Relationships · one of twelve palaces
Litter & Legacy
- Covers
- What Is Left in People
- Faces
- Home & Safe Ground
- Also called
- The Successor Palace
- Read at
- Bond Level 3 — a pet's last free rung
Litter & Legacy is most animals leave no young and no work — what they leave is inside somebody else. It is the same cell of the same cast chart a person's Successor Palace is read from — renamed, because an animal has no career, no marriage and no property portfolio, and a reading that kept those words would be describing a life it is not living.
What Litter & Legacy describes
Ask what a person leaves behind and the answers are theirs: children, work, students, something with their name still on it. Almost none of that is available to an animal. Most never breed, none leave work, and nothing survives them carrying their name. What does survive is entirely inside other people — the household quietly rearranged around a creature, the walk that is still walked, the habit nobody has undone. This is also where the keeper bond lands: declare a companion on the board and the reading comes here, into the person's chart rather than the animal's, which makes it the one palace of the twelve read from outside the animal looking in. A strong reading is a creature easy to be responsible for that leaves a visible mark on the people. A difficult one never settles into being somebody's and stays a guest in its own home. The mistake is reading this palace as breeding.
A pet reaches its twelve palaces at Bond Level 3 — one rung later than a person, because an animal's first two rungs are spent on species and breed and then on birth year. These twelve are also the last free reading a pet produces: there is no Soul rung for an animal.
Litter & Legacy in each of the seven species
What a palace looks like depends on the animal standing in it, and this is the whole of that difference for this one. A bird's version of Litter & Legacy is not a fish's, and neither is the version you know from living with something warm-blooded.
| Species | What Litter & Legacy looks like |
|---|---|
| 🐕 Dog | Reads as somebody's early and easily — the keeper bond forms fast and the household reshapes itself around it. |
| 🐈 Cat | Becomes somebody's on its own terms and its own timetable, and the arrangement is no less permanent for it. |
| 🦜 Bird | Outlives most keepers' plans. A long-lived one is a legacy question well before it is a companionship one. |
| 🐇 Rabbit | Rehomed more often than almost anything else here, which is why this palace is about the home, not the litter. |
| 🐹 Hamster | A short, complete life. What it leaves behind is usually somebody's first experience of being responsible. |
| 🐠 Fish | Frequently the first animal a child is trusted with, and therefore the first real lesson about consequences. |
| 🦎 Reptile | Can outlast a marriage. Legacy here is a genuine planning problem rather than a sentiment about one. |
Seven species, and the element beside each on its own page is the pet catalogue's reading rather than a chart's. Breed sits a layer below this: the palace describes the position, and the species and breed describe the animal in it.
Whether the keeper bond runs through here
This is one of only two. Declare an animal as a companion on the Bonding Map and the reading lands here, in the keeper's chart — this palace is where a person reads the animal they are responsible for. Its opposite number is Keeper & Care, which is the same bond read from the animal's side.
That asymmetry is the difference between an animal's chart and a person's on the board. A person can be declared a parent, a sibling, a partner, an heir or a colleague — five directions through five palaces. An animal has two, and they are the two ends of one bond.
What Litter & Legacy is set against
Litter & Legacy faces Home & Safe Ground across the ring, six places away, and the two are read as a pair rather than separately. An animal that looks difficult on Litter & Legacy alone often reads differently once Home & Safe Ground is set beside it.
The geometry the twelve sit in — the six facing pairs and the four triangles — is a fact about the ring rather than about any one animal, so it is written once for the whole site on the Persona palaces rather than repeated here in twelve near-identical paragraphs.
The other palaces under Relationships
Relationships is one of three groups the twelve are filed under. Relationships (Pet) lists all 5 of them.
Frequently asked
- What is the Litter & Legacy palace in a pet's chart?
- It is most animals leave no young and no work — what they leave is inside somebody else. Ask what a person leaves behind and the answers are theirs: children, work, students, something with their name still on it. Almost none of that is available to an animal. Most never breed, none leave work, and nothing survives them carrying their name. What does survive is entirely inside other people — the household quietly rearranged around a creature, the walk that is still walked, the habit nobody has undone. This is also where the keeper bond lands: declare a companion on the board and the reading comes here, into the person's chart rather than the animal's, which makes it the one palace of the twelve read from outside the animal looking in. A strong reading is a creature easy to be responsible for that leaves a visible mark on the people. A difficult one never settles into being somebody's and stays a guest in its own home. The mistake is reading this palace as breeding.
- Is Litter & Legacy the same as the Successor Palace?
- It is the same cell of the same cast chart, named for an animal instead of for a person. The human reading of it is the Successor Palace, and the two pages link each other rather than pretending the overlap is not there. The rename is not decoration: an animal has no career, no marriage and no income, so a reading that kept those words would be describing a life it is not living.
- Does the Litter & Legacy palace tell me anything about my own animal's breed?
- Only in part, and the table on this page is where that part lives — one line for each of the seven species, because what this palace looks like in a bird is not what it looks like in a fish. Breed sits a layer below that, and the breed pages carry it. This palace describes the position; the species and breed describe the animal standing in it.
- Is Litter & Legacy read through the bond with a keeper?
- This is one of only two. Declare an animal as a companion on the Bonding Map and the reading lands here, in the keeper's chart — this palace is where a person reads the animal they are responsible for. Its opposite number is Keeper & Care, which is the same bond read from the animal's side.
One palace is a twelfth of an animal. Seat it on the board with its hour, day and month of birth and all twelve are cast at once.
Open the Bonding Map