Holding VI, The Others.
The register. Everyone this holding holds anything on, and how much. Last corrected Year 398.
How much we know about a people is itself worth knowing, and you cannot see it from inside a single entry. Someone we traded with for three centuries takes generations of detail. Someone we met twice takes four lines. This register puts them side by side so a short entry does not read as a badly kept one.
| People | Where | Where we stand | How much we hold |
|---|---|---|---|
| The dwarves of Keiter | Keiter | Trade, unbroken Year 52 to Year 398. Two debts outstanding, both ours. | Full. Custom, craft, governance, and three hundred and forty-six years of dealings. |
| The Sylphen | Perganis | Occasional. Eleven meetings in 226 years. Nothing owed either way. | Adequate. Enough to deal with them. Not enough to know them. |
| Hadozee crews | Wildspace, at ports | Hired eleven times. Reliable. Paid in coin. | Working. What we need to hire them and nothing else. |
| Giff companies | Wildspace, at ports | Never hired. Costed twice, declined twice. | Working. Note: they will take powder over coin, which halves the price for anyone carrying it. |
| The keepers of the asteroid ring | Near orbit of the lesser sphere | Twelve clans under their own governance. Passage asked four times, granted four times, at a toll. | Thin. We know the toll. We do not know the clans. |
| The people of Zohiruta | Zohiruta | None. Approaches marked after the loss of the Slow Return, Year 218. | Nothing. A name, a location, and a mark. |
| The power at the North Star | The North Star | None. Never approached. | Nothing. A name, and it may be a title. |
| The Solanari Dominion | The Solanar Expanse | Standing order of avoidance since Year 1, never relaxed. | Thin by decision. See the entry, which is short for reasons it gives. |
Why six of these are thin
Six of the eight are thin and there are three different reasons, which are worth keeping apart.
Thin because far. Zohiruta and the North Star. We never went and never had cause to. Ordinary ignorance.
Thin because narrow. The Hadozee, the Giff, and the ring keepers. We wanted one thing from each of them, a crew, a price, and a passage, and wrote down only what bore on it. A crew hired eleven times is a crew we could have learned a great deal about. Twelve clans who let us through four times are twelve clans we could say the same of. The keepers noticed and did nothing.
Thin because chosen. The Dominion. The standing order of Year 1 forbids the contact that would fill the entry. It is the only entry here whose depth is set by policy rather than by opportunity, and the only one that would deepen if a single standing order were relaxed.
What is missing entirely
No entry on any Rolaran power. We have meant to settle that world for four centuries and have never opened a relationship with anyone on it. That is recorded in Holding V and noted here only so the gap is visible.
No entry on the Astral Elves as a people separate from the Dominion. We use one term for both. Sefa Anthek Tidemark entered a note in Year 239 recording that the conflation is unexamined, that we have never sought evidence either way, and that any Astral Elf met outside Dominion service would be assessed against an entry written entirely about the Dominion. No correction has been made.