A tourney is held to make knights. Two rivals are handed to opposing masters as weapons in a feud neither of them started. To win the oath, each must break the other — and survive a final trial that cannot be passed alone.

Once a generation, Claireville fills to bursting. The Chevaliers de la Monde, the stateless order of knights that kings defer to and no nation commands, open their ranks and call the world to prove itself. What looks like pageantry is a crucible: five days of trials, oaths, and constant judgment, where steel is the least of what's measured.

But no one is knighted without a patron, and the patrons arrived in Claireville with knives already drawn. Two of them, old enemies, have each found a champion. You are one. Your rival is the other. The lists are rigged so you must ruin each other to rise.


▸ THE FAVORED — the one the order already expects to win.
Trained in proper salles, fluent in its rituals and its social game. Backed by an established power that treats you as an asset — total support, on a tightening leash, because it wants a Chevalier it owns. Your cage is expectation. Everyone's already decided you'll win, so victory earns you nothing you don't already have; one stumble could cost you everything. Your goal: to be knighted on merit no one can say was bought for you.

▸ THE INTERLOPER — the one who shouldn't be here at all.
An underdog plucked from somewhere the Chevaliers were never meant to recruit. Self-taught or hard-taught, you fight in ways the salle never sanctioned, and your place in the lists is a provocation by itself. A faction at war with the Favored's patron has put you here. They don't believe in you. You're a battering ram, and they want the rival house humiliated more than they want you crowned. Your cage is precarity. One accusation, one "unsuitable" ruling, and you're gone — and everyone's waiting for it. Your goal: to force the gate open, prove merit beats pedigree, and make the order admit it.

What the two of them have in common: both are being spent by patrons who see a weapon where a person is standing. Both are trying to hold an oath the war keeps demanding they break. Each is the other's obstacle — and, by the end, the only one in Claireville who understands them.

• Action-forward. Trials, duels, sabotage, the arena. The intrigue is the spice; the competition is the meal.
• Standalone or ongoing. The tourney is a complete arc on its own. But the world is wide: smuggling cartels, a colonized New World bleeding magic into the old, the duties of knighthood that call our characters far beyond Claireville, the fallout of an honorable loss (or dishonorable win.) If we both want it, this can extend well past the final trial.
• Romance optional. On the table if the chemistry is there; never required. I am currently open to MxF, FxF, or MxM pairings. Rivalry first; whatever it becomes, second.

I'm Antlers! Canadian (MST). 34 years old and prefer my partners to be 25+ for that reason. I'm a woman (she/her), but write male or female characters with no preference for writing one over the other. I write morally-grey fantasy for grown-ups: high stakes, slow-burn tension, and characters who do the wrong thing for good reasons.

• My pace. I'm on medical leave at the moment (awaiting surgery), so I have the time and post often — once a day to every other day, barring a flare-up that takes me out. I'll never rush you for a reply.
• Expect mature content. Violence, the costs of empire and colonialism, moral grey on grey. Smut optional; I'm just as happy with fade-to-black.
• Face claims. Actors if we use them, but descriptions alone also suffice.
• Where. OOC by PM or Discord; IC by PM, thread, Google Docs, or Ellipsus.

• An active and engaged partner who progresses the story: bring me new twists and turns, raise the stakes, take a scene somewhere I didn't plan or expect.
• Advanced / literate; quality over quantity. Third person, past tense. Characters who feel like real, complicated human beings. The good shit.
• Communication: I can stay engaged with a story as long as I am not left endlessly wondering when a post is coming. In an hour? Next week? Next month? Great! Tell me that, and I'll happily wait.

Andermonde is split between two continents and two ages. The Old World (Nonotoule) is where this story unfolds: an industrial, rational, low-magic civilisation of airship lanes, universities, factory smog, and fading faith. The New World (Xyletl), colonial name Chevataille, lies across the ocean: ancient, magical, barely understood, and recently invaded by Old World expeditions hungry for magical relics and land.

A generation ago, the Royal Academy of Tovair published The Origination and declared gods and demons disproven — the Death of Worship. Reason had won. Then the first artefacts returned from Xyletl and refused to uphold the chosen narrative: statues woke, objects warped, the dead began to stir. Magic re-entered the world as contamination, smuggled in crate by crate. The Old World is still pretending it has everything under control. It doesn't.

It's also an age of hard inequality. The rich were promised a golden century of innovation and kept it for themselves; the poor were promised the same and got ash and empty stomachs. That class gap is the fuel under half the schemes in this world — your patrons' included.


Croussai — Empire. Industry & iron. The brute powerhouse of the northeast: vast resources, vast factories, vast armies. Short on social freedom, short on imagination, but no one out-produces it. A Croussai upbringing means discipline, hierarchy, and the belief that strength is measured in tonnage. (Good for: a hard, drilled, institution-shaped fighter — favored or frontier-grim.)

Incharde — Council-state. Money & motion. The equatorial port-city at the mouth of the Mer Mortou — the most influential trading hub in the world and the main gate for westbound airships. Scientists and new-money industrialists flock here. Cosmopolitan, mercantile, ruthless beneath the polish, where a fortune (or a person) is made or unmade in a season. (Good for: dockside grit, self-made ambition, a new money patron's wealth.)

Noutaine — Duchy. Old blood & old gods. One of the world's eldest nations, once the seat of faith, now declining genteelly in a scientific age. Its capital, Hautnoir, is all soaring cathedral architecture and dwindling congregations — beauty outliving belief. Noutainians carry a sense of fallen grandeur, of being the past the future stopped needing. (Good for: faded aristocracy, a devout streak, the ache of a name that used to mean more.)

Claireville — Neutral ground. The order's city. Where the tourney is held: an old, grey port on the inland Mer Mortou, loyal to no nation. Its entire prestige rests on hosting the Chevaliers de la Monde, which fills it with nobles without courts, inventors without permits, and pilgrims who've found a new object of faith. When the Tourney is called, the city triples overnight.

(Other names you'll hear: Enchaire, the eastern airship port; Haunder, faded seat of the old Church; the Mer Mortou, the grey inland sea Claireville sits on.)


The frontier across the ocean. The Twelve States claim it on paper; in practice, the interior answers to no one. Archaeologists compete with treasure hunters, settlers rename places already named, and smugglers move artefacts faster than any law. Wild, magical, dangerous, and looked down on by every polished soul in the Old World — which is exactly why an initiate who came up out there is such a scandal in the Claireville lists. (Good for: an Interloper's origin, or anyone who's brushed real magic.)

• Airships move the world over distance: licensed, scheduled, lane-bound by buoys and markers, prey to storms and sky-pirates. The grandest run 900 feet long.
• Rail and road stitch the Old World together; gaslight lines the streets; telescopes, presses, and engines are the pride of the age.
• Clockwork automatons are real and not uncommon. The Chevaliers field them in the tourney as living opponents.
• Arms: steel and gunpowder both. Blades, lances, and crossbows share the field with early firearms — a knight is as apt to drill with a pistol as a sword.
• Universities rival the old temples for influence. This is a world that trusts a laboratory over a prayer.
• Medicine is skilled and brutal: surgeons, sutures, laudanum, no miracles. A clean wound you walk off — a fouled one kills you slow. Anything that heals faster than that is contraband, and trusted by no one.
• Word travels by rail, wire, and the morning broadsheets. The tourney is front-page theatre. A name is made or broken in print as much as on the sand, which is half of why working the crowd matters.
• Daily life splits hard by purse. Gaslit avenues and airship promenades for those who won the century; filth, pollution, and tenement cold for everyone else. Most people never leave the city they were born in — a berth in the sky costs a month's wages.

Rare. Restricted. Smuggled. Unstable. Every scrap of it traces back to Xyletl, and the Old World taxes and bans it into a thriving black market run by the Chevataille Trading Company. A wand that spits fire, a cloak that turns a blade, boots that run a person across rooftops — these exist, but they're contraband, costly, and prone to side effects no one fully understands. For the tourney: assume your character fights mundane. An enchanted blade won't win you the lists. It'll win you a scandal, a rumour, and a target painted on your back.


A nation-less order of warrior-protectors: peacekeepers, arbiters, philanthropists whose word carries weight in every court. They are the social summit, the best of the best, and they serve for life. When one falls to age, injury, disgrace, or exhaustion, the gap must be filled, and the call goes out to Claireville. Their creed is the thing this whole story turns on:

They seek protectors, not champions.

Skill at arms only buys you through the door; what they actually weigh is temperament, judgement, and restraint — which is why a patron demanding you win dirty is asking you to fail the only test that counts.


Open to anyone who can reach Claireville and survive the opening trials. No fee — but you must abandon all prior allegiances for its duration, and you are watched constantly. It runs up to five days and has five components:

I — The Opening Event

• The Skyfall. Leap from an airship some 300 feet up; choose a parachute (steady) or a glider (bold). The crowd loves nerve over caution.
• The Battle Mobile. Race a 500-foot track hunted by two automatons — outfight them or outrun them. They don't tire. You do.
• The Ranger's Test. Strike a distant mark from sixty feet, three shots, with a weapon you assemble yourself. Pure accuracy, no luck.

II — The Open Days

• Jousting & Duelling. Sign up, or call out a rival. In a duel, the challenged party chooses the weapon — and no magic, no poison, ever.
• The Arena Presentation. Sponsors pay to loose exotic beasts or automatons for initiates to fight before the crowd — a display of their wealth and your nerve. Single combat earns more acclaim; teams are encouraged. No explosives, no area weapons.
• Crowdwork. You're judged off the field, too. Bravery, humility, and visible self-sacrifice win the public; working the crowd between events matters as much as winning in it.

III — The Oathswearing

• Choose a virtue and be tested on it; knights are known by it — "the Bold," "the Pure")
• The Pure — endure cold and deprivation without breaking from devotion.
• The Good — be forced to choose between your own success and helping another, and choose right.
• The Bold — face a clearly superior foe and refuse to yield, even unto a (survivable) death.
• The Great — given only to one who wins everything, secures patronage, and swears every other oath. Awarded three times in the order's history.

IV — Patronage
Every initiate needs a patron — an old family, an industrial house, a charity, a political bloc. Patrons take them on to raise their own standing, and each prizes a different quality: ruthlessness, courage, honour, ingenuity. Securing one is a social battle as fierce as any duel. Lose your patron and your run is over, no matter how well you fight. This is the lever yours holds against you.

V — The Final Initiation
Only those who held a patron and proved themselves arrive here. The survivors are loosed together against a single, overwhelming automaton. No single combat is allowed — the order is watching for teamwork, leadership, and sacrifice. Which means the trial cannot be passed by beating your rival. Only with them.


Initiates can be poisoned by rival competitors, bribed into yielding, sabotaged by mechanics tampering with the automatons, framed for cheating. Worse: an inner cabal within the Chevaliers quietly culls candidates it deems "unsuitable," merit be damned — and an outsider is exactly the sort it has in its sights. Looming over all of it is the Chevataille Trading Company, the smuggling cartel whose money corrupts institutions across the world. The tourney is a complete story on its own. But pull any of these threads and the tourney turns out to be the opening act — if we want to keep going.


Andermonde — The world itself; some call it Tzakla'tun or Ynverrai.

Chevataille — Colonial name for Xyletl, the New World; also the smuggling cartel that took the name.

Claireville — The neutral port-city that hosts the Tourney; its prestige rests entirely on the order.

Croussai — Old World empire of industry and iron; short on freedom, long on tonnage.

Enchaire — The eastern Old World port where westbound airships depart.

Haunder — Faded seat of the old Church. (Distinct from New Haunder, a separate university city.)

Hautnoir — Capital of Noutaine: soaring cathedrals, emptying pews.

Incharde — Old World council-state and the busiest trading port in the world.

Mer Mortou — The grey inland sea Claireville sits beside.

Nonotoule — The Old World: the industrial, rational, low-magic continent where this story takes place.

Noutaine — Old World duchy of fading nobility and old faith.

Salle — A hall of arms; the formal school where a properly-trained fighter learns the blade.

The Twelve States — The colonial governments that claim Xyletl on paper, controlling little of it in fact.

Xyletl — The New World: ancient, magical, recently colonized. Mapped by its colonial name, Chevataille.