blaster—an arcana weapon that uses deiat in a crude fashion, firing bolts of pure energy that explode on impact. Like any arcana making use of deiat and not in the hands of a centarch, blasters are powered by energy stored in sunsplinters and useless once the energy is expended. The Legions use blasters as their standard ranged weapon. Pistol and rifle variants both exist, with the latter having greater range. Since charged sunsplinters can only be acquired from the Twilight Order or occasionally scavenged from ruins, functioning blasters are very expensive to acquire and a mark of status.

centarch—one of the elite warriors of the Twilight Order, capable of wielding deiat through a haken, unlike all other humans.

Chosen—One of the Elder races, along with the ghouls. All Chosen could use deiat, without the aid of tools like haken, and this power made them unchallenged rulers of a continent-spanning empire for centuries, with humans serving them. They were wiped out by the Plague, but in their final years they founded the Dawn Republic and the Twilight Order, to help humanity survive in their absence.

cognomen—Humans in the former Chosen Empire have either only a given name, or a given name and a family or clan name for city dwellers and elites. In addition, some people have a cognomen, a third name that describes some aspect of their history, character, or appearance. Cognomen are granted by general acclamation, not chosen, and trying to pick one’s own cognomen is the height of arrogance and opens one to mockery. Cognomen are not always complimentary but can be very hard to shake once applied. They are often two-word compounds: Rottentooth, Boldstep, Halfmask.

For centarchs, cognomen have a greater significance. They are granted, not by the centarch’s peers, but by the Kyriliarch Council when an agathios reaches the status of a full centarch. The cognomen matches the way the centarch manifests deiat, and the Council often chooses names held by past centarchs, with the oldest names conveying the most favor and honor.

construct—a semiorganic autonomous servant created by the ghouls using dhaka. Constructs come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, but many are roughly humanoid, with specialized construction for their particular role, such as armor, weapons, or extra limbs. They are typically built of artificial muscle and tissue layered over a metal skeleton, and sometimes resemble plaguespawn, although the latter are much more chaotic and strange. A device called an analytica provides the construct’s ability to understand instructions and make decisions, but only the ghouls understood how these function.