There’s a system in Kassara that tries to ensure everyone has a single, unique name (no ‘surnames’). There are few enough people in Lura that it’s still possible.
Many people strive for harmony (especially the Northern Alliance) because they feel if people start sharing the same names or start adding additional names, it will bring the world one step closer to chaos, thus one step closer to a repeat of the day of discord.
So if a family has a baby, they must send a message to ‘Sky Haven’ with their requested name.
The elected officials at Sky Haven check their records to ensure that name doesn’t belong to anyone living. If that’s true, they create an ‘ID card’ for that child to use when crossing any city gates. That card will be traded in every five years throughout their life for a new card. The machine that creates the cards is large, lumbering, unique, and takes an almost unfathomable amount of energy to run. Their unusually high altitude in the mountains (closer to the arc lightning) helps them generate that power. Sky Haven uses the gates system and ID cards, attempting to keep track of the people of Kassara.
In the event that a person should earn a title recognized by the Naming Committee, they have earned honor for their name. When ‘Gaitan’ became ‘General Gaitan’, he was allowed to pass on his name once. Many of the new parents requested to name their child ‘Gaitan’, but he had planned to pass the name on to his son.
A child bestowed with a name of a titled individual is forbidden to accept the same title prior to their predecessor’s promotion, demotion, or death.
If a titled individual should be completely stripped of their title and they have given out their name to a child, they must relinquish their name and take on a new name with low honor, or become one of the ‘lost’.
If someone thought to be dead turns out to be alive, they must take on a new name. Until they do, they are ‘nameless’.
Anybody without a card living within the alliances is considered nameless. Many people without homes are nameless. They usually claim to have names, anyway. If a nameless leaves a town or city that uses the gate system, they are allowed to leave, but they can’t re-enter.
If one of the lost (people living outside of the alliances) happens to have the same name as an individual recognized by the Naming Committee, it must immediately be reported so proper action can take place. The lost are considered a threat to the years of harmony and upset the gods. Or so it is believed.
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[Reply]
Comment by elizaw — August 25, 2008 @ 12:03 pm
Sure, you could try and forge one. But you’d be found out within a day and a half of crossing a gate. Most forgeries are caught immediately at the gate.
Even if your forgery was perfect, each crossing gets analyzed. If you take a non-existant name, the name of a deceased, or the name of another person, the Naming Committee would catch on very quickly. Within a city, you’d be captured by the guards. Outside a city, you’d be captured by the (even worse!) fugitive hunters.
And you wouldn’t want to get caught in this world :) Punishment for rats is death by slow poison.
[Reply]
Comment by cirellio — August 25, 2008 @ 7:45 pm