Ko-don Chronicles | The Atramentous Order
How assassins communicate across Ermaeyth
FROM: MASTER-OPERATIVE | BYLOS LAKET
TO: APPRENTICE-OPERATIVE | SABEL TUNRICK
“Rule sixteen? Consider that rescinded as long as it doesn’t hinder our work or your training.”
In the world of Ermaeyth, even the unlawful have rules and procedures—at least, the ones with staying power. There’s order within the chaos they create, and everyone learns it early on. The brimstones are calling for no mercy, just blood, and we’ve got to feed them.
The Atramentous Order (TAO) is the oldest, longest-enduring institution in Ermaeyth. Lying across the Golden Sea from Ralloc, in the country of Cronele, it lurks beneath the city of Merlul, but its will reaches around the globe. While Ralloc considers itself the shining beacon of civility, Merlul reckons they’re the true seat of civilization. Here, they’re a prosperous hub of art, culture, cuisine, politics, and vices. The poorest among them can rise up to the top, but only if TAO wills it.
More than a dozen times, TAO has thwarted being taken over by their enemy to the south, the Kran Empire from the large continent Vesole. Operatives of the Order have used subterfuge, assassination, blackmail, and interception of correspondence to carry out their plans and kept their country independent. While their country shares cultural origins with their distant relations to the south, they’ve been free of their shackles for a long time, and they won’t go back into the irons willingly.
But The Atramentous Order, though outside the law, aren’t like the Vice Lords of Elysys. They don’t carve out an area of operation, daring the enforcement arm of the law to weed them out, nor do they engage in open conflict. No, they operate in the shadows. TAO is, by their design, something mythical, whispered about, half-believed, and half-superstition. And that’s the way they want it.
To keep control and have correspondence with their agents on the global scale, they have to create their methods of communication, and if intercepted, it should read as a garbled message with very little revealed. More than that, everyone in the order should be able to read and understand quickly, regardless of native tongue. Let’s find out how they do it…