Kemetopolis is a city-planet in the Atum-Ra system, in a pocket dimension, founded by Amenirdis and kept secret from Earth, which it calls Alkebulan.
The law underneath everything: reality answers to its true name. The world has a source code and the source code is speech. Learn what a thing is really called and it does what you say.
Every surface in the city is talking, and most of it is trying to sell you something. The city has to be kept alive on purpose, spoken true every day, or it rots. That daily fight is the engine of every story.
The world has a source code and the source code is speech.
Nobody fully agrees how old the city truly is.
Twenty-one nations hold the lexicon between them. Four are named here.
A tiered water district where the river hands back what it takes. You are served what the water gave that day, at communal tables over running channels, with a bowl set for the dead. Rich homes weep clean water on command from a cistern that never empties. Poor homes share a channel that reaches them last.
A street where the truth about you is sung before you arrive. A door-griot sings you in, deeds good and bad, and seats you by your reputation. The rich pay to be sung up a tier and everyone knows it. The Archive sits here.
A court of pure light. The unseen ruler sits always one breath from the dark, his life tied to a flame the keepers can cap. The Oyo empty-calabash sanction, blended with divine concealment.
The nation with no throne. They guard the right to disappear. The check against the lexicon becoming total, the most feared and least trusted line in the federation.
Seventeen more nations exist. Their names remain unratified.
Alkebulan is what Kemetopolis calls Earth.
The city was founded by people who left, and kept it secret.