Sette leads Duane around by a more literal leash than normal.

Duane: Consider it, Sette: If a tree could think thoughts, what might it value?
Sette: Your face.
Duane: Peace. Peace in which to thrive and grow. Acutely empathic, the beast will with hostility react to your hostility. Entreat it peacefully, however, and it will in like fashion answer.
Sette: Ugh, walky roots are STOOPID critters.

— Chapter 1

Unsounded is a Fantasy Webcomic by Ashley Cope set in a world quite unlike our own, containing multi-faceted cultures with deep and dark histories, strangely different laws of physics, and magic so commonplace it's called by a different name.

The main story revolves around rude, loud-mouthed Sette Frummagem, daughter of the Lord of Thieves. Sette is on a mission from her Da, and she'll lie, cheat, and steal to make sure it's a success (she'll lie, cheat, and steal anyway). Condemned to aid her in her rotten endeavours is a rotten corpse by the name of Duane Adelier, who seems oddly talented with the supernatural, and oddly not laying motionless in the dirt.

Events are quickly complicated by the appearance of the "Red Berry Boys", a gang of criminals who at first appear to be simple slavers, but are soon discovered to have a stranger and much more disturbing agenda. That agenda appears to have an uncanny number of connections to Sette's mission, and as such Sette inadvertently finds herself wrapped up in their schemes. It's not long before she and Duane are in over their heads and under fire from all sides. Priorities change from just carrying out her appointed task to living to see the next sunrise.

The road is long and no one is what they seem. Never trust a thief, and never trust anyone who won't let you look into their eyes.

The author has also written supplemental prose stories in the same universe, which can be found here.

Book 1, The Zombie and the Brat, officially concluded on August 21, 2025, with Book 2, The Red Cost, having started January 5, 2026.

Webcomics

Unsounded: The Zombie and the Brat (2010-2025)
Unsounded: The Red Cost (2026-)

Print Comics

The Priestess ^noteVolume I first edition
Duane in Sharteshane ^note
The Last Client ^noteVolume II Iron Circus edition
The Story of Kissfist Baxter ^noteVolume III

These webcomics and their supplemental stories provides examples of:

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General Kasslynian Tropes

Abandoned Info Page: Initially there was an author curated wiki on the site alongside the comic explaining core things like pymary or the basics of the khert and helping keep track of characters. Eventually it stopped being updated, and then after getting hacked into was deleted entirely.
Acid-Trip Dimension: The Khert, being both the infrastructure of Kasslyne's reality and a melting pot of every memory anyone has ever had.
Murkoph: "It's too bright in here and the fish keep lookin' at me."
Cope's commentary: "If heaven doesn't look like a psychedelic album cover I don't wanna go."
Action Bomb: Beadman's Better Rat Traps look like crawling mechanical beetles, and are designed to explode once eaten.
Adopted into Royalty: To avoid family favoritism and primogeniture, and because Cresce believes that important women shouldn't get pregnant as it's too much of a handicap/risk, sitting Crescian queens typically don't have any biological children of their own; as a rule, all of a queen's children/prospective heirs are adopted or sired by the royal consorts on suitably vetted surrogates.
Aerith and Bob: There are a number of different naming conventions at play which make for some interesting contrasts in names, such as Knock-Me-Down Frummagem and Maharaishala Sonorie living on the same content as fistfuls of Saras, Jons and Karls.
Alien Blood: Senet Beasts tend to bleed a black ichor, though Lady Ilganyag's black is shot through with rivulets of silver, Shaensigin's blood is red and waterwomen bleed water.
All-Accessible Magic: Anyone can be made into a spellwright with a quick ritual to open their connection to the Background Magic Field. Spells are just correctly worded instructions in the Language of Magic, so wrights run the gamut from Inept Mages reading by rote out of a primer to Badass Bookworms who know the language inside and out.
All There in the Manual: Sort of. There's a ton of miscellaneous information about the setting and characters on Ashley's Formspring and Unsounded's wiki and Tumblr.
Amputative Sentencing: Criminal spellwrights usually lose their tongues alongside other penalties, rendering them unable to use pymary.
Animal Motifs: The Black Tongues are associated with crows, due to their patron Lady Ilganyag.
Animate Dead: While most plods have a degree of their rotting flesh remaining the Black Tongues' new plod mask concept allows them to animate bodies that are down to mostly charred remains.
Animesque: Unsounded is by an American artist and drawn in an art style she is happy to say is visually influenced by manga, Bone and Ted Naifeh.
Anthropomorphic Food: If the khert is broken, strange things happen. Like your cup of coffee freezing and suddenly wanting to be your friend.
Anti-Magic: There are a few things that can interfere with pymary;
- "First Materials", leftovers from when the gods created the world (or so the religions claim), are separate from the universal khert(having an internal khert of their own), and are therefore immune to normal magical manipulation. This immunity also allows them to disrupt pymary if they pass through the khert lines a wright is using.
- The khert emanates from the ground, and becomes thinner farther away from it.
- Overloading and irritating the local khert with heavy or badly-performed spells can make further manipulation of it more dangerous.
- Since spells target objects according to their material, mixes of different materials can complicate matters.
Antiquated Linguistics: Older members of the long-lived Aldish castes tend to speak like they're still a century behind.
Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Perceptive glamours work this way; they make people perceive something in a certain way, but the specifics of that perception varies by individual. Duane looks different to everyone he meets, for instance, as does Bastion Winalils when he's under an illusion - which comes back to bite him when two observers realise what they're seeing doesn't match up...
Arc Words: Live in your best world. It's practically Sette's catch phrase, and even Duane comes around to appreciating the phrase. But while it starts off with a positive meaning, it starts to turn darker as both Duane and Sette begin to sit in denial over their situations and the consequences of their actions.
Arranged Marriage: In Alderode, if a person hasn't gotten married by a certain age—which age depends on their caste—the elders of their gher push for their marriage and find them a partner as everyone but Third Options is expected to have children. Mathis and Vienne were put together even though Vienne didn't want to get married and Mathis would have liked to stay a loner, and neither (at first) wanted to have children. It seems to have been a nearly-Perfectly Arranged Marriage since they both did genuinely fall in love with each other, but it's later subverted with the reveal that, while Quigley did love Vienne, he came to resent both her and Matty after the latter's birth due to feeling she was neglecting and not listening to him in favor of their son and her work for a rebel group that he knew was bound to get them all horrifically tortured to death by the state. So he turned her in to the government, even though he quickly came to regret this.
Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligences like Timofey and Uaid are created by sounding memories from the khert, stripping them of extraneous bits and them binding them with other memories suited towards the personality the artificer is trying for into a construct of First Materials.
Artificial Limbs: Lost an arm? No problem. There's a whole range of simulacra. Including cigar-lighting, weaponized, and self-lubricating.
Artificial Afterlife: There was an attempt at one that was only partially successful, and the ramifications of this failure drive the first half of the story. Unlike what the setting's religions teach, the khert is not an afterlife and reincarnating souls do not exist. When Lady Ilganyag's paramour discovered this, the two tried and failed to create a reincarnating soul, and instead settled for reprogramming the khert to store human memories upon death. The problem is that this doesn't preserve whole consciousnesses, only individual memories, so the afterlife just ended up full of incoherent mnemonic fragments that cause problems when they leak back into reality. However, despite all this, it is implied there is an actual afterlife, it's just not the khert.
Artistic License – Physics: The River Jarla flows in two opposite directions with a mouth on opposing coasts according to the map, this part of the map was not shown again after this was pointed out.
Ascended Extra: Flann started out as one of many nameless Inak revolutionaries, but attracted attention from readers so readers were asked to name him and he became the viewpoint character within the Inak revolution.
Author Catch Phrase: Kind of. Ashley's typical response to people asking spoiler-y or story-related questions on her Formspring is simply "I wonder."
Background Magic Field: The khert.
The Bad Kingdom: Duane, and most Aldishmen as it turns out, describe and fully believe Cresce to be a hellish perverse kingdom ruled over by a tyrannical queen. They scorn the way the throne is passed down through a single family, regardless of talent, rather than being ruled over by elected men. It turns out that not only is Cresce a fairly decent country to live in, but the Queen is actually an elected official, with new queens usually being selected from a large group of young women adopted into the royal family and provided with an education on ruling for the purpose of becoming potential queens.
Barbie Doll Anatomy: It's confirmed that Sette has no nipples or belly button.
From author comment: "Legality"? I would never let issues of legality effect what I draw. Sette looks the way she looks because that's how she's supposed to look.
Barrier Bypass: Sette is able to use her hands, which have strange claws that can touch ghosts, to temporarily push aside a pymaric shield barrier during a khert fire, allowing Jivi and Mathis to escape the place where they had become trapped.
Bathos:
- Frequently employed to take the wind out of pompous characters like Duane, and even to undercut several of the Wham Lines listed below.
  Bastion: I brought him back! Bastion Winalils beat death!
  Rahm: Dogshit.
  Bastion (looking like a kicked puppy): Dogshit?
- The author has stated one guiding principle of the comic is that Duane is never allowed to be too cool, and this is borne out; every time he performs some impressive feat, you can be assured he'll suffer some embarrassing pratfall shortly after.
Belief Makes You Stupid: While Duane is surprisingly intelligent / verbose for an undead, his fundamentalist belief in Sasselit leaves him blind to points of view that a dumber man could figure out - such as HOW Lady Illganyag is deceiving him; she pretends that his faith is an absolute, and can feed him piano wires about topics pertaining to it even when he (rightly) distrusts everything else about her.
Bizarre Alien Psychology: Senets—those beings from before time that survived the implementation of the khert—tend to think in very odd fashions as they are inhuman and in many cases incapable of changing the way they think due to their very natures. Bastion points out that senets have an alarming tendency to claim to love something or someone while destroying it or torturing and killing them, without finding themselves to be doing anything odd or contradictory to that "love".
- Efheby have predatory insticts that make them want to chase and tear apart small children and violently sexually dominate adults as their sexual organs are not for procreation but putting anything encroaching on their territorry in their place. They can also become addicted to drinking and manipulating human minds.
- Llemulin (Waterwomen and Stormbringers) have collective memories and regularly unmake themselves destroying any personal memories they've aquired in order to reset. They also keep one waterwoman's skull hollowed out to host their tribe's memories with no personal ones. Minnow is considered broken by her kin for her insistance on retaining her personal memories and breaking with her tribe.
Black Comedy Pet Death: Apparently Mikaila went through two squirrels and a rabbit before her parents called it quits on her having pets, with the implication she killed them trying to practice pymary, and Duane half-jokes that he's terrified she'll next try to cast on her baby brother.
Blessed with Suck: The Platinum Caste of Alderode have the strongest connection to the Khert, and produce the most powerful wrights - but this connection significantly shortens their lifespan; none of them live past thirty. Plat boys are very often conscripted to become Child Soldiers and get thrown into the meat grinder of war, and Plat girls don't even get to benefit from their relationship with the khert, since women aren't allowed to practise pyrmary in Alderode.
Blood Magic: Waterwomen can control blood so long as they are touching their potential victim. This allows them to kill instantly with a touch and is why anyone who has managed to get into a confrontation with them tries to take them out at a distance. They still prefer drowning if a human has managed to gain their ire.
Boats into Buildings: In the capital of Sharteshane, a country with a sea faring economy and pirate history, several buildings have overturned boats and ships as their roofs and upper floor.
Breeding Slave: This is the fate of any woman capable of getting pregnant in territory conquered by Alderode. Since any child conceived in the vicinity of the dammakhert is automatically sorted into one of the Aldish castes, after the dammakhert is 'installed'' in a new area, the Alds instigate mass rape with the specific intention of breeding as many children as possible, both to replenish the castes back in Alderode and to erase the conquered people.
Brown Note: The weeping plague is spread by eye contact.
Burial at Sea: Since the khert does not extend over the sea the major religions of Kasslyne treat the sea as hell, and burial there is sacrilegious. Starfish once cut up a family and tossed them in the sea to ensure the authorities wouldn't find them.
Canis Major: "The giant dogs represent the defeat of leisure and fealty by the capitalist demands of poorly compensated labour– haha, no, that’s a lie. Who doesn’t like giant dogs?"
Carnivorous Healing Factor: Decapitated efheby can regenerate their bodies by hunting bugs and working their way up to larger prey, using that mass to regrow their own.
Cave Mouth: Kasslyne is made of the corpses of Mountain Ogres who died when the khert was first activated. While they're mostly broken down into simple soil and rocks on the surface ogre caverns where they retain their shape in part or whole are common beneath the surface. These natural tunnels traverse through the ogres' natural or dying holes, including mouths.
Chariot Pulled by Cats: The world of Unsounded has giant dogs in place of horses; some breeds are used to pull carriages, while others are suitable as mounts.
Child Soldiers: Alderode's army recruits plat children for the front lines, to Cresce's disgust. Even extremely young plats naturally have a stronger connection to the khert than the most gifted soud wright in centuries. It's implied that older plats work in safer conditions, but the less skilled children aren't as valuable.
Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The major-character wrights have a particular color attached to most of their spells: Duane's are green, Quigley's are blue, and Anadyne's are purple. When they steal each other's spells, though, the colors can get mixed or rearranged. And Duane's spells seem to turn red when things get serious.
Conditioned to Accept Horror: In the Gefendur religion twins are taken from their parents, placed in service to a temple and, sometime after they turn 22, one of them is ritually killed and cannibalised. The twins themselves not only know this is going to happen but are fully aware which one of them is going to get the chop, and they regard it as a great honour and—at least in Ulestry and Cresce—can opt out of the sacrifice. However the practice of 'kept twins' does creep out otherwise devout believers, such as Sette, Matty and Jivi.
Conlang: Tainish is a pretty elaborate invented language, and Ashley will often give translations when it's used on page though some readers are starting to be able to guess at what was said. Old Tainish is less built, though Ashley has given out lists of vocab.
Conscription: Alderode conscripts young men into the Council Army, while its Ssaelit and Gefendur Church run armies seem to be made up of volunteers. Lemuel was conscripted to the army when he was twelve and sent to fight the decade long rebellion in Avelpit.
Creepy Crows: The Ssaelit religion sees crows as tempters and tricksters in a similar way to the way serpents are viewed in Christian iconography. This may have something to do with their being carrion birds and the Ssaelit beliefs concerning decay and death, or it might have something to do with the crow-like Senet in the khert that has been manipulating humanity for centuries and seems to have known Ssael himself.
Cruel and Unusual Death: Getting core leeched is a horrible way to die. It involves having a vital aspect of your physical makeup removed from your body by a wright. The khert then sees the rest of you as incomplete material and then painfully dissolves the rest of your body. It is 100% fatal.
Cult of Personality: Queen Maharaishala Sonorie of Cresce is extremely popular among her people, controls the press and has her portrait above an offering table in homes and shrines across the country. The near worship of the queen is not universal, there are plenty who are upset with her because she is not more on their northern neighbor, but it is very prevalent. She works hard to maintain her kind ethical motherly image and hides the less savory work she oversees.
Cursed with Awesome: The Gold/Soud caste, who are unaffected by the Dhammakhert in Alderode. Their countrymen distrust and look down on them because they can't be read through the khert, but it also means they can't be "stung" and captured by the government, or have their minds twisted and warped into wanting to kill a particular person should someone cast the Etalarche curse.
Cute Monster Girl: While most senets are wholly monstrous in appearance the female Llemülin look mostly like blue and green skinned and haired women with open necks. Minnow is a very conventionally cute perky blue lady who is one of the Llemülin. The male Llemülin on the other hand look like ever changing living clouds.
Dead Guy on Display:
- In Alderode political dissidents are publicly strung up to be tortured and executed, and kept in hanging cages over the punishment pits. Those executed are held up to show the public what should happen if they try to fight the Vits Council.
- The Black Tongues dress the skeletons of their order's deceased leaders in robes and suspend them with pymary over their headquarters.
Death by Childbirth:
- Duane and Lemuel were raised by their father and grandfather after their mother died of complications giving birth to Lemuel. Lem's guilt over it manifested in nightmares where people would blame him for killing his mother.
- Karl brings up the fact that women die in childbirth all the time when discussing how he's going to kill his wife once he's secured a noble title through marrying her. He's lying though. Childbirth in Cresce is incredibly safe since with wrights the baby can just be safely pulled out of the womb through the mother's flesh by rendering it temporarily intangible.
Dehumanizing Insult: In Alderode, a slur for the Platinum caste directly translates to "mayfly", in mockery of their 30-year lifespans. Mathis Quigley, a Platinum, chooses a mayfly design for his marriage tattoo as a gesture of defiance.
Deliberate Values Dissonance: Bigotry abounds in the world of Unsounded, even in the majority of the 'good' characters.
- Alderode has two state religions and an ironclad caste system based on hair color. People of different classes and religions are segregated and forbidden from marrying each other or interbreeding, they're expected to take stereotypical careers and the Gold and Bronze castes are heavily discriminated against. (The castes have real physiological differences: the upper caste, the Coppers, has a lifespan of centuries and almost no talent with pymary. The lower class, the Plats, die before 30 and are the most skilled wrights in the world...but this just means the Alderode government trains up Plat boys as Child Soldiers to get the most use out of them. This isn't a natural state of affairs: the castes are reinforced by an artificial khert and the laws against mixed-caste marriage.) It also has ubiquitous sexism, with women being barred from the public sphere and from practicing pymary in all but the rarest circumstances.
- At first glance Cresce is a near post-scarcity utopia with social equality—but it's also a theocracy with a noble class based on which families the priestesses say are in favour with the gods, the people living there have limited autonomy, the whole system only works so well because of the use of plod labor, and in the cases where plods aren't employed the Inak are forced to take the worst jobs that humans don't want to do; they're one degree away from slaves as they are physically incompatible with the "breath system" which allows or Cresce's "moneyless" economy and equal distribution of rations and necessities. The queen and her loyalists are trying to improve the lot of the Inak in Cresce but are facing too much pushback to make much headway.
- Every nation (excluding the Mmatont) practices the ritual sacrifice and cannibalization of twins, believing that twins are beloved by the Gefendur gods, and that the sacrificed twin is freed from the endless cycle of reincarnation, staying in paradise at the gods' sides. The surviving twin spends the rest of their life as a member of the clergy, taking care of other twin children until their turn comes at adulthood in shrines separate from society. The Ssaelists of Alderode find this practice abhorent and whenever they give birth to twins, they do everything they can to make the twins appear not to be out of the belief that Gefendur believers will steal the children away to be taken to a shrine, a belief that may or may not be Ssaelist propoganda. The Mmatont still practice human sacrifice, but it's not based on the Gefendur twin superstitions.
- Official Ssaelist dogma teaches that a woman's place is in the home giving birth to and raising children and obeying her husband, and a man is meant to be a warrior who protects his people by killing those who aren't Ssaelist and those who break faith with the many tenants of the Ssaelism. This of course gives their victims a chance to be reincarnated into a "better" life by being reborn into a Ssaelist family next go around so the slaughter encouraged by the teachings is meant to be guilt free. To be clear the reincarnation that Ssaelists and Gefendur adherents believe in has no supporting evidence in their world.
- Everyone hates the two-toed Lizard Folk the Inak, or at least considers them inferior since they don't have a "soul". The official Gefendur dogma is that they're essentially beasts. Alderode doesn't basically enslave them like the Cresians do, but that's likely largely due to the absence of Two-Toe population in Aldeorde. At least one lizard decided to take the fight to the human nations, but he abandoned that plan before it even got started.
- Homosexuality and same sex relationships occupy an interesting niche; homosexuality is regarded as something that a person does rather than what they are and everyone is expected to marry someone of the opposite gender and have lots of kids, so most LGBTQIA people in Kasslyne lead double lives, with a socially acceptable identity in public and their true self hidden behind closed doors. Chancellor Ufal and his partner Liro have openly been together for many years, but it's acceptable because they're both married to understanding women and have their own respective families, plus they're public figures in Cresce and fairly popular; people on the lower levels of Crescian society, and definitely in Alderode, would be looked down upon and called slurs. However, crucially there are no religious edicts against same sex relationships; Word of God is that they're generally seen as a vice similar to how we view excessive drinking or gambling, so 'they'll call you names, but they won't try to hang you from a tree.'
Dirty Old Man: Delicieu raped his teenage apprentices, and lent the boys out to other Black Tongues with similar tastes for the same purpose.
Dumb Struck: After the last thing he saw before being blinded by spellfire was his mother and her workers being tortured to death Matty was mute for a long time to his father's consternation. He finally spoke again to beg his father not to leave him when Mathis tried finding someone better than his broken self to leave Matty with so he could go commit suicide by cop.
Easter Egg: Some pages have additional bits "hidden" on them, usually in the form of a text bonus (in-universe newspapers, letters, journal entries, etc.)
Eldritch Ocean Abyss: Scripture teaches that the ocean floor — which is cut off from the Background Magic Field and therefore the afterlife as they understand it — is where the Gods built Hell, for the souls of the damned to be trapped in the frigid, crushing dark for all eternity.
Elective Monarchy: While the Queen of Cresce may propose an heir that heir needs the support of at least two out of three of the nobility, High Priestess and the Lord General to actually be elected to the position. The heir is usually a young women adopted by the queen but can be another member of the royal family and can be from elsewhere adopted into the royal family to make them eligible for the position.
Extinct Sapient Species: The lions of Kasslyne are mentioned to have been sapient. They were wiped out by the Gefendur in a failed attempt to demoralize the Ssaelit, who adopted them as their icon.
Fantastic Drug: Many, the most common being "purple weed", which has similar effects to cannabis and is widely smoked in lieu of tobacco, as well as the stimulant krrf. The magical steroid "glut" is smoked for a temporary high and a boost in muscle growth, with prolonged use causing distinctive gigantism. This is why Bell is so large.
Fantastic Fromage: A "monny" is a type of Unicorn. A popular breakfast item is a colorful savory cereal made up of crunchy bits that taste like shrimp and salty biscuits served in warm monny milk topped with monny cheese.
Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Hedgeapples are a common fruit, often used as an ingredient in bigger dishes. They're round with little nodules and light colored flesh and taste like woody pears.
Fantastic Naming Convention:
- Crescians outside the royal family traditionally have four letter first names and four letter last names. The tradition started when there was a famine under the first Queen and she chose to ensure rations only for those with four letter names in a desperate attempt to keep the country alive, this meant her own children starved. This is not a hard rule, but it is considered to be inviting bad luck to give your child a longer name.
- In Sharteshane parents give their children meaningful and unique names, with "fancy" Crescian stye names mocked. This results in such names as Nary-A’Care, Corners, Stockyard, and Knock-Me-Down.
Fantastic Nuke: The allepakh (literally "juicer") is a scaled-up Limited-Use Magical Device that discharges a liquefying spell from its point of impact. The Background Magic Field reflexively heats every affected substance to its natural melting point, causing a regional Magic Misfire that further destabilizes reality and shuts down other magic, destroying a square half-mile with the initial blast not counting further destruction via fire. What's particularly insidious is that the heat produced is technically a physical change, allowing it to bypass Anti-Magic protections.
Elka: Whole area becomes... foul, boiling, dead soup. On fire.
Fantastic Racism:
- Aldish society is divided into People of Hair Color.
  "Caste diversity equals Aldish strength. Caste purity equals Aldish power."
- Most people look down on the reptilian two-toes, seeing them as dull, thieving pests. After humans tore down their homes for First Materials, banned their religions, and turned them into second-class citizens forced to only take menial jobs, most two-toes have no love for spiderpaws either.
Fantastic Slur:
- "Pissmop" is one for Souds, an Aldish caste identified by their blonde hair.
- "Insect" is one for the short-lived Hethllot. Quigley rebels against this by giving his custom spells insect themes.
- The "two-toes" respond in kind by referring to the gangly, many-fingered humans as "spiderpaws".
Fantastic Underclass: The two-toe lizard folk were driven from their underground homes after a disastrous first contact and now live on the margins of human society with none of the rights of citizenship, doing menial work. It goes From Bad to Worse when they're scapegoated for Princess Rilursa's murder and subjected to mass internment.
Fantasy: Quite. Beyond that, however, it doesn't readily fit into any of the subgenres. It could probably be best described as "Low Fantasy, high magic."
Fictional Currency:
- The standard currency on Kasslyne is the "sem", a coin that's minted from various metals. People might specify the metal à la "gold sem" or leave it implicit, much like "two-fifty" could mean $2.50 or $250.00 in context.
- Cresce is a state with some communist elements that abhors money, so citizens who produce beyond their required quotas earn Labour Points instead. These magic coins are keyed to the earner's aura so that they can't be spent by anyone else.
Fictional Document: The author cheekily claims that she has lots of information on the setting, but much of isn't in English and she hasn't scanlated it all.
Fictional Holiday: There are four major holidays a year in Kasslyne, each a feast day for one of the four Twin Gods and marked with the ritual sacrifice of a younger twin. The first book ends on Tirna's Day or Treenahinn, the fall day dedicated to the Trickster God Tirna.
Flesh Golem: Plods are usually made with men of similar body shape to help keep their "donors" anonymous so that people interacting with them aren't identifying them with dead loved ones or personal tragedies. Maur seems to think that stitching dead babies' arms onto the corpses of grown men makes for "cute" plods and creates a group of such plods for a parade.
Fluffy Fashion Feathers: A few of the elaborate Crescian noble court party ensembles seen involve masses of fluffy feathers framing their gold painted chests.
Formulaic Magic: Pymaric spells are essentially programs spoken to the Khert in the Old Tainish language, complete with the potential for catastrophic glitches if functions are incorrectly described.
For Science!: The ethos of the Black Tongues, spellwrights who want the freedom to practice pymary however they want. Some work for the betterment of mankind; some dismantle infants.
Freaky Funeral Forms: The two main religions feel this way about each other. Gefendur bury their dead to return them to Mother Yerta and abhor Ssaelit cremation rituals as destroying a divine gift. Ssaelit cremate their dead to spare them from decay, which they see as one mark of the dead Gods' tyranny, and believe that burial jeopardizes the soul's reincarnation.
Functional Magic: Sorcerers are called "wrights" (short for "spellwright"). Seems accessible enough that one of the mooks could use it while reading an instruction manual. Specifically, pymary is Rule Magic —it's controlled by speaking a Language of Magic with lots of rules and limitations that must be strictly adhered to.
Futile Control Fiddling: All Magitek, from cosmetic accessories up to mechas, can be infected by mnemonic phantoms. If the operator is lucky, they might just jam the controls for a moment and then disperse. If they're very unlucky, the ghosts might override the weapons systems.
Glass Weapon: First Materials are the only materials that can pymarically contain aspects, and First Glass is commonly used to contain explosive and fiery aspects creating handheld explosives that blow up when the glass is broken.
Gorn: Cope really loves her gore. The gore does tend to be more for dramatic or horrifying purposes than pure excitement, but it does dip into this occasionally.
From Author Comment: Viscera are beautiful. I think we're lucky to have such pretty insides :3
Godzilla Threshold: The Etalarche Curse is so fundamentally vile and damning that it took a theocratic police state 10 years of political debates before they could stomach using it on an extremely effective rebel leader. It is so seldomly used that it has only been cast less than 12 times in the entirety of history, with it's namesake, the grandson of Ssael himself, being the very first victim.
Graffiti of the Resistance: On the day Duane was assassinated graffiti saying March On, for the Aldish rebel group the March, had to be washed off the wall around the gher he lived in.
Greed: The dangers of giving in to greed show up and are pointed out time and again. In Cresce greed is illegal, technically, as regular money is outlawed and people are to use labour points to purchase things, yet their nobility is still far more wealthy than the supposedly fairly treated laborers.
- Quigley's fatal flaw is his susceptibility to greed. Even though he, Uaid and Matty are on the run from the Aldish and Crescian governments and he's disgusted by Starfish he's talked into smuggling Starfish and his cargo into Cresce despite having promised his son they'd go to Sharteshane and keep away from both superpowers that want his construct, and his head.
- Human greed is what destroyed the Inak homelands. When they were unearthed they had many first materials, so people killed them and destroyed their villages for it. Then forced the survivors to convert to their religion and be second class citizens treated like slaves.
Green Rocks: "First" versions of various materials, supposedly from when the gods created the world. They're required to craft pymarics, as they're the only objects that can hold a permanent enchantment.
Green Thumb: The ancient Tains, the first people to figure out how to use pymary, used it to grow plants, improve their farms and for healing. The traitor Ssael, who allied himself with the Gefendur invaders slaughtering the Tains for having a different religion, created the basis for modern pymary when he went against his people's decree and figured out how to use pymary for war and other things.
Grey-and-Grey Morality: Just about everywhere you look.
- Very few characters are truly good, even Duane, one of the most virtuous adults in the story has rather dark aspects to his character, most coming from his loyalty to Alderode and his hatred of Crescians (though considering they appear to have murdered him and his daughter, one can sympathize with his feelings). Matty is essentially the only purely good character, and he is also a rather young child and is supressing memories and guilt to be more cheerful. And then you get some truly sinister characters ranging from the pedophile slaver Starfish to the sadistic senet beast Ruck, who is a rapist in more ways than one.
- Neither Cresce or Alderode are perfectly good or evil, with both countries having their good and bad sides.
  - Cresce is arguably the more sympathetic country: it treats all its citizens equally, as everyone is given a job according to their talents should they be unable to get an apprenticeship in their desired profession and given comfortable enough living conditions with the ability to earn Labor Points to purchase luxury items. However, if one practices any religion besides Gefendur, they are traditionally burnt at the stake if found out and Gefendurism itself has the unfortunate practice where twins are taken to be raised in a convent with the younger twin ritually sacrificed and cannibalized some time after reaching adulthood, though in Cresce they may opt out of the sacrifice. Despite seeming like a communist country, they still retain the nobility which is reinforced by the church. Worst of all, the two-toe lizards are slaves in everything but name, forced to do the worst jobs and unable to ever become citizens because they do not have a human "soul" that can be mapped by the breath system. However, Queen Sonorie is trying to better the Inaks' living conditions, and succeeds at the end of the first book and the acceptance of the Black Tongues reveals that the state is becoming less oppressive to those who publicly denounce Gefendurism.
  - Alderode is an oppressive theocracy with strict gender roles, a violently reinforced class system, and a strictly enforced caste system based upon hair color (which isn't completely arbitrary, hair color indicates the person's lifespan and general pymaric potential). Ssaelism and their patriarchal version of Gefendurism can both be worshiped freely, though both groups regularly attack citizens of the other religion and following any religion outside of the two approved by the state is a death sentence. Alderode gets yet another strike against it due to its use of conscripted child soldiers and genocidal rapist expansion policies.
Hate Plague: Alderode has a weaponized self inflicted one in the form of the Etalarche curse. Alderode's leadership essentially brainwash everyone within the Dhammakhert's domain to absolutely fear and hate the targeted individual with every fiber of their being, meaning that every Aldish citizen will do anything and everything in their power to make sure the afflicted target dies a horrible painful death. The first victim and namesake of the curse, Etalarche, was cursed for betraying his grandfather Ssael (the Ssael) to his death. In the end Etalarche was violently torn limb from limb by an angry mob. It's considered such a vile and drastic measure that it has only been used less than 12 times in history and it took a decade of debate before Alderode's leadership decided to cast it on the leader of a large faction of Aldish rebels that threaten to destabilize all of Alderode. It has its limitations, however: it can only be cast on and only affects those who were born and changed by the Dhammakhert, so Alderode couldn't cast it on the queen of Cresce for example. Also, as Souds like Duane are not affected by the Dhammakhert, they cannot be targeted or affected by the curse either. Also the target must be within the Dhammakhert to be targeted (and Alds outside the Dhammakhert also won't be mentally affected either).
Hiding Behind Religion: While some of the murderers running around using religion as their excuse really believe what they're saying, even if their acts go against their religious doctrine, not all of them are strong believers in their religion.
Sette: Stay away from 'im! I didn't like him! Not in the khert! Nor in your dead man's tale! He's like the paladins at home, like you: says he does as the gods say, but the gods tell him ever t'do as he were plannin' anyways.
Horse of a Different Color: Giant dogs are used as mounts, but they are also put to work as draft animals.
Human Sacrifice: The most prevalent religion in the setting sacrifices younger twins who've reached the age of 22 during holy festivals, with their elder twin going on to become a priest/priestess. The second most prevalent religion teaches adherents to kill non-believers, but this isn't seen as a sacrifice as instead the thought is their victims will reincarnate into families following the "correct" religion.
I Just Write the Thing: Among other things, Ashley didn't want to kill off Knock-Me-Down, 'but she wanted to go with Anadyne. I had no choice.']
Impaling Arthropodal Legs: Sette adopts a haunted spider pymaric designed to weave magical traps. She names it Bugaboo Dagger-Toes Frummagem and it uses its very pointy legs to stab a man trying to rape one of her friends repeatedly in the face and eyes.
Impossibly Cool Clothes: The Functional Magic of pymary lets complex illusions be integrated into outfits, which the nobility of Cresce absolutely love to take advantage of. Elaborate feather mantles aflutter with spectral birds are a mainstay at one court event, while the Queen once shows up in a Simple, yet Opulent white gown that trails off into tendrils of mist that coil through the council chambers.
Infinite Canvas: Makes liberal use of this, sometimes altering aspects of the website's background as well; see Painting the Medium, below. A notable example is a point where Sette falls through the page.
Octopus Pymaric: Are you ready for something a little different?
Intangible Theft: Wrights can take or borrow aspects of things, like sound, momentum or heat. Some of these aspects are considered core to an object and if an object is without them for too long the khert will dissolve that object, but some, like a voice, can be stolen without further damage to robbed.
Intangibility:
- Timofey is an intangible construct made out of First Light, though his tongue can touch things and whenever he figures this out he uses it to turn book pages and fill up his memory with literature, requiring Bastion to empty it out again.
- Wrights can remove the tangibility of walls or other surfaces in order to walk through them. They can do this to themselves or other living things as well but that can be dangerous and if the tangibility is not returned quickly will lead to a core leach.
Intended Audience Reaction: Word of God explicitly says that Murkoph is designed to be as vile and hateable as possible, so the readers who despise him are perfectly justified in doing so.
Interrupted Suicide: Quigley in Orphans, twice.
"It" Is Dehumanizing: Plods are usually referred to as "it" and intentionally given as few identifying features as possible to avoid the Uncanny Valley effect. And Stockyard reveals his true colors when he refers to Duane as "it" in conversation.
And your Da earning a queen's ransom getting it back where it goes.
Jagged Mouth: Smoke eels are malevolent ghosts that manifest in the physical world by possessing and shaping particulate, like smoke, dust or blood, into the shape of an eel with a jagged mouth and glowing eyes.
Living Whirlwind: Typhoon whales are eternal living hurricanes that roam the oceans — and in fact filled the oceans at the end of The Time of Myths. Of all the creatures that the Gods directly created in that era, they're by far the most awesome and inscrutable, and are sometimes worshiped from a safe distance.
Lizard Folk: Called "two-toes" here, named after the fact that they have, well, two toes. Call themselves Inak. They're pretty small compared to humans though. They used to be subterranean, so they have poor sight and hearing but excellent senses of smell, making them useful as trackers. Not actually reptiles, though, being warm-blooded and having no scales, among other things.
Lost Him in a Card Game: While it didn't occur in the comic itself there is a promotional image titled "That time Sette lost Duane in a card game" depicting Sette and her cousins all cheating at cards while Stockyard and Sette argue over Duane, who is tied up beneath her chair.
Lysistrata Gambit: Duane grew a beard once, in a Patreon-only picture. Leysa used this to get rid of it.
Made from Real Girl Scouts: Cannibal pie!
Madness Mantra: A question on his Formspring resulted in Duane giving an answer that ended in one of these. Could also count as a Survival Mantra.
Mad Scientist: The Black Tongues (or "Ilganyag") are a group of lawless pymary researchers limited only by their imaginations and their own morals. Some are sane, kind individuals who honestly want to aid humanity in their pursuits, but others are... less scrupulous.
Rahm (a Black Tongue himself): The Black Tongues are one brotherhood but each of us act independently. Some seek to better the world through pymary; dismantle the woes of humanity! Others dismantle infants.
Magical Gesture: Justified because the Anatomy of the Soul interfaces with the khert through "ports" in the palms. Pymary can require highly specific detail, so a gesture is the easiest way to direct a spell towards its target — at a bare minimum, you need to specify which hand will release the spell, on pains of a potentially deadly Magic Misfire.
Magic by Any Other Name: Pymary is the practice of instructing the khert to modify aspects of reality. Justified because it's a universal fact of life in the setting, with its own tradespeople and academic disciplines; Kasslynians use the term "magic" for things that are unnatural and inexplicable to them, not for the power driving their refrigerators.
Magic Is Mental: Using it requires fluency in an archaic language and precise mathematical calculations.
Magic Knight: Duane is not only an exceptionally skilled wright but skilled with a staff as well. According to his Formspring account, when he was a military commander, he trained all the wrights under his command in weapon skills as well in order to defy Squishy Wizard.
Magic Mushroom: Bloodeye Wanderers are a type of mushroom that can crawl, fleeing from attacks or responding in kind en mass to poison a being. They are large gray mushrooms with poisonous spots of dripping crimson guttation.
Magitek: Pymarics. Usually of the bionic (replicating living creatures) variety. Due to how the magic system works, they can only be made out of special materials. Word of God explains in a colourful metaphor here.
Making a Splash: Waterwomen can control water in their proximity, this includes blood and other bodily fluids containing water so long as they're touching.
Mandatory Motherhood: Most of the human cultures on the continent place special emphasis on settling down with a member of the opposite sex, having children and being able to support them. Same-sex relationships are disapproved of (though thankfully there's absolutely no religious discrimination) because such affairs get in the way of 'making babies'. It's taken to the extreme for the Platinum caste in Alderode as the country is in constant need of Plat soldiers for the army and they don't live beyond thirty; it's common for Plat girls to start having children only a little while after they first start menstruating, and it's unusual if they aren't pregnant by fifteen.
Mark of Shame: Inak pariahs are marked with a series of scars to warn off other Inak when their clan disowns them. The most striking scar is across their muzzle to the bone, taking a chunk of their lips and ensuring their teeth are always visible.
Meeting Your Reincarnation: Sette meets her first incarnation in the khert. First Sette is a murderous brat who wants to escape her ghostly existence and kills Sette to try and get a body to hitch a ride skinside.
MegaCorp: Beadman's Betters is a giant company that produces just about everything, from food items, to sex toys, to weapons and magical constructs, and the owner of the company, Jab Beadman, is the power behind Sharteshane's Puppet King.
Monster Whale: Typhoon Whales are vast, primordial entities from The Time of Myths, flying over the oceans and bringing hurricanes in their wake.
Muggles Do It Better: Because the inak 'two-toes' can't use pymary, they don't have the option of spelling their ailments away and thus have a far better understanding of medicine, biology and how the body actually works. They've cottoned on to germ theory while the humans of Kasslyne think wounds get infested with ghosts from the khert, and an elderly inak is able to explain basic brain mechanics to a sceptical human audience.
Mystical Plague: Regions in the nation of Alderode are afflicted by the Weeping Plague, which somehow spreads by making eye contact with a sufferer.
The Namesake: The title "Unsounded" seems like it's just a cool sounding fantasy name, but it's actually the place in the khert where all souls go after death before reincarnating, and is also where the gods or Ssael is depending on your religion. It is called the unsounded because wrights have been able to map out much of the khert through a technique known as sounding, but the technology isn't powerful enough to sound out the depths of the khert, so that place is the "unsounded". The story doesn't even begin to involve the khert itself until 7 chapters in, with most of the story just involving the living world.
Nerf Arm: The pair of swords Lemuel was planning to give Mikaila for her eighth birthday before everything went to hell were wooden, so they could still bang people up but she wouldn't be cutting anyone with them. An author comment says he ended up giving her the swords for her fourteenth birthday.
Noble Bigot: Almost every main character, except for Sette, who's sort of the opposite. Duane is an Alderode nationalist who hates Cresce and is disdainful of the Gefendur religion. Jivi, Toma and Elka are Crescians who hate Alderode. Quigley doesn't care for any of the above. And all of them save Sette think Duane is an abomination for being a sentient zombie (Duane himself also thinks this), though all other zombies are mindless drones, so this is somewhat understandable. Matty is the only one who isn't burdened with any real prejudices. They are all still decent people for the most part.
Nothing but Skulls: Litrya Shrine, and other twin shrines, has shelves full of the skulls of the previous twins. At Litrya most of them get knocked off their shelves into piles on the floor when the shrine is attacked.
No Woman's Land:
- Alderode doesn't give you a ton of options if you're female; women are meant to be wives and mothers and little else...unless they're from the Platinum caste; then they're often "encouraged" to go into the sex trade.They're not really expected to have jobs and certainly not have careers outside their ghers, plus they're not allowed to own property, vote or even use pymary, unless it's for making things look pretty; in the past it was socially acceptable for innate women wrights to have their tongues cut out 'to make them more suitable wives and servants', and it still happens in remote parts of the country. Not that different from plenty of past and present cultures in the real world (save hopefully the tongue cutting!) but it says a lot when a woman's best chance for real power and autonomy is the chance to take the Third Option and legally be seen and treated as a man; plenty of women from the Copper caste, who are relatively more liberated thanks to their long lifespans, take this route. But even then, women in the ghers communities primarily take the Third Option because they're forced to do it, since there may be no male heir in the family and, again, women can't own property or inherit. The other countries on the continent, particularly the matriarchal Cresce, condemn such misogyny as incredibly backward and barbaric.
- In Sharteshane, legally women have the same rights and opportunites as men — but since there's no active enforcement of the law, things tend to fall apart in practice. For example, Sette's grandmother was whip-smart, manipulative and able to find numerous sources of income for her schooling, so she eventually became a barrister and wright, whereas Anadyne was only ever average at pymary, thus Nary Frummagem wasn't interested in wasting money on having her trained and shunted her off into working in one of his brothels.
Obnoxious In-Laws: In life Duane's mother in law Orlina was constantly nagging him over how his lack of ambition was leaving his family in poverty.
Offerings to the Gods:
- The Gefendur often leave small offerings of money or goods at statues of the Twin Gods when they pray. The Lovable Rogue Sette tries bribing the Mother Yerta to turn a blind eye to the underhanded business she's planning.
- In Alderode, people often burn locks of their hair as offerings when they pray. It's a symbolic gesture, as hair is the basis of their Fantastic Caste System and the subject of some superstition about Sympathetic Magic.
Oh, My Gods!: Averted in the case of one religion, played straight in another. Ssaelit are monotheist, and so use "God" in the same way Abrahamists do for the most part. The Gefendur, being polytheists, have more unique religious exclamations.
One Nation Under Copyright: The Sharteshane King is just a figurehead bought and paid for by Jab Beadman of Beadman Industries who is the real power behind the throne and finagles its military to get rare materials and try to prevent wars that will reduce his clientele while supporting those whose fights have a chance of expanding the area where he can sell.
Order of Scholars: The Black Tongues are a secret organization of Mad Scientists who work to push the boundaries of pymary to see what happens when they do. Their version of Sacred Hospitality involves never turning away any visitor who comes in the spirit of scholarship. They pursue knowledge for its own sake and forbid no avenue of research, which means their innovations include both revolutionary new medicines and weapons of mass destruction.
Our Ghosts Are Different: Ghosts start out as clusters of memories cleansed from the souls of the dead by the setting's Background Magic Field, the Khert. Some are intense enough to absorb similar memories and slip from the Khert to the physical world, where they seek out things that resonate with their theme. The most common are smoke eels, when ghosts of pain and suffering form ephemeral bodies of dust or smoke; and haunted pymarics, when ghosts hide inside Magitek and co-opt it for their own use. Sette's Team Pet Boo is an unusually complex and precocious ghost that holed up in a pymaric spider.
Our Dragons Are Different: Vliegeng, the Aldish national mascot, are the closest thing the setting has to them. They're highly intelligent, and fly by gliding along the khert lines. Elite Aldish soldiers ride them.
Our Humans Are Different: Humans are unique in that they demonstrably possess a soul, which lets them access the Background Magic Field of the Khert and delivers their memories to the Khert upon death. Other sapient beings, such as the ancient Senet Beasts and the "Two-Toe" Lizard Folk, see this with some envy or consternation, not least because the dominant religion takes this as proof that Humanity Is Superior. The author has stated that humans also vary biologically from real life humans, partially because Unsounded's universe operates on different laws of reality than real life.
Our Souls Are Different: According to Word of God, they are essentially a depository of memories. Thoughts and feelings and such occur in the brain, the soul just retains memories and feelings experienced over a lifetime. Duane is unique in that his soul has managed to adapt to his rotting body. His brain has rotted away, so logically he shouldn't be even able to think or feel, but his soul has adjusted to his body's circumstances so that he has a thinking and feeling soul, something that so far is apparently one of a kind.
Our Zombies Are Different: Actually something of a return to the original voodoo-zombie tradition. "Plods" are corpses that were deliberately reanimated with pymary, and are widely used as a cheap source of slave labor. They are considered quite ordinary in the countries that "employ" them; making a mindless magical meat-puppet do punishing work for days at a time is considered to be a more humane practice than enslaving living, feeling humans. Ssaelism, an offshoot religion that demands respectful treatment of human bodies, disagrees with this.
Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: The Black Tongues believe that the Twins and Ssael are false gods created by mankind and believe themselves beyond such superstitions. Interestingly though, Ilganyag, the source of much of the knowledge they have gained and the namesake of their organization (Ilganyag translates to Black Tongue), casually tells Duane that the Twins did exist and Ssael slew them, as Ssaelism states, though whether Ssael truly has achieved godhood has not been said. There is of course the very real question of how much Ilganyag is just manipulating Duane, but we do see Ilganyag mourning Ssael's disappearance with the added implication that he is Sette's father.
Painting the Medium: Characters lean across the comic borders, and some explosions leave debris across the page. The pages are made to look like a torn up notebook, but the background sometimes changes to reflect scenes in the story. A notable example is Murkoph grabbing a knife from the header image during chapter 9.
Panthera Awesome: The ancient Gefendur invaders of Tain rode giant lions more intelligent than those in our own world. After lions were used to hunt down and tear apart the traitor twice over Ssael the nascent religious cult he was building used them as a symbol of being freed from an imperfect body, and the Gefendur started slaughtering their lions, in their fervor eventually killing off not only all the lions but every cat in Kasslyne. Thus cats are extinct by the time the story starts.
Patriotic Fervor: The horrors people will carry out in the name of nationalism come up again and again in the conflict between Cresce and Alderode. Even plenty of otherwise decent people from both countries display the bigotry and hatred caused by nationalism.
People of Hair Color: The Aldish nation have a caste system based on the changes the Dammakhert creates in their people, which is most obviously expressed in hair color. A general rule of thumb for dealing with the castes is that lifespan is inversely proportional to pymaric power, and the longer you live the higher caste you are. Redheads (known as Coppers) have no pymaric power but can live up to 400 years and thus make up the highest nobility (since they have a long time to gain power), black-haired people (Jet) are the next down, live ~240 years and can use pymary if they're in physical contact with whatever they want to affect, brunettes (bronze) are a bit longer-lived than normal humans and can do pymary but aren't good at it, blondes (gold) are actually completely unaffected by the Dammakhert (they're often subject to discrimination because the government doesn't like that they can't be manipulated) and are normal humans aside from having the same hair color, gray-haired people (silvers) are somewhat stronger in pymary but don't live quite as long as blondes, and platinum blonds (platinums or 'plats') are naturally incredibly powerful in pymary but only live to age 30 (and while religiously they're considered somewhat holy as people on their last reincarnation whom the gods love enough to take them early, socially their short lives mean they're exploited quite ruthlessly).
Pilgrimage: Ulestry is a common Gefendur pilgrimage site as the country contains the religion’s most sacred sites and is where the head of the church is located, though the Aldish branch of Gefendur has broken with Ulestry and Sliverleaf for a more violent paternal take on the religion. Matty tries to claim he's a pilgrim when caught.
The Plague: Illness is a major issue in Kasslyne because the human healers have no understanding of it, with cold and flu analogs being very deadly. They're better at treating infection, only because the Tains left words that casters can use to kill bacteria. The problem is that, with the Gefendur culling of the Tains as heretics and destruction of their culture, modern Kasslynians don't even know what bacteria actually are, thinking them ghosts.
The Place: The comic is named for many things. One of them being a place where the gods might be.
Polar Opposite Twins: The Gefendur gods are two pairs of very different twins. Riv is a violent macho manly man while his twin Baelar is a quiet warrior scholar and poet. Yerta is a plump, loving fertility godess who loves creating life while her twin Tirna is a skinny wrathful trickster who doesn't understand the appeal of imprefect living things.
Powers as Programs: Every human in Kasslyne is born with a connection to the Khert, so anyone can become a spellwright through a pymaric rite that allows them to speak to the Khert through that connection. A rare few are born with that enhanced connection already in place.
Precursors: The Senet Beasts came before humans, most have been wiped out by humans who use the First Materials they're made of so many of the surviving ones will not hesitate to kill or trick humans they come across, and they do not reproduce. All Senet Beasts that are still around have been around ere the dawn of humanity.
Precursor Worship: Before Gefendur paladins started forcing conversion at swordpoint most of Kasslyne worshiped senet beasts, the immortal creatures who survived the initiation of the khert and are older than time itself. There are still some holdout practitioners in remote places like Anchert and the Inak never stopped treating the senets as their gods.
Primordial Tongue: According to one Creation Myth, the Old Tainish Language of Magic is also the First Language, granted directly to mortals by the Twin Gods. This is definitely much more an argument from faith (and nationalism) than from historical linguistic rigor, but it does raise the question of why the Khert only listens to one obscure regional dialect.
Prized Possession Giveaway: Matty has Chitz, a sack toy made by his deceased mother and turned into a sight aid, which he treasures. At the end of the first book he gives Chitz to his father during Mathis' funeral, signifying an end to his childish innocence and naivety.
Propaganda Machine:
- In Cresce there are posters decrying the Aldish as snakes and baby killing blasphemers. The newspapers are controlled by the state and the information dolled out to control the populace, Bell subverting the queen's wishes and publishing an inflammatory report that the heir was killed by two-toe rebels before the investigation is complete allows him to start a deadly pogrom against them.
- Alderode is a fascist surveillance state with posters glorifying the military, calling for caste purity and offering rewards for Crescian "pelts". Their newspapers also spread the state line, for instance Quigley killing everyone involved in murdering his wife and stealing her construct to take his son and run was presented to the public with no mention of , and claimed Quigley was a crazy radical who built the thing, murdered state officials and then went to ally himself with Cresce.
Propaganda Piece:
- The Quigley Play in Cresce misrepresents the actual events it dramatizes to make Quigley's actions at the time more heroic and sympathetic, to create a play about the horrors of Alderode with a likable hero and satisfying ending. They didn't need to make the Aldish government's actions any more horrific, the Window agents who tortured and murdered Vienne and her workers had that covered.
- Crescian newspapers leave out more questionable Crescian actions in their never-ending hostilities with their northern neighbors, playing up Aldish war crimes and the horror of their totalitarian government and refering to the Aldish as snakes as a play on their snakelike flying mounts.
- Aldish propaganda is somehow even worse, just straight up telling people to bring in parts of Crescian corpses for money, mocking the country as weak for allowing women to have jobs and having a queen as head of state, and lying outright to make Cresce look more evil.
Rage Against the Heavens: In the background a fundamental tenet of the Ssaelit faith is that the four Gefendur gods who made the world were cruel beings who afflicted humanity with death and a world filled with suffering for their own amusement and that after being slain Ssael gathered an army of the unhappy dead, made war upon the gods, and cast them down to become God himself. A traditional phrase among the Ssaelit seems to be "Death is the gods' crime." As a bonus, this neatly solves the Problem of Evil that normally comes up when you have a single benevolent god. Why is there evil in a created world? Because Ssael didn't make the world, he took it from the callous old gods who did. Why is suffering allowed to exist? Because suffering is a fundamental property of the universe, and Ssael can't get rid of it without remaking the world. Not a good idea when people still live in it.
Rate-Limited Perpetual Resource: Most First Materials are non-renewable remnants of the First World. One of the rare exceptions is the First Silk spun by ageless, perpetually metamorphosing spindleworms — but the spindleworms can't reproduce and can be killed, so they're very carefully tended in special shrines.
Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Implied for the Shadwe, who says Duane is "the finest wright I have seen in centuries."
- All Jets and Coppers are potentially like this, due to their incredibly long lifespans.
Reasonable Authority Figure: Queen Sonorie is reluctant to accept the guilt of Ethelmik until more concrete evidence is found of any crimes that justified the town's destruction. She also refuses to allow the dead of Ethelmik to be besmirched without very concrete evidence of their wrongdoing.
Reincarnation: Both the major Kasslyne religions, Gefendur and Ssaelism, teach that human souls are stripped of memories in the khert and reincarnated as they go through lives working towards their final incarnation and are deemed worthy of joining the gods/god. The khert stripping them of and storing their memories after death is provable and the whole thing is used to excuse genocidal bigotry. As other sentients don't have a Kasslyne soul they are considered inferior, and slaughtering a bunch of adherents of the opposing religion can be disregarded as sending them on to their next incarnation and closer to perfection.
La Résistance:
- The March is the big rebel group against Alderode's surveillance state, but not much is known about them save that Vienne was building Uaid for their leader. She was tortured to death before she ever finished, but it's notable that Uaid is not a traditional war construct being designed to protect those he's carrying rather than kill opponents.
- The rebels in the Foi-Hellick affair allied with Cresce and managed to dismantle the Dammakhert's surveillance capacities in their entire ginnal before they were hunted down and killed by the Aldish military.
Ridiculously Cute Critter:
- The happy yellow fish-squid spirits or "squishes" in the khert.
- "Squeals" are large amalgamations of happy memories which look like a smiley glowing yellow and teal seal or otter mixed with the squishes and are reminiscent of sea hares, if they had more mammalian cute features.
Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Agib can somehow cause changes to the khert which are retroactive, with it altering reality and human memory to make it so. Senets, who are older than and unaffected by the khert, don't receive any new memories to fit with the alterations.
Royal Harem: The Queen of Cresce is free to have as many husbands as she wants, and the current queen has at least three. Generally any children from these marriages are not in the line of succession; the Queen is expected to adopt multiple orphans into the royal family and then chose a preferred successor out of their adopted children or their nieces who then has to be approved by the rest of the Council of Four.
Sacred Scripture: The Songs of Ssael are the core scripture of the Ssaelit religion, penned by the legendary spellwright who, according to the faith, killed and replaced the Creator Gods after his own death. The volumes he wrote while noticeably senile lay out some increasingly bizarre commandments. The final volume appeared after his death, written on unidentifiable material, and detail his deicide and his plans for the world.
Science Wizard: Pymary works through precise manipulation of Aspects of reality, so the talented spellwrights are the ones who train up in physics, biology, and materials science alongside the Language of Magic. In one side story, Wizarding School students discover and write an academic paper about the properties of laser light.
Sentimental Homemade Toy: The eight-year-old Matty Quigley has Chitz, a small stuffed blob that his mother sewed for him — very poorly, albeit with love. Since the attack that killed her and blinded him, it doubles as a Tragic Keepsake and is enchanted to "see" for him; he treats it like it's alive and keeps it on his shoulder.
Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: All the Aldish characters that have appeared so far seem prone to using vastly more complicated sentences and words than most of the other characters, though Duane is especially heavy on the long-winded Shakespearian dialogue, even compared to his fellow Aldishmen.
Sex Slave: Official Aldish military doctrine when invading territories is to capture women so that once the Dammakhert is installed they can be raped by the soldiers since any children conceived in the Dammakhert will be biologically altered in the womb into one of the Aldish castes.
Shock and Awe: The storm-folk can create and direct lightening.
Showing Up Chauvinists: Vienne was a genius Magitek engineer and forgemaster who creates a revolutionary Construct design. She got by in her isolated village, but magic is illegal for women in her country, which led her to funnel aid to La Résistance and ultimately got her killed. In a prequel story, a resentful employee reports her to State Sec, so she evaporates the agent's head in front of him.
Vienne: No one lets me do anything.
Sibling Murder: In Alderode it is normal for Jets to set their children against each other with the intent that the stronger sibling will previal and get rid of the weaker ones.
Simplified Spellcasting:
- Tacit casting, i.e. casting without the verbal component. It's an inherent trait, made possible by a mutation that allows wrights to "think" at the khert. Duane is capable of it, and it runs in his family.
- Inverted by the Jet caste of Alderode, who cannot cast at range, requiring them to touch anything they want to alter. The Copper caste cannot cast at all.
Sinister Surveillance: The Vits Council uses the Dammakhert as an autocratic surveillance systems, with which they spy on, keep control of and "sting" dissidents among the populace of Alderode.
Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The Red Berry Boys are slavers, and the group contains many of the most contemptible and repulsive people in the tale. After Mathis Quigley died the author pointed out that everyone, save Nary-A-Care, who had worked for or contracted with the Red Berry Boys was dead since slavery is abhorrent.
Snake Oil Salesman: One of the ways Sette supplemented her pickpocket income to make sure she could pay her jukrum was by selling her granny's fake potions to superstitious sailors. ^*Explained in this Q&A post
Soul Eating: Efheby venom turns the soul to mush, allowing the efheby to sort through it, see the victim's deepest secrets, and eventually devour it. They can envenom someone and mess with their memories without eating it, allowing them to mostly recover.
State Sec: The Aldish state uses Window agents to bring in, torture and locate traitors, which in Alderode is anyone who questions the government's control of the khert, practices pymary without a current license, publishes literature not approved by the state, tries to follow a non-approved religion, tries to leave the country, sells first materials to Cresce or, of course, those with any part in any of the rebel groups their tyranny has caused to sprout.
"They’re the Window into the khert and what citizens are doing with it. It’s almost cute until you consider the implications, and picture men in black trenchcoats looking through the windows of your house at you." -Ashely
Stay in the Kitchen: Aldish patriarchy believes women should be cosseted and protected, and that anything other than aesthetic pymary is "unfit for the gentler sex". One of the reasons Alderode hates Cresce is because they're disgusted by the way Crescian forces put women right on the front line.
Strange Salute: In Alderode, the standard salute is to touch the middle and ring fingers to the forehead, palm towards the face. The most formal version, used as Due to the Dead or as a gesture of sincere humility and deference, is to cover the face with the whole hand and bow deeply.
Strip Buffer: In a tumblr post, it's revealed that Ms Cope keeps a buffer of at least fifty pages.
Stripperiffic: If this image is anything to go by, the clothing of the Crescian nobility (male and female) is elaborate, colorful and very revealing.
Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: According to Word of God, the reason magic is called "pymary" and not "magic" is because "magic" implies something unknown or mystical. This is not the case with pymary; it is a common fact of life and essential part of society. It's even taught in schools!
Suicide by Cop: Quigley attempts this (and fails) at the end of Orphans.
Take a Third Option: What happens if you're a woman in Alderode who isn't content with being a housewife, and wants to partake in a role normally only filled by men? Become a literal Third Option! Specifically, agree to be sterilized, bind your breasts and dress and act like a man in every way. If you do well, you'll be allowed to stay in your role, and eventually even marry (another woman) and adopt children! Just be prepared for more than a little discrimination along the way...and if you don't manage to prove yourself, you'll be exiled by your society at best.
Targeted Human Sacrifice: Gefendur shrines pay handsomely for sets of twins, who are raised in comfort at the shrines until the younger one is sacrificed and cannibalized and the older enters the priesthood. Ssaelit families take great pains to make twins look as different as possible, for fear of Gefendur kidnappers. In theory, the practice is entirely voluntary... but if a kept twin chooses to leave, their parents and hometown have to repay a huge amount of money, to say nothing of the fear of the gods' displeasure.
Technicolor Fire: Blue and teal fire is a sign the khert is on fire, and is a cold spectral flame that can be safely walked through.
Themed Tattoos: Spouses in Alderode get "marriage brands" tattooed over their hearts. The tattoos aren't required to have a matching design, but have a weak pymaric link to each other.
Theme Twin Naming:
- Twin sisters Lori and Iori were given rhyming names by their parents before being sent to the shrine.
- Kept twins Siya and Sara have another pair of similar names, and it's revealed all kept twins are given such names.
The Theocracy: Many Kasylinnian states are a theocracy to some extent, and all have one, or two, state religions.
- In Alderode the government is split between representatives of their Fraternal Gefendur sect and of Ssaelism. Other religions are viewed as heretical and being caught following them is bad news.
- Ulestry is the heart of the Gefendur religion and is run entirely as a Sororal Gefendur theocracy. Much of the land is protected as holly sites and priestess call the shots.
- Cresce is rulled by the Council of Four, one of whom is the High Priestess of Cresce. Gefendur is the state religion which all citizens are meant to uphold and influences many of its policies but there are those who question and openly reject the religion in the country without reprisal.
Thieves' Cant: Nary and his gang, including his daughter Sette, use a fair amount of real thieves' cant such as jukrum, and their name Frummagem is inspired from a bit meaning hanged or strangled—Fummagemmed.
Title Drop:
- Not the name of the comic itself, but a chapter, here.
- The comic's title is dropped in the Interior Emanations side story —Duane expresses a desire to "sound the unsounded."
  - The title of that side story is also dropped, as the name of the paper Duane and his new friend Sarthos are writing. In universe, it is a reference to their theories on the inner workings of pymary and, out of universe (though Duane manages to make some connections himself in story), a reference to the side story's themes of personal character and skill being more than what appears on the surface.
- The title is finally dropped in the comic proper here.
- Chapter 11: "Only a Cause directs a good man against his nature."
- Chapter 12: We find out where Duane got his phrase from - an atheist Black Tongue: "Sound the great unsounded. Beat at the gods' door and hear it ring hollow!"
- Chapter 16: The website's name is also dropped here: "Such casual villains we are"
Touch of Death: Waterwomen can instantly kill any human so long as they're touching since their control over water extends to bodily fluids. They can turn a human into a shriveled husk, give them fatal internal bleeding, drown them in their own blood or otherwise at a touch. Generally they prefer drowning if they've chosen to kill a human since they hope to prevent their "long thoughts" from entering the khert and know the khert doesn't extend into the ocean.
Twins Are Special: The Gods are believed to be two sets of twins, so twins are sacred in the Gefendur religion. Temples pay handsome fees to adopt twins, who are raised to adulthood in comfort, after which the younger one is sacrificed and the older is inducted into the priesthood.
Urban Segregation: In Aldish cities people live in walled ghers determined by their caste to preserve caste purity and try to keep the undesirable castes from mixing with the elites, and the efgherseti from mixing with those with the protection of a ghers. Their public transportation is also segregated, as soud and semon caste members have to sit in top deck exposed seating rather than inside.
Utopia Justifies the Means:
- This is the theme of chapter 11, "Only a Cause", as well as the theme of arc it introduces. The political scene is full of actors who genuinely believe their vision of the world would be a utopia, and are willing to do horrific things to bring it to fruition.
- This is a common attitude of the more moral Black Tongues. They are willing to commit terrible sacrifices (including enabling the abuses of their decidedly less moral brethren) in the name of science. Their inventions demonstrably do change society for the better... but at what cost?
- Bastion (himself a Black Tongue) is in deep with this rationalization. His goal is to cure death itself, surely a worthy cause... But he's willing to destabilize entire countries and precipitate mass death just for a chance to advance this research. It even leads him to enable the atrocities of Omnicidal Maniac Prakhuta, because he believed Prakhuta likewise had a noble goal at the end. When he discovers Prakhuta in fact does not, it sparks a major crisis of faith in him.
  - Prakhuta calls him out on this, and the trope in general, during a "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
    "Yes! All those tragic deaths! If only I could be like you! But I can't be a pretty human pretending the greater good pressed my hand and made me a murderer! I can't make it all better by being saaaad afterwards! Bastion's allowed to kill because he cries a-bloo-hoo-hoo once the blood's dry!"
- Lady Ilganyag wants to erase all the memories in the khert, ending the enternal torment of the negative memories that make up smoke eels. In order to do so, they abetted Deliceu's hideous abuse of Bastion and Prakhuta so that the latter would create a Fantastic Nuke that has gone on to kill countless people and throw the entire continent into chaos. Worth it?
Vice City: Sharteshane has a reputation as a home to criminals run by gangs, and its capitol Sharteshane City is shown to have prostitutes carrying out their business in the streets while pickpockets slip through the crowds and Jab Beadman, a gangster who bought his way into the nobility, is the real power behind the throne. Sharteshane's rulers being a bunch of gangs hiding beneath the husk of monarchy allows people who would be executed elsewhere in Kasslyne as heretics, traitors or escaped slaves to live decent(ish) lives by paying a protection fee.
War for Fun and Profit: Jab Beadman of Sharteshane fears that whatever Queen Maharaishala Sonorie of Cresce is currently plotting will disrupt the profitable forever war between Cresce and Alderode, so supports Bell's insurrection which will see the hostilities ramp up should it succeed.
War Is Glorious: Ssaelism teaches that all men must be trained fighters, preferably soldiers, who fight for the glory of Ssael and slay the Gefendur so that they may be reincarnated as Ssaelit. The religion glorifies war and a warrior's death for men.
War Is Hell:
- The ongoing war between Cresce and Alderode is mostly shown in the bloody aftermath of battles, or battles are shown from the perspective of civilians caught in its way. It's all consequences and brutality rather than glory.
- In life Duane was able to find honor, glory and righteousness in his memories of battle, but his clear memories straight from the khert after his soul is bound to his corpse do not allow him such comfort and he's horrified by the cruelty and violence he finds in memories he once spun into heroic tales.
- The Inak Revolution is a bloody explosion of hatred after decades of oppression and genocide, Inak raging out against Crescian civilians who happen to stand between them and the nobles who all but enslaved them. Mere moments before victory, the Inak are betrayed from within by their own general, who mocks and humiliates his entire army as he seizes control of the command hub to upgrade his Humanoid Abomination into a world-destroying warhead. Meanwhile, the Crescians' treasonous Lord General Bell sabotages the Crescians' defense efforts and then goads a bunch of enemy Alderodians into suicide dive-bombing city hall, crushing most of the nobles in hopes of killing the queen. In short, when war rains blood, it pours souls.
We Are as Mayflies:
- The Copper and Jet castes in Alderode can live up to 400 and 250 respectively, and so tend to accumulate the most political and economic power in their families.
- Inverted with the Platinum caste, who die of accelerated old age at 30. The Gefendur faith believes them to be on their last mortal incarnation before being called to join the gods. The Silver caste lives a little longer, generally lasting about 50 years naturally.
- In the middle lie the Bronze and Gold castes. The Bronze live anywhere from 50 to 150 years. The Golds live as long as the average human, as they are average humans. They are the one caste that is unaffected by the Dhammakhert. They are just genetically brilliantly blonde which coincidentally fits them into the thematic scheme of the castes.
- Senet beasts live forever unless an outside force kills them. However, since new senet beasts are never born, humans as a species might very well outlive them all.
Weather Manipulation: Stormfolk can control and create weather, forming violent storms out of group liaisons with each other or simple rain clouds should they wish on their own.
Weird World, Weird Food: Kasslyne is permeated with a Background Magic Field to which the local human analogs are bound, and while there are some flora and fauna that overlap with earth's most are unique and are used to create a different cuisine. Strawberry Fish—which are freshwater fish intentionally infested with a parasitic worm and served uncooked at room temperature fresh out of a tank—are a popular snack. A popular breakfast item is a colorful savory cereal made up of crunchy bits that taste like shrimp and salty biscuits served in warm monny milk topped with monny cheese.
Wretched Hive: Sharteshane.
Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Alderode treats the March as horrific treasonous terrorists for opposing the country's rule. Even people simply caught distributing pamphlets promoting such things as not treating plat girls as things to be bred are in for a trip to be publicly tortured and executed, or sterilized and turned into a slave. The government lies about their actions as well, for instance claiming Quigley was a crazy rebel who killed government officials and ran off to sell stolen government property to Cresce, when his wife was the revolutionary and inventor and he killed government officials to steal back her work and avenge her. He also refused to hand it over to Cresce.
You Kill It, You Bought It: Leadership positions in Sharteshane's underworld are gained by a less powerful member of the group killing their leader. Nary took over his gang by killing his da, and he expects and raised Sette to at least try to do the same. This is part of the origin of the "predators never die old" saying.
Your Magic's No Good Here: Pymary has three limitations regarding the khert:
- The khert is anchored to the continent of Kasslyne, so pymary stops functioning at high altitudes and out at sea. Exploited in the Crescian palace: the royal apartments are built above the altitude cutoff, deterring any clever pymary-based assassination attempts.
- Pymary only affects the material world. If someone somehow finds a way into the khert itself, they can't use it.
- Downplayed with "spellburns", specific pymaric shortcuts for more complicated magic. Each country uses large-scale "khert-hubs" to maintain a government-approved list of spellburns, some of which are classified, so foreign spellwrights can easily find themselves without some of their abilities when abroad.

Interior Emanations

Interior Emanations is a free illustrated story by Ashley Cope set in Kasslyne featuring Duane during his time at school prior to his enlistment.

Bigot with a Crush: Duane is repelled and disgusted when he learns his new friend Sarthos is a Third Option, considering it nigh heretical to give up womanhood and become a wright despite not being born male. Before he can put in motion his plan to cut ties a bully tries to kill him, Sarthos helps save his life and the two of them end up having sex in a closet. Duane is upset to realize Sarthos took the fall for the bully who ended up killed in the fight and kicked out of school, and is concerned Sarthos may be exiled or killed for arriving home without having proven to be "worth the loss of their womanhood" as was demanded of them.
A Day in the Limelight: Sarthos has been missing for decades by the time Unsounded starts, but gets obliquely referenced by Lemuel and Duane. They're one of the main characters of the side story "Interior Emanations".
Killing in Self-Defense: The first time Duane killed someone it was a bully who had gathered a group of friends to jump and kill Duane out of jealousy. While killing him made his friends flee and saved Duane's life he was traumatized by what he'd done, especially because he Core Leeched the other boy which is not considered an honorable way to do things.
Star-Crossed Lovers: Duane and a fellow student at the academy, Sarthos. Firstly because a relationship with anyone outside your caste is an extreme social taboo —and secondly because Sarthos, as a Third Option, is legally a man.
These Hands Have Killed: Duane was pretty shaken up by his first kill, ashamed of the dishonorable technique he used and that he was upset about the way the guy he killed screamed because he's from a religion that values warriors. He tries sending Sarthos away asking what's stopping him from killing them too if he was willing to use a core leach without thinking about it, but they point out killing in self defense is quite far from killing a friend.

Vienne of Seferpine

Vienne of Seferpine is a free illustrated story by Ashley Cope set in Kasslyne featuring Vienne Quigley.

Bond One-Liner: Vienne delivers one after killing an Aseptick who came to investigate her rebellious activities. It's not directly related to her kill, though, and is actually addressed to a bystander who previously gave her a chauvinist speech about how women can only do what their husbands allow them to.
Gerald cried out. Vienne regarded him over one shoulder, dropping the pymaric in her pocket.
"No one lets me do anything", she said.
Bookends: Vienne of Seferpine begins and ends with an assessment of Vienne's capabilities. But while the beginning is upbeat and confident in tone, the ending is troubled and uncertain.
Chekhov's Gun: Vienne mentions fairly early that she has a cache of weapons in case the government comes for her, including a pymaric that makes Your Head A-Splode. She uses that pymaric to kill a government assassin sent to investigate the forge later in the story.
A Day in the Limelight: Vienne is years dead by the time of the story, only brought up in reference to her husband's guilt over her death and her surviving work, but she's the main character of the side story Vienne of Seferpine.
Dead Guy on Display: Wick Madigan gets caught by the Aldish government, killed, mutilated and strung up at a crossroads as a warning against those who might try to do anything against the current bigoted totalitarian rule.
Doomed by Canon: Inverted in Vienne of Seferpine. We know Vienne can't die until she finishes Chitz and upgrades Uaid. The former requirement is eventually completed, but not the latter, and the story does not end with her death as some might have been expecting.
Make an Example of Them: A member of the rebel group The March is captured by the Aldish government, tortured and publicly strung up at a crossroads with a boot mark stomped into his face as a warning to those who would defy them.
Showing Up Chauvinists: Vienne was a genius Magitek engineer and forgemaster who creates a revolutionary Construct design. She got by in her isolated village, but magic is illegal for women in her country, which led her to funnel aid to La Résistance and ultimately got her killed. In Vienne of Seferpine, a resentful employee reports her to State Sec, so she evaporates the agent's head in front of him.
Vienne: No one lets me do anything.
State Sec: Vienne and Wick are both attempting to avoid the Window's attention as it will see them tortured and killed. Mathis works for the Window and is rightfully terrified of the orginization and the government.
Tongue Trauma: Quigley describes the punishment of a mage who didn’t renew his license in time in Alderode. The poor man’s pymric companion was crushed and his tongue and hands cut off, which the Aseptics called a mercy.
Your Head A-Splode: Vienne of Seferpine reveals that Vienne had a pymaric weapon that could reduce a man's head to vapor, kept for self-defense in case the government came for her.

Orphans

Orphans: is a free illustrated story by Ashley Cope set in Kasslyne featuring Mathis Quigley and his son on the run from Alderode and Cresce.

Cute Mute: Matty is an adorable child whose just survived a very traumatising experience and hasn't spoken since.
Death Seeker: Mathis has lost his will to live, and is only barely abstaining from killing himself outright because he wants to ensure Vienne's son is looked after and safe first.
Elective Mute: Matty hasn't spoken since his mother's murder and getting blinded by the government assassins that killed his mother and her workers. Mathis has confirmed that Matty's physically capable of speech, and by the end of the story Matty talks once more in order to ask his father not to leave him.
Interrupted Suicide: Mathis gets interrupted by his son while he cuts into his own chest with a burning blade, and again when he takes Uaid into a fight he doesn't plan to survive.
Please, Don't Leave Me: Matty finally starts talking again to tell his father not to leave him.
Talking Down the Suicidal: Matty has to talk his dad out of killing himself twice, though he has the advantage of not needing to say much as Mathis' feeling of duty towards his son is the only thing keeping him alive and he only tries to kill himself when he thinks he's found people better than himself that Matty likes being with to leave him with. This is good because Matty's been mute since his mother's murder.
Tattooed Crook: Berdy is a member of the criminal Black Tongue orginization with a tattoed face and mouth.
Wedding Ring Removal: In the side story "Orphans" Quigley uses a heated knife to burn and cut away his wedding brand before attempting to commit suicide, out of feelings of guilt and despair over his wife's murder.

Minor Kasslynian tales

Tropes in short stories, single page comics, and snippets of prose by Ashley Cope set in Kasslyne.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Bastion really wanted to meet up with the mysterious Senet the Mmatont are worshiping on Anchert, but displeased the Agib in the Dark who ensured he spent the visit in agony without getting the answers he wanted.
Bed Trick: One of the short prose side stories depicts Ruck messing with Roger and convincing him he's about to sleep with an eager attractive young man rather than be raped by a monster while Roger keeps almost remembering what is really happening to him and Ruck takes advantage of the mess he's made of Roger's mind.
Carnivorous Healing Factor: The Agib in the Dark was badly wounded at some point and thus anyone who visits to try and beg for Old Tainish words or other inspiration must bring things for him to eat as he slowly heals himself. Bastion assumes that those who try to reach Anchert without the Mmatont's approval are fed to it as well.
A Day in the Limelight: Flann is a minor character in the comic, but received a prose story in which he described defending his village against the first wave of human invaders to some young Inak.
Depraved Bisexual: The "Obsession" prose story portrays Ruck as one, rather than the Depraved Homosexual he's depicted as in the comic proper, as he rapes and devours a woman who had murdered her girlfriend. It's explained that he sometimes preys on women as well as men, but usually prefers men because women tend to lack the attributes he most enjoys feeding on.
Incompatible Orientation: Jon, Duane's lieutenant in the army, is in love with him, but Duane is straight as an arrow. Duane never realizes this, however, as Jon is killed in action before he can confess his feelings.
Our Doors Are Different: Bastion and Rahm are surprised by some doors on Anchert which seem to be alive, possibly a Mamalen Entak that has been modified or some other Senet Beast.
Psycho Lesbian: Ruck's victim in "Obsession" fell in love with another woman, then disembowelled her with a knife when she refused to run away together. Ruck notes while feeding on her memories that she "had not slashed only to kill, but to torment, to open the inside to the outside, to splay open to the night what she had wanted for herself but which she would have to steal because it would never be given."
Public Execution: Bodkin Jr. was publicly hanged.
Secret Test of Character: In a side story about how Duane met his wife, we learn when he was moved to his caste's upper wards, there were many families who wanted to marry their daughters off to him, the new teacher of wrights in a major military unit. Of all of them, there was one woman who wasn't throwing herself at him. She had a cleft lip and a lazy eye, which put Duane off but he could see there was something else behind her eyes. She corners him at the church while he is praying to question him about whether the rumors that he murdered a fellow student at school were true (he had killed a student, but it was because he had been addled from a blow to the head from behind and used a lethal pymary without meaning to). After prodding him about his appearance and getting him to imply he plans to marry her (and glamour her face into something more attractive), Leysa removes a pymaric pin from her dress that causes the glamour on her face to dispel and return her eye and lip back to normal. She just wanted to make sure he wasn't a shallow man (or a murderer).
Water Source Tampering: Duane's little sister was killed as a child when their Soud ghers well was poisoned by bigoted Aldishmen from other castes.

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