Culture

The canon draws inspiration from the Shulaveri–Shomu cultural horizon: early settlement complexity, craft specialization, and long-lived ritual patterns that can either preserve meaning or become empty performance.

A core story engine is the tension between the benefits of permanent settlement and the emergence of hierarchy (the “trap”): once systems scale, they start demanding maintenance, enforcement, and status.

Anti-Drift Institutions

Culture here is not just “custom”—it’s a technology for keeping signal and tone married at scale.

• The Cave Game: periodic, communal alignment checkpoints where stories are witnessed and sealed.
• The Mark (cave wall): durable memory interface—enough to reconstruct intent after drift.
• Priest/elder witnessing: validates without idolizing; prevents private obsession from becoming public dogma.
• Humor: a pressure valve that keeps the “Third Step” from turning brittle or self-serious.