The Arithrimos Lamperum

The Arithrimos Lamperum was a Drankorian society dedicated to cataloging and understanding extraplanar weak points and other kinds of planar connections. For many years, the order recorded these places, using brilliant numbers as encoded location keys: large numbers, each built from prime factors of the same length, that could hide precise maps in plain sight, undecipherable to anyone who did not know the factors. In the waning days of the Drankorian Empire, the order increasingly focused on closing what planar connections they could.

Purpose and Culture

The Arithrimos Lamperum understood the boundaries between planes as porous walls requiring continual maintenance. Its members described their work as “keeping the outside out and the inside in,” and for centuries regarded extraplanar incursions as the greater danger facing the Drankorian Empire and all of humanity. They mapped weak points, repaired damaged boundaries, contained creatures that crossed them, and closed passages that could not safely remain open.

The order combined mathematical and metaphysical scholarship with strict secrecy and compartmentalization. Cartographers such as Menestheus memorized the factors needed to decode brilliant-number maps, while other specialists performed the work of containment. Even instruction within the order took a secret form, collected in the Allegories for the Initiated; a common strategy in Drankorian societies.

The conviction that this work protected the world also made the order capable of profound cruelty. At its worst, they treated secrecy as justification, prisoners as research material, and souls as a source of motive power. On the Science and Possibilities of Soul Bindery, written by an early member, enthusiastically proposed powering golems, automata, ships, and weapons with the pressure of souls prevented from reaching the Land of the Dead, despite the heretical and evil nature of such a project. As many members of the order often said: “All progress involves sacrifice.”

History

The order operated for centuries, locating and maintaining weak places throughout the planes, establishing outposts at planar weak points, including the 27th House, where early investigators had been consumed by a strange entity. The order captured the being and constructed a shifting complex around it, using the souls it held to power the prison.

In the waning days of the Drankorian Empire, Thalestria, then head of the order, believed the world they knew was ending. She redirected the order from maintaining planar boundaries toward permanently sealing as many remaining breaches as possible. In her metaphor, the revel had passed its height, and their task was to lock the doors and extinguish the lights. However, the order’s independence and dispersed power base eventually drew the hostility of Apollyon. Kallipseis publicly resisted imperial pressure, though Thalestria believed their mission was too important to endanger through open defiance. It did not matter. The order was disbanded anyway. Thalestria blamed Kallipseis, and withdrew from the 27th House. To keep its prison operating without the order’s attendants, she tricked Lord Revel Beginning into a bargain that supplied an unending stream of mortal visitors.

Kallipseis remained behind and claimed leadership after Thalestria’s disappearance and presumed death.

After the destruction of the 27th House, Kallipseis escaped into the Multiverse in a fungal golem body, carrying a book of brilliant numbers. The Arithrimos Lamperum now survives, so far as is known, only through her claim to its leadership and her intention to rebuild it.