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Jackelian · World Guide

A field guide to Jackelian

The world of the Jackelian novels runs on flintlocks, gas-lamps, airships, brass-bodied intelligent machines, and a working acquaintance with magic that nobody is comfortable letting wander loose. A parliamentary kingdom dominates the temperate north; every other ideology contests the borders. The seas are populated, the deep ocean is populated, and the sky has civilisations of its own. This is a spoiler-light field guide.

Machines, wonders & hardware

Celgas & the aerostats
The buoyant gas mined beneath the Steammen Free State that lifts every airship in the sky — and the Royal Aerostatical Navy that rules the air with it.
The steammen
Brass-bodied intelligent machines — a sovereign people in their own mountain kingdom, who worship their ancestors and field religious orders of knights.
The worldsingers' craft
Magic in Jackals is suppressed, not wielded: the worldsingers are a clerical order trained to detect and contain sorcery, treating it as a wound in the world.
Womb-mages of Cassarabia
The desert Caliphate's biological sorcerers, who grow weapons, mounts and servants out of living flesh rather than commanding the elements.
The Hexmachina
A god-machine slumbering at the world's core — the counter to powers older than any nation. (A Book One revelation, kept light here.)

Factions & powers

◈
The Kingdom of Jackals
A parliamentary kingdom where the monarch has been deliberately diminished — Parliament runs the country, the pneumatic post moves the mail, and the Royal Aerostatical Navy rules the sky.
ParliamentGaslit
⬢
The Steammen Free State
A sovereign mountain kingdom of intelligent steam-driven machines, ruled by King Steam — Jackals' steadiest ally and the source of celgas.
Machine kingdom
✦
The Special Guard
The Kingdom's feybreed enforcement — powerful citizens altered by the leylines, collared and conscripted into state service.
Feybreed
❖
The worldsingers
A sorcery-suppressing clerical order, trained to detect and contain magic rather than wield it.
Sorcery, contained
◆
Quatérshift — the Commonshare
Jackals' continental neighbour: a post-revolutionary republic governed by the First Committee, where the revolution kept eating after it won.
Revolution
☀
The Caliphate of Cassarabia
A vast desert empire ruled by the Caliph Eternal, whose womb-mages shape living tissue rather than the elements.
Desert empire

Timeline & continuity

Deep past
Camlantis & the Banished
Pre-human powers and the floating utopia of Camlantis shaped the world's deep history — and left buried machinery, and older gods, better not disturbed.
Before the cycle
The diminished crown
Jackals fights down its old aristocracy — with the steammen at its side — and builds a parliamentary kingdom where the monarch is deliberately powerless.
Book 1
The Court of the Air
Two hunted orphans pull on a thread the Kingdom doesn't know it's keeping — and a war that never ended stirs beneath it.
Book 3
The Rise of the Iron Moon
A new moon rises and an invasion that does not negotiate takes the continent one nation at a time — the cycle's apocalyptic turning point.
Books 4–7
Detectives, deserts & deep oceans
Jago's murders, Cassarabia's air-war, the gill-necks rising from the deep, and on to Mightadore — the world widens and its archaeology of vanished powers tightens.

Characters

Heroine
Molly Templar
A Middlesteel poorhouse orphan with a price on her head she can't see — later a celebrated novelist dragged back into a war.
Registered feybreed
Oliver Brooks
A country boy kept under indefinite worldsinger watch, pulled into the kingdom's secret war against his will.
Exiled u-boat captain
Commodore Jared Black
A loud, sentimental, magnificently unreliable exiled aristocrat who arrives to complain and stays to fight.
Steamman savant
Coppertracks
A scholar of the Steammen Free State — chemist, theologian and loyal friend — on extended sabbatical among the soft-bodied.
Deniable agent
Harry Stave
Charming, deniable and capable of considerable violence with good manners — he works for an organisation he isn't allowed to name.
Archaeologist
Professor Amelia Harsh
A disgraced academic, brawler and the last believer in the lost floating city of Camlantis.
Consulting detective
Jethro Daunt
A defrocked Circlist vicar with the manners of a Victorian gentleman and the case files of a black-bag operative.
Steamman knight
Boxiron
A formerly grand steamman of the Free State in a damaged human-built body, with the temper of a knight intact.

Glossary

Kingdom of Jackals
The cycle's central polity — a parliamentary kingdom where the monarch has been deliberately stripped of power.
Middlesteel
Capital of Jackals: gas-lamp streets, smog, parliament, the pneumatic post and the rookeries.
The Steammen Free State
A sovereign mountain kingdom of intelligent steam-driven machines, ruled by King Steam.
Celgas
The buoyant gas, mined beneath the Free State, that lifts every airship in the sky.
Worldsinger
A sorcery-suppressing cleric, trained to detect and contain magic rather than wield it.
Feybreed
A person altered by the leylines — registered, watched, and sometimes conscripted into the Special Guard.

Good to know

🛈Content & sensitivity notes

The Jackelian novels are adult genre adventure built on adult ideas rather than shock. Warfare — airship, infantry, siege and street — runs throughout, taken seriously without wallowing; political cruelty (Quatérshift's punitive state, Cassarabian palace intrigue, the collaring of feybreed) carries real moral weight; and named characters die, most heavily in The Rise of the Iron Moon. Body horror is modest, more pronounced in Book 5's biological sorcery. Sexual content is minimal and non-explicit, and strong language is light and period-flavoured. The cycle contains no extended sexual violence, gratuitous torture or gore for its own sake.

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