cult in question did not originate with the Palleseen but that they "took it over" - ch 13. He bars his chest to show scars "between tattoo and scar" but declines to explain further, saying only: "we'll see whose fuckery is strongest right then, God or the Widow" - ch 13.

The book leaves unresolved whether the Osseach will bring down the Gaelensreach or accept the Palleseen Ultimatum within the five-day window - ch 13.

Relationships

• Gil - Resident of Slate House, the Palleseen's principal agent in Alkhalend. She frames her affair with Alkhand Dekamran as "bending to local customs" for Outreach's sake, but the Palleseen do not see it that way; she is ultimately lost "not to the Loruthi, not to Gorbudan, but to her own people," reflecting that "everyone ends up making one compromise too many" in Outreach. Her mission is declared complete and she is reassigned to less-tamed shores - Days of Shattered Faith, ch 45.

• Alkhand Dekamran - The Alkhand of Peor depends on Palleseen military support for his survival while his people hate the Palleseen; every Kepishi outrage widens the wedge between him and his nation. He is described as having a "Pal commander" and is backed by the Resident; Flint regards this Palleseen backing as what makes his ambition possible. By the closing chapter of Days of Shattered Faith he is "their prisoner," reachable only through petition to the Palleseen - ch 25, ch 26, ch 31, ch 40.

• Angilly - Palleseen-born, ideologically trained at Junior phal, she serves as an Outreach operative for the Palleseen Sway before being dispatched as Resident to Usmai. Her loyalty moves from ideology to personal ambition while she remains within the Commission's structure - Lives of Bitter Rain, ch 1, ch 6.

• Loret - A Cohort-Invigilator and aide to the Resident in Alkhalend, she is the Palleseen state's own cautionary tale: as a seventeen-year-old in the army she joined a healing cult, saw the entire army "full of God," and then watched the state declare the cult anathema and round up its members for internment. She now serves the institution that destroyed her faith, weighing the "Palleseen prohibition" against local custom - Days of Shattered Faith, ch 2, ch 10, ch 36.

• Flint - Holds a commission under the Temporary Commission of Ends and Means via the Resident's writ; commands a troop contingent sent to Tesemera under the writ of the Mirror Throne. His relationship to the Palleseen is transactional: he uses their commission to pursue his own agenda, including demon deployment on Usmiat soil - Days of Shattered Faith, ch 26, ch 31.

• Ivarn Ostravar - A pragmatist collaborator in Ilmar who uses the Occupation's corruption to his advantage while preserving Ilmari traditions, simultaneously "sending Palleseen soldiers to haul off his competitors" - City of Last Chances, ch 8.

• Mother Semprellaime - An Allorwen demon-procurer and bawd who caters specifically to Palleseen officers at Companion rank and above; the role is a consequence of the Palleseen invasion of Allor. Her wagon stands inside the Palleseen army camp - House of Open Wounds, ch 49.

• The Fisher King - The Palleseen tried to exterminate the Fisher King's cult; the god survived among the Islermen descendants. The Fisher King cult knows they will get "zero mercy" from the Pals and defend the Pandaemonium knowing their fate - Pretenders to the Throne Of God, ch 9, ch 41.

• God - God's healing cult was caught up in the Pal war; Accessory 'Maric' Jack was pressed into the Palleseen army and the cult "did not originate with the Palleseen but that they took it over." God's true name and the nature of what the Palleseen "took in a box" remain unstated - Pretenders to the Throne Of God, ch 13, ch 15.

• Varinecthes - The Palleseen besiege Gaelensreach; the Pal attack on the Varinaen at the siege's start was "all the more shocking," and the Pals banished Ghastron back to Hell. The Palleseen neuted Varinecthes at the siege's opening without killing him - Pretenders to the Throne Of God, ch 24.

• Anders - A double agent embedded among the Palleseen; their discovery of her "two coats and two faces" would be fatal - Pretenders to the Throne Of God, ch 16.

• The Indwellers - The Palleseen are "in some kind of feud" with the Indwellers - City of Last Chances, ch 7.

• the Tesemer - "Not fond of the Palleseen"; they gave Gil "more than a few hard looks" - Days of Shattered Faith, ch 11.

• Follo - Despises the Palleseen; all his complaints concern them - Days of Shattered Faith, ch 31.

• The Fever Lodge group - Former Palleseen agents now hiding; the group is "a crooked little family" of people with "horrors in your past" - Days of Shattered Faith, ch 32.

Notable Quotes

"moderation in all things save ideology" - narrator, City of Last Chances, ch 2

"to be perfect means to be fully known and understood" - narrator, Lives of Bitter Rain, ch 9

"killers of gods, devourers of ways" - Gorbudan, Lives of Bitter Rain, ch 10

"a nation of the rational and the reasonable with no time for that kind of flamboyance" - Alkhand Dekamran, Days of Shattered Faith, ch 3

"between the lines now. Nobody's and everybody's" - narrator, Pretenders to the Throne Of God, ch 13

"we'll see whose fuckery is strongest right then, God or the Widow" - Accessory 'Maric' Jack, Pretenders to the Throne Of God, ch 13

"everyone ends up making one compromise too many" - Gil, Days of Shattered Faith, ch 45

Tags

1. nation · #colonial · #empire · #occupying-force