Q&A time…
Twenty is the age of adulthood in Karagond culture — this exact topic is addressed during conversation between an aristo MC and their father, seeing as so much of the toxicity surrounding that man is rooted in being the “hope” for the House, carrying on the legacy of that name.
While several of your peers in Rim Square are already safely betrothed, virtually none actually wed before the start of their life’s third decade. And no one would have expected you to adopt a child into the family for years afterward.
This is fairly realistic, more so than how modern mass culture would imagine the old aristocracy, especially with how perspectives on marriage shifted significantly over centuries. To be unmarried at 20 would not be statistically unusual; nor would it be unusual to be considering marriage in your early 20’s.
I don’t think your lower bound is correct: if helots that young were expected to start getting married, we’d expect it to be more relevant to us before the rebellion. Twenty seems significantly more reasonable: Radmar’s around that age, and the MC and Breden are 20 when they can get married — and this is marriage for love, not marriage to survive.
For evidence, let’s look at some of the helot parents in our rebellion:
Cited Text
Rorind was one of the older boys on the Keriatou estate, the one who taught you how to set a snare when you were five. When he seizes your arm as you’re walking by one day, you don’t immediately recognize him. He’s only a few years older than you, but his hollow cheeks and deeply lined eyes and mouth could belong to your father. "My son is dead,
One helot father, just four years older than you, runs after you and clasps your shoulder. His tears mingle freely with the rain.
“Other than that…the one time I reckon your father truly loved someone was when we were about your age. A beautiful young fellow named Jaq from the Pelematou estate. Never concerned about looking for a safe-mate, our Jaq, open about everything he did.” Her face looks unutterably weary. “Got Harrowed about as quick as you’d expect. Within a week or two, your father had stopped crying and arranged things with his first wife.”
Lelyan emerges from the lower cave. She’s leaning heavily on her sister, but smiling—especially at the scrap of a babe drowsing in a sling around her neck. Her five-year-old son scrambles away from the rest of the children with a whoop and wraps his arms around Lelyan’s knees.
[…]
“I’m twenty-six years old, ${kuria},” Lelyan chuckles indulgently. "Done this four times before.
Lelyan’s implied to have her first kid at 21, we have other parents at 23, and Rorind could be even older. [Helot] Father was probably around 20 for his first marriage, and obviously older for his second. While Lelyan has 5 kids, Rorind might only have one, considering his anguished, “I never thought…I thought we’d die giving him a chance. Not the other way round.” There’s diversity to be had there.
It’s also important to not get caught up in this Zebedian view of the helotry. Helots are also the agricultural labour force, so even a cruel, dehumanising Thaumatarchy would rather not kill them in the prime of their physical condition. They do need the helotry to breed fast enough to maintain populations despite aristos murdering them and the state Harrowing them, but what draws the Theurges’ eye seems primarily to be rebellion. Jaq was Harrowed young, but he openly flaunted his refusal to play by the Thaumatarchy’s rules.
We’re likely to get some insight into how helots are chosen for the Harrowing in the near future, and I suspect it’ll look a lot like the injustices and hypocrisies of the Xaos-village.
In lighter news, did you know that Corras having twins was such a joyous event that the Whendward Band named the warren of caves it happened in after her? In Chapter 3, to test Breden or Radmar, they’re given false information about the band planning to set camp at Corras’ Cave — it’s very likely this is the same campsite the band used during Week 6 of winter. It’s very wholesome. Just ignore that it’s still called Corras’ Cave even when Corras is back in Rim Square.
Dann is described as one of your “young friends”, so he’s roughly around the same age as the MC.
As for Calea, she’s also likely around the same age as the MC, though this needs more inference.
Why Calea isn't much older than you
First, let’s establish a bound that Calea can’t be more than ~3 years older than the MC by dissecting the text surrounding a Hector romance:
It was during the Angelday ball on his family estate three years ago. Both Calea and you were determined to be seen as full adults, and had discussed extensively (and in her case with uncommon generosity) what you would both wear to drive the point home.
Angelday is the spring equinox (making this two years to the day before Olen Stonehewer was murdered, for reference). Since the MC’s birthday is in late spring, this puts them at 16, almost 17. The Karagond age of adulthood is 20, so Calea would’ve been younger than 20 at this time. That said, going off vibes, I read them as about the same age here. Speaking as a 21-year-old, 22 and up is old, and 20 and under is young. That’s just how things be. The bigger the gap between Calea and the MC, the harder it is for me to see their common ground in wanting to be seen as adults.
Also, the aristo MC, Calea, and Hector are childhood — well, not friends, but y’know — and they all learned horseback riding at around the same time, per:
For a moment, you stare out over the familiar landscape where you learned riding and played at swords with your cousins. You remember sitting under those pear trees, listening with mingled curiosity and envy as they recounted the glories and intrigues of the Archon’s court in Shayard City. And you remember the sting of fourteen-year-old Calea laughing, “Oh, ${fname}—what do you mean, when you come up for a Season? We all know your father couldn’t clothe you for a week.”
I personally read Calea as maybe a year or so older. But 3 years is the window I’d give it.
Dann was Calea’s first victim, but we can also learn from Calea’s fourth victim, Tullmer. The Keriatou Masque is set in the autumn before the uprising, about a year before the Fourth Harrowing (placing the MC at 18 — yes, if you “had a summer together” with Hector, Calea makes you play a coarse, ugly brute who’ll never be with their richer, more powerful cousin just a couple months after your break-up), and regarding Tullmer:
The three “favorites” before him had all been Harrowed extraordinarily young, starting with your friend Dann.
So Tullmer was definitely killed within two Harrowings after this (since the third Harrowing only got three elders) — he probably got called up the first Harrowing of the new year considering that Mertice (Calea’s mother) noticed him. It’s rather likely that she’s the one arranging for Calea’s “favorites” to be Harrowed; and considering the prodigious rate that Calea’s described as going through “favorites” along with Mertice’s keen eye, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate was roughly once per Harrowing. The expected number of Harrowings annually in Rim Square seems to be 3, so under this assumption, I’d suggest that Calea started about a year before Tullmer, which would be 2 years before the start of the rebellion (3 years before the present). That would make her somewhere between 17 and 20 when she started, based on these assumptions.
Broadly speaking, the Thaumatarchy wants to Harrow children if they have an excuse to, because they harvest more aether that way. If they can accuse a child of a crime punishable by Harrowing, you can bet they will. Take, for example, Zebed’s justification for murdering children:
“You are all reprobates and rebels, Angels stand witness. Each one of you corrupted by Xaos! Age offers no protection when innocence is lost.”
Or this Theurge, if your rebellion is caught in the woods:
Run, Pin, run!
Their curt speech carries faintly across the ravine. “Have a care to catch every child. Alive.” Is that a tremor in the Theurge’s voice? “They’re the most important ones to bring back for punishment.”
“Harrowing children, kurios?” The flatness of the Phalangite’s tone perfectly conveys his disgust. “Was that not why we fought the Halassurqs?”
“These are traitors and criminals, corrupted beyond repair by the devil ${lname}. Not true children. Find them all.” He beckons the soldiers on up the stream.
Maybe they would draw a line at woodchipping actual babies, but the Theurge does specify every child, which we know includes infants.
There’s, uh, a rather simpler explanation for how Ganelon got his hands on the First Exercise:
“The First Exercise.” Cerlota clucks her tongue in disapproval. "I have heard that some Theurges find ways of smuggling that scroll into the noble homes where their child has been adopted. They hope that their child will find it and start down a path of meditation that ultimately will lead them to the Lykeion and back to their birth parents.
Ganelon had passed you the thin vellum scroll the previous autumn, as the most readily disposable piece of a small library he’d recently inherited from some distant aunt.
It’s pretty impressive how seamlessly this was integrated: we know per Havenstone’s own statements that Ganelon’s role has grown in the process of writing Stormwright (which is both good and bad news for me, since Ganelon’s death is, to me, the absolute best scene in Uprising). It’s not entirely clear whether Havenstone intended this when writing Uprising, but it fits naturally now: it seems likely that one of Ganelon’s parents is a Theurge, and passed along the library with the First Exercise hidden inside.
The joke theory I had is that Chirex is Ganelon’s mother, because they’re both incompetent and get clowned on by us, and she’s physically visited Rim Square. But we’ll see…
Even then, not necessarily. Take physics for example: any literate layperson can learn concepts from a book, and with some mathematical background can read and understand many foundational papers from decades past. But it still takes years of education to actually become an academic physicist, and it’s not a path that everyone who could take it actually would.
Branching out from education to the nebulous idea of “smart” in general, there are going to plenty of highly skilled, competent people who just don’t grasp Theurgy. Future 6 COM or 6 CHA rebels are going to be geniuses and yet probably couldn’t lift a rock with magic. On a smaller scale, we see Jyrrek struggle with Theurgy even when actively trying to learn.
Personally, I’d be a bit disappointed in Sarcifer 
If he wants to dedicate his time and energy to watching some self-taught mage in the periphery, it seems a bit of a waste. And if he was paying attention, he could’ve, you know, helped out a little.
It’s worth noting that a rebel Theurge might not be the most interesting ally to Sarcifer, not even considering Cerlota’s hypothesis that Sarcifer wants to rebalance society to weaken the institutional power of Theurges. Sarcifer is already one of the most powerful mages in the setting, who already managed to defeat an Ennearch at what we have to assume was a significant aether deficit. What he isn’t is a warrior-general, or an inspiring voice to mobilise people.
(This isn’t to say that a Theurge wouldn’t be a useful ally to Sarcifer. There’s a lot that could be learned from him: Ward-work, Plektosis, defeating the kill-switch; each of these could make us a usefl piece to wield against the Thaumatarchy, but it remains to be seen how much he’d be willing to teach)
A crimson ram. This is also why they wear kermes-dyed clothes.
I also don’t particularly see Calea as getting her own “faction”; there’s nothing suggesting that caleaname is related to factions, they just happen to be two things Havenstone has already put in the code to hint at future chapters, such as irdgoal, suspicion, and ird_anarchy. Personally, I think it’s what we’ll call Calea in dialogue (e.g. cousin, Calea, Keriatou, etc.) This is consistent with the “cername” variable. @apple’s speculation that it’s what Calea will call us is also valid, and is consistent with other name variables.
A major barrier that Calea needs to overcome is that her natural base of power overlaps with our own: the Outer Rim. The Keriatou are the aristarchs, so the Rim Square houses have to appease them — but what happens if, say, the Archon falls and Shayard is thrown into chaos? Suddenly the Keriatou look a lot less attractive; this is the power of anarchy.
This isn’t to say that I think Hector and Calea will stop being important; just that their power might be less faction boss and more dangerous lieutenant for some faction. I’ve said it before, but I suspect Hector will be rather like the Flame Temple guy from Pon Para: a foil from the same hometown who serves as a rival to clown on (there are so many ways to humiliate Hector already) before somehow becoming a major threat.
In Sojourn, you can improve any one of your stats by one point; if you get INT 3, you’re given the choice to start specialising in some Theurgic skill. One of those is healing, and it can be learned from both Cerlota and M’kyar.
Plato’s fictional depiction of Aristophanes would turn in his grave. And it’s seditious too… after all, what is the part of one’s body that’s always in the beginning connected to another? That’s right, the omphalos. Just as each person strives to become whole, so too does the world strive to become whole again… with its manifest destiny, the Karagond Hegemony.
More seriously, though, it’ll be interesting to see what else from Symposium makes its way into Karagond culture.
Oh, and to keep up the spirit of polls from just a few days ago, here’s a fun one: what element would you choose to base a sacramental liturgy on? They’re all good vibes, and even those rebellions that don’t dabble in religion at all can acknowledge that. We’ll just see about
- Water
- Air
- Fire