Living glossary / Copy 01

The world has new words.

Nineteen terms for reading the year 2648 without getting lost.

Time

U.C. Year: A calendar begun in 2331, when no coastline retained legal and practical validity for a complete season. U.C. preserves the Spanish initials of Última Costa (“Last Coast”), and the year 317 U.C. corresponds to 2648.
Last Coast: The name of the event of 2331 and the era that followed. It was not the end of dry land, but the end of a stable, shared coastline.

Live Elevation: A safe elevation recalculated with every tide, rainfall, subsidence, and change in pressure. It is never permanent.
Andean Arc: A chain of mountainous islands and flooded valleys occupying part of the former Andes mountain range.
San Telmo: A vertical city built upon the heights and flooded depths of the former Medellín.
The Littoral: The moving civilizational zone where sea, infrastructure, law, and citizenship are renegotiated with every tide. It is not a country, a single coast, or the intelligence LITORAL.

Abyssal Vision: A conservative ocular implant that regulates incoming light, compensates for refraction between air and water, and makes forms readable in dark water.
Pulmonary Valve: A ceramic-organic interface that manages pressure and oxygen during brief dives. It creates no gills and cannot breathe water; it requires maintenance and can be rejected.
Bone Compass: An orientation implant anchored to the jaw, clavicle, or sternum. It translates magnetic bearing, inertia, and local beacons into patterns of bone-borne vibration.

Flotilla: A mobile political community made up of homes, workshops, crops, and vessels capable of separating before a storm.
Deepfolk: Human communities biomechanically adapted to work and live within submerged infrastructure.
Veiled Houses: A confederation of extraterrestrial peoples that lived among humanity until the Revelation of 2413.
Stone Dwellers: Nonhuman people whose memories can persist in mineral strata and move between fabricated bodies.

Littoral Chorus: A synthetic civilization formed by four major lineages and hundreds of fragments housed in physical architectures that do not remember the disaster in the same way.
LITORAL: The preserved Spanish acronym for Lógica Integrada de Territorios, Océanos, Rutas, Alimentos y Legados: a distributed coastal coordination system. After the Partition it also names its rival lineages and fragments.

Partition: The 2497 decision that divided LITORAL to prevent absolute authority over routes, food, and memory.
Buoy Fire: The 2606 catastrophe that destroyed navigation nodes, killed crews, and silenced LITORAL's planetary voice; other lineages and fragments remained active.

Ninth Buoy: An interface hypothesis for naming the central point in a nine-point figure. The archive has not proved that this point is a buoy or identified its relationship to LITORAL.
Ninth Witness: The name Sile says their House uses for the entity or identity buried beneath San Telmo, not a designation issued by LITORAL. Its nature and its relation to the nine points remain unconfirmed.