The Successor Palace

What the Successor Palace describes

Children are the obvious reading and the narrow one. This palace covers everything a person hands on and does not keep: students, apprentices, the people trained and then outgrown, work that goes on being used after its author has moved to something else. It is the palace of what survives the handover. A strong reading shows in juniors who do well and stay in touch, and in the quiet fact that things built here keep working without supervision. A difficult one is rarely about fertility and usually about transfer — effort that does not compound, teaching that does not take, a body of work that needs its author present to function at all. The question this palace really asks is whether somebody can let go of a thing while it is still theirs, which is harder than it sounds and is most of the reading.

This palace is read for a person. An animal's chart lands on the same cell and is read as Litter & Legacy instead — same position, no career and no marriage in it.

The 12 Palaces are read at Bond Level 3. None of this exists without a cast chart — a birth year on its own names a Spirit Guardian and no palaces at all.

The Successor Palace in each of the twelve communities

The same domain reads differently depending on who is holding it, and this is the whole of that difference for this palace. Find the community holding your Successor Palace and the row is your baseline — the starting reading, before anything sitting in the palace adjusts it.

In the order the cycle turns. A community holds one palace in any given chart, so these twelve readings are alternatives to each other rather than a list of things all true at once.

What the Successor Palace is bound to

Position binds palaces to each other, and those bonds hold for every chart because all twelve turn together. The Successor Palace faces Property across the ring, six places away. The two are read as a pair: whatever is happening in one is felt in the other, and a chart that looks lopsided on Successor alone often reads differently once Property is set beside it.

It also belongs to the Interpersonal Network trine with Parent and Associate — three palaces four places apart, making a triangle on the ring. A trine tends to move together, so strength in one of the three is rarely isolated and neither is strain.

The lens the board reads this palace through

When two charts are compared on the Bonding Map, the relationship you name decides which palace the comparison runs in. Heir and Pet both read through the Successor Palace — so seating somebody as either of those is choosing this domain as the ground the two of you are measured on.

That is worth knowing before reading anything above. A difficult reading here is not a verdict on a particular person; it describes the ground, and the same ground is underneath every relationship of that kind. It is also the axis a keeper and their animal are read on — the one who provides against the one provided for.

The other palaces under Relationships

• Parent— parents, employers and everybody a life has had to be answerable to
• Associate— colleagues, collaborators and the wide network a life actually runs on
• Romance— the one central partnership, read for shape rather than temperature
• Sibling— brothers, sisters and everybody standing at the same rank

Relationships is one of three groups the app files the twelve under. Relationship Palaces lists all 5 of them.

Frequently asked

What does the Successor Palace mean?

It is children, students and everything handed on rather than kept. Children are the obvious reading and the narrow one. This palace covers everything a person hands on and does not keep: students, apprentices, the people trained and then outgrown, work that goes on being used after its author has moved to something else. It is the palace of what survives the handover. A strong reading shows in juniors who do well and stay in touch, and in the quiet fact that things built here keep working without supervision. A difficult one is rarely about fertility and usually about transfer — effort that does not compound, teaching that does not take, a body of work that needs its author present to function at all. The question this palace really asks is whether somebody can let go of a thing while it is still theirs, which is harder than it sounds and is most of the reading.

Which palace sits opposite the Successor Palace?

The Property Palace, six places across the ring. A palace and the one facing it are read together rather than separately — whatever is happening in one is felt in the other, and a chart that looks unbalanced on Successor alone often reads differently once Property is put beside it. The Successor Palace also belongs to the Interpersonal Network trine with Parent and Associate.

Does everybody have a Successor Palace?

Yes. All twelve palaces are present in every chart — that is what makes them a map rather than a score. What differs between two people is which of the twelve Spirit Guardians holds each palace, and that is what the twelve readings on this page describe. There is no chart with a missing palace and no chart with two of the same.

How do I find out which Spirit Guardian holds my Successor Palace?

Seat yourself on the Bonding Map and it is read for you. It is worked out from a cast chart rather than from anything that can be looked up directly, because casting one means converting a birth into a lunar date and a true hour against the timezone it happened in — the board does that conversion, which is the part that is easy to get wrong by hand.