The Six Systems

The record

Foundation

The Empire was founded after the Last Realm War, in which the Voltrumites ended every other people of Midrealm by extermination or by bondage. There was no settlement, no treaty, and no acclamation, there being nobody left with standing to give one.

Dominus founded the First Imperium on a dragon-line and the mandate of Chronus; Aethas Aureides founded the Second on a sonship of Ra and a doctrine of restoration; both claims were contested, tested, and in the end declined. The Third claims nothing. It has never produced a document justifying its rule and has never been asked twice.

The world was remade and renamed. Farhaven — richest city of the old gulf, seat of the Wayhall, home of the founding workshop that made every silver compass in Midrealm's history — became Voltris, the imperial capital, and was the only place on the world the Empire ever treated as significant.

Within a generation the Empire had ceased to regard the world as its extent. What went outward was not a people who could cross the dark unaided but a programme — a century and a half of requisitions, assessed provinces, failures entered by number and men entered by name, kept by a chancery in the ordinary form and consulted daily by people who were building the next thing — and the six systems were taken in the ordinary manner of a power that cannot be refused. Voltrum was the first province of the Empire and long ago stopped being the important one.

The Starseed succession

The Empire's constitution is one paragraph long and was spoken by a dying man. In the Last Word, Argus swore that he would be born again among the stars as a Starseed and return to take up the throne a second time. The Empire took him at his word and has organised itself around it entirely.

This produces the arrangement the Empire's neighbours found hardest to credit. The Voltrumites are a people who hold that authority is earned continuously and reviewed continuously, and who have taken it away from men who held it — and they made their own succession the least examinable thing that has ever existed, and then refused, for generations, to accept any claim to it that could not be proved.

The Search

The Search is the largest sustained undertaking in Voltrumite history and has never been suspended, not at the height of the Imperium and not after the fall.

Candidates are identified, brought before the court, examined, recorded, and dismissed, in a register that has never once closed. Every examination is entered in full. No name is attached to any judgement, the confederation having attributed acts to the body and never to persons since long before it was an empire, so that a hundred generations of failed claimants exist in the record as procedures and outcomes and nothing else.

Argus left no sign by which he might be known, holding that a sign could be counterfeited and that he did not wish to be found by anyone looking for a mark. The Search therefore has no criterion of its own and depends entirely on the test.

The Starfinder

The Starfinder lay in the throne room at Voltris. It answers only to a bearer who commands the water-art, and holds true only for one who wills a destination whole and without doubt, wandering for anyone divided, uncertain, or false to themselves. A claimant took it up before the court; if it answered, he was the Emperor returned.

It answered five times, for five strangers, across five lifetimes. The intervals between them lengthened each time. Then came the barren cycles, in which the needle settled honestly on north, claimant after claimant, in a throne room built around the certainty that it would one day do otherwise — and then came the Purge, and the throne room, and the compass, and the world beneath them, ended together.

The seventh proving was made by the Imperial Flame instead. See the proving of Argus VII.

The Grand Regency

Between Emperors the Empire is governed by the Grand Regent of Voltrum — an office of administration and not of sovereignty, held for a term and surrendered at its end, exercising every function of government and none of the dignity.

There were Regents between each of the six, and the interregnums lengthened with every cycle, so that the regency has always been the Empire's ordinary condition and the Emperor its occasional interruption. No Regent has ever been styled Emperor, none has ever been recorded attempting it, and none has ever sat in the throne room except to receive a claimant.

No Regent ever proposed the obvious economy of doing without an Emperor. The throne belongs to somebody who has demonstrably come back before.

The royal line

Argus left children. They and their descendants are imperial royalty, hold precedence, honour, and the highest offices the Empire confers, and are barred absolutely from the throne.

The bar is Argus's own. His people reckoned authority as a thing continuously earned and continuously reviewed, and had taken it away from men who held it and given it to men who had not been born to it — and he refused to found a dynasty on the one arrangement the confederation had never accepted from anybody, which is a man holding a thing because his father held it. So the Empire is hereditary in every particular except the one that matters, and the throne is the only office in it that cannot be inherited.

The royal line has never contested this in the whole history of the Empire, and its members are among the most rigorous examiners of claimants.

The six systems

The Empire held six systems and never published a full account of how it took them, its records in this respect resembling those of the Last Realm War: plain, sequential, unapologetic, and very short.

Voltrum was the first and was kept as a capital rather than as a possession. It was not the richest of the six, nor the most populous, and its principal industry was the Search. The other five are not named in any document that survived into the reckoning of the old world, there being no old world left to keep such reckonings — and, since the Purge, no Empire left in them.

At its height the Imperium counted hundreds of millions of true-blooded Voltrumites and tens of billions of subject peoples across the six. Both figures are now of historical interest only. See the accounting of the Purge.

Trivia

• The Empire is the first in history to rest on no divine claim, no lineage, and no artifact anyone conferred, and the first to extend beyond one world. It nonetheless kept two artifacts of the old one, both because they still worked.
• Its regalia divide by question. The Starfinder asks who. The Imperial Seal — the Mandate of Heaven, taken from Chima — asks by what authority, and has never refused anybody. The Imperial Signet asks only is he here.
• Six Imperial Signets were forged and six broken. The seventh setting in the throne room at Voltris was cut when the sixth was filled, and stood empty until the world did.
• Its capital, Voltris, was Farhaven — richest city of the old gulf, seat of the Wayhall, and home of the workshop that made every silver compass in Midrealm.
• Seven Emperors have reigned and all seven were the same man.
• The intervals between returns lengthened every time. The last one outlasted the world it was measured from.
• The throne has been vacant many times longer than it has been occupied, and the regency is the Empire's ordinary condition rather than its exception.
• The Empire will not accept a claimant it cannot test, having been founded by a people who ended the age of divine accident on precisely that principle. It therefore waits on a reincarnation and demands proof of it.
• No name is attached to any judgement in the register of claimants — a practice the Empire applies even to the examination of its own sovereign.