Kingdom of Ulek
Type Legitimist regency council
Founded ~4510 AR (immediately after sealing)
Seat Prince Eltram Landing
Ruler The Regent Council (throne held in trust for Prince Eltram)
Religion The Keymaster (monarchist branch)
Status Stable and self-contained; politically marginal

Overview

The Kingdom of Ulek is not, technically, a kingdom without a king. It is a kingdom waiting for its king to return.

When Prince Eltram sealed himself in the Temple of Primordial Evil alongside Aerom Latan in ~4504 AR, his surviving officers and court did not dissolve. They retreated to the landing site on the southern coast — the place where Eltram's fleet had made shore before the final campaign — and built a city around the conviction that he would come back. The Regent Council was formed within a decade of the sealing to maintain the institutions of the kingdom until that return.

That was over two hundred years ago.

The Legitimist Position

The Kingdom holds three positions that distinguish it from the other Ulek factions:

First: Eltram's seal is not permanent. The compact that sealed him with Aerom Latan can be voided — if the seal is broken from outside, both Eltram and Aerom walk free simultaneously. The Kingdom believes this can be done safely, though they disagree internally about what "safely" requires.

Second: Neither the Committee of Committees in Ulex City nor Theodor Crane in Sandstone holds legitimate authority over Ulek. The Free Cities discarded royal succession by treaty. Crane seized it by force. Neither action is valid in the Kingdom's legal framework, which has continued to develop and refine itself for two hundred years as if it were the governing authority of a functioning kingdom.

Third: The original Ulek crown predates the empire. The Kingdom's legitimacy claim runs through the first King Ulek (1 AR), not through the imperial bureaucracy that came later. The Free Cities can abolish the empire; they cannot abolish the monarchy that preceded it.

What the Council Actually Does

The Regent Council governs Prince Eltram Landing and its surrounding territory. In practice this means: maintaining the city, managing southern coastal trade, preserving Keymaster worship in its pre-schism form, and producing an extraordinary volume of legal scholarship on the question of seals, compacts, and conditions for legitimate return of sealed royalty.

The Council has been arguing about the correct procedure for unsealing Eltram for over a century. The theological and legal literature on this question, produced in Prince Eltram Landing's libraries, is probably the most comprehensive body of work on divine compact dissolution in the world. It has not yet produced agreement.

The city is stable and not poor. Southern coastal trade is reliable. The Kingdom is not in crisis. It is in a holding pattern that has lasted two centuries, maintained by an institution that has become very good at institutional maintenance.

The Ground-Level Seal

GM Note

The Scrambledough Seven broke the ground-level seal on the Temple of Primordial Evil in ~4700 AR. The Kingdom's Council does not yet know this happened. When they find out — through rumor, through the deteriorating conditions at the temple site, or through direct investigation — it will force the question they have been deferring: the outer protections are down. The question of unsealing Eltram is no longer theoretical.

The Council's two centuries of legal scholarship will suddenly matter. So will the fact that they cannot agree on the procedure.

Relationship with the Other Factions

The Kingdom regards the Free Cities as temporary — a republican interlude that will end when legitimacy is restored. It regards Crane as a usurper who has committed a specific theological crime (forcing a church coronation) and is therefore not merely illegitimate but impious.

The Free Cities regard the Kingdom as a museum. Well-maintained, earnest, and irrelevant.

Crane's faction rarely mentions the Kingdom at all, which is its own kind of insult.

Connections