Three Sacrosanct Houses

The Three Sacrosanct Houses are the highest-ranking lineages descended directly from the divine ruler of the Sacred Territory of Otawalle. Their standing as the “Most Sacred of the Sacred” is inseparable from a hereditary vulnerability: members are particularly prone to memory loss, sometimes while still in their prime, making sacred descent a source of both privilege and fear.

Lineage and Rank

The Three Sacrosanct Houses consist of direct descendants of the divine ruler. They are distinguished from the Eight Hallowed Houses, whose members are only indirect descendants. The distinction shapes social standing: Hohsalle’s stepmother and her first husband belonged to the Three Sacrosanct Houses, while Hohsalle’s father, Ahnolle, came from the Eight Hallowed Houses. For many, that disparity mattered greatly. In Hohsalle’s stepmother’s present life, however, rank had lost all significance.

The Divine Ruler’s Curse

Descendants of the founder of the Ancient Kingdom of Otawalle experience memory loss at a rate too high to be coincidence, and many develop it before old age. The affliction is particularly prevalent among the Three Sacrosanct Houses. Because memory loss can erase the record of a person’s achievements, those born into the sacred line live in fear of the condition, privately called the Divine Ruler’s Curse.

Some interpret the illness as divine punishment for the greedy pursuit of knowledge and the attempt to approach the gods. Hohsalle rejects that moral explanation: disease does not distinguish the sinful from the good, and its indifference is what makes it so frightening. The Houses’ sacred status therefore offers no protection from affliction; instead, it marks them as its most exposed heirs.

Secrecy and the Search for Medicine

The word “curse” is forbidden outside the Academy of Deeper Learning, a prohibition intended to prevent knowledge of the affliction from spreading. Behind the Sacred Territory’s pursuit of medicine and other fields lies a wish bordering on prayer: to escape a disease passed down through the divine ruler’s descendants without interruption.

That long history of loss converges in Hohsalle’s experimental work. As he and Tomasolle observe a mouse resting in a milky pond, the mouse becomes the focus of hopes extending beyond a single experiment: the fate of a thousand years’ worth of victims rests, for the moment, on whether the treatment can work. Hohsalle nevertheless warns that success in mice would not guarantee success in humans and that much work remains. The scene sets the Houses’ exalted lineage against the vulnerability it cannot command, and turns medical inquiry into a possible answer to a fear kept secret even from the world beyond the Academy.