A flotilla republic of memory-bearing reef aliens who treat salvage as adoption, piracy as public theater, and a properly itemized theft as a civic virtue.
Nothing useful dies unnamed.
When the moon Khepri broke over Pelagos, hot debris boiled the nursery seas and erased every fixed city. The surviving Veyr escaped inside refinery hulks, carrying family memory in smoke bladders and declaring that anything able to move could still belong to the living.
The refugee captains ended their first resource war by agreeing that property abandoned, stolen from a tyrant, or won under an announced challenge could be adopted by a crew. Every prize must be logged, named, and offered a place in the flotilla before it can be stripped.
Veyr-of-a-Wake // Amphibious colonial polyp intelligence
A Veyr person is a cooperative reef of fist-sized polyps sharing a lacquered pressure mantle. Individuals bud, merge, and trade living memory nodules throughout life.
Directive 1
Every captured ship, rescued machine, and recovered relic receives a name, a receipt, and a chance to join before it is dismantled.
Directive 2
A defeated civilian must retain enough propulsion and life support to reach safety. Taking the last engine is murder, not piracy.
Directive 3
A raid without an announced challenge is mere theft. The target must know who outflew them and why.
An open coral ring trailing three ember strokes.
The broken ring is lost Pelagos. The open gap is escape. The ember tail is the wake that survives by moving.
Primary // Coral orange marks living reef tissue, rescue paint, and ownership earned through care.
Secondary // Charcoal records the ash that ended the old world and hides the stains of constant repair.
Geometry // Open circles and hooked wake lines; closed rings imply imprisonment.
Number // Seven, for the refugee hulks that signed the First Prize Code.
Materials // Lacquered salvage plate // Braided pressure hose // Coral ceramic // Hand-stamped brass receipts
ashfall corsairs
Ashfall ships should look rescued, renamed, and loved harder after every theft. Keep silhouettes fast and off-balance, with exposed tow gear and one obvious coral receipt stripe crossing mismatched charcoal plate.
native hulls: lancer, needle
adopted hulls: longbow
captured hulls: foundry, kraken, razor
ashfall corsairs
Public structure language: ashfall corsairs.
The sealed Quiet Ledger names Aurelian recovery hulls at Pelagos before the moon fragments cooled. The Syndicate calls the ledger a forged attempt to convert stolen liens into prize law.
The Order quarantined a refugee wake whose borrowed memories failed provenance checks. The Corsairs broke the cordon, stole three hospital ships, and returned them crewed; both sides call the act a rescue.
The Guild impounded named prizes at the Brass Junction for unpaid transit tolls. The Corsairs seized the cargo, returned it to its crews, and now dare Meridian convoys to itemize ownership at gunpoint.
A Corsair wake removed a seed vault from a dying habitat and named it rescued kin. The Compact calls the act ecological abduction and demands the living archive's return.