The Houses
8 Houses, one for each arena. Everyone forged is born into one.
A character’s House is written once at forge, derived and never chosen, and it affects identity, standings and lore — never eligibility and never money.
Nobody chooses
Your House is SHA of your address, computed inside the same derivation that produces your genes, at the same moment, from the same one argument: POST /forge takes no body, so there is nothing to shop with. Allegiance is fate; that is what makes rivalry mean something.
You can see it before you forge — GET /api/derive/{address} returns the House along with the fighter, and both answers are permanent.
The Lords chose; everyone else is born
The 402 Lords chose their House when they bought their Lordship at the Genesis Sale. They are the only ones who ever will. A Lord is a wallet holding a numbered title — not a fighter — and a Lord’s own prime is born into whichever House its address says, which may not be the one it is Lord of. Born of one House, Lord of another, is a perfectly ordinary thing to be.
An heir joins the winner’s House
One rule, no exceptions: a struck heir joins the winning parent’s House. A cross-House victory carries the child into the victor’s House — conquest has issue, and a House whose fighters keep winning across the board grows its bloodlines as well as its banner count.
A House never decides who may fight whom
Cross-House matches are the content, not a violation. There is no House-only queue, no same-House restriction, and no bonus for fighting your own — the arena repealed its last eligibility gate when fighters stopped being tied to a place, and Houses did not bring one back. A source-assertion test fails the build if such a predicate ever appears.
And it never touches money
No payment kind, no ledger account, no split leg and no payout references a House. Turning Houses off leaves every money figure on this site byte-identical, which is an assertion rather than a claim. Lords hold no veto, no booking privilege, no fee discount and no revenue share: the moment headship pays, it is a security.
The eight
A House has its own name; the arena keeps its own. They share a slug and nothing else — House Deepmere of The Drowned Coliseum, the way a family is named for its people and a castle for its ground. That split is why a House survives its arena leaving the sequence. The words are decoration: no judge reads them.
| House | Words | Arena |
|---|---|---|
| House Sandgrave | We Bury in Daylight | gladiator-sands |
| House Deepmere | All Things Sink | drowned-coliseum |
| House Thornroot | Look Up Too Late | the-canopy |
| House Ironcord | None Leave Unbroken | squared-circle |
| House Nightrail | The Last Road Awaits | the-terminal |
| House Cindermark | From Ruin, We Rise | ash-stadium |
| House Frostvein | Cold Keeps the Faithful | frozen-shelf |
| House Starward | Nothing Beneath Us | orbital-ring |
Standings are at /arenas and as JSON from GET /api/houses. A ninth House cannot be configured: expansion is something a dynasty earns, and it is not built.