House Frame Rhivadi is a noble family of Caldero, headed in the present cycle (1824 AE) by Beautiful and Cold Tittiframe, that keeps a public face of piety and philanthropy alongside a hidden operation allied with Lord Valanthru.
| Type | Faction (noble family) |
| Seat | Twin Towers |
| Spanish entry | Casa Frame Rhivadi |
Description
Its plate shows two towers, one tall with every floor lit, the other massive and dark against the volcano, with a baroque palace between them and a lone figure at the side threshold.
History
Not one of the crater’s primordial houses, it entered the nobility in the middle industrial-magical phase and rose fast: from merchants to one tower, then two, then an apparatus parallel to the great houses. The provincial Decadian archive notes that classical genealogy does not fully explain this success. Tittiframe, an influential hostess, runs the double register; siblings, cousins in the guilds of Star City and portrayed ancestors stay in the background.
The double register
- Public: strict Decadian liturgy, philanthropy, matinées in the towers’ pavilion, formal ties with the old houses and the Imperial Church.
- Hidden: sealed laboratories in the south tower, ciphered letters to Valanthru of the Obsidian Tower, clandestine operations the clergy suspects, alliances of unknown nature with Star City guilds.
Unlike other corrupt houses, it holds both registers without visible contradiction.
Alliance with Valanthru
The archive of the Plata has recently postulated that the two towers form one apparatus: Valanthru runs the ritual (zodiacally marked children, the platform ritual); the house runs the material side (technology, mechanical arms carrying the marks, candidates for the ritual). Both converge on the Cageewrights prophecy, with Thirteen as coordinating number. If so, the house is the material body of Valanthru’s ritual, split between two buildings to spread suspicion.
Projects
- Mechanical arms for maimed warriors, possibly carriers of ritual marks; Teo is a candidate but has not accepted.
- Arcane imports from Star City: Miles Corp flying brooms, sorcerous drones.
- Matinées to map the nobility and spot candidates. At one, with a time sorcerer, the adventurers were watched and expelled; Vitalis was hired and dismissed there.
Relationships
- La Jabalina (“the Javelin”), its adversary, knows the pavilion (seven members attended the matinée) but not the towers or how the apparatus works.
- The apparatus may gestate the industrial-magical form of the Borg Popes’ dark papacy.
- It works with the Magical Industrial Revolution.