The Stuarts fell. The Hanoverians rose. Power changed hands. The game remained the same.
The Hollow Sceptre covers the Tudor, Stuart, and early Hanoverian periods — the age of religious reformation, civil war, restoration, and the long slow transfer of real power from the crown to Parliament. The sceptre remained. What it represented changed beyond recognition.
The Stuarts fell. The Hanoverians rose. Power changed hands. The game remained the same — but the players, and the rules, were being rewritten in ways that would make the England of 1837 unrecognisable to the England of 1509.
Like all titles in the Aethereal Histories, The Hollow Sceptre is narrated by Ariaste — the immortal archivist of the Unwaking Library, the long witness whose record covers the full span of the mortal world. Ariaste was there. The vantage is long. The voice is restrained.
The Hollow Sceptre is concerned with the gap between symbol and power — with a monarchy that retained its ceremonial weight long after the actual authority had migrated elsewhere, and with the forces that used the confusion of that gap to operate unseen.
