Clivilius High Council (CHC)

Origin and Formation

By April 2019, the Clivilius Lead Council had been meeting for over eight months. It had formalised its own Secretariat in late January, converted itself from an ad hoc weekly gathering on a hill into a structured body of named departments, and was, by the standards of any settlement of its size and age, functioning. What it could not do — what it had never been built to do — was carry the kind of strategic work whose timeframes ran in years rather than weeks, whose subject matter exceeded the boundaries of Bixbus's immediate footprint, and whose deliberations required a candour that public weekly sittings could not protect.

On the morning of 29 April 2019, eight founders convened to remedy the gap. The body they formed was the Clivilius High Council, and it was created in the same single act that established the Clivilius Secret Service — sister organisations born together, the deliberative and the operational halves of a single institutional response to a single growing problem. From the morning's first sitting, the two bodies were understood as complementary: the High Council deliberated, the Secret Service executed.

The Strategic Layer

The Clivilius Lead Council had, since its founding eight months earlier, carried in its very name a claim much larger than the body's actual footprint could support. The six founders who climbed a hill across the river from Bixbus in August 2018 had named themselves the council of Clivilius without yet quite understanding how vast Clivilius was; the gap between the name and the reality became, over the following months, a source of quiet operational embarrassment.

The High Council was built precisely to make the Lead Council's overreach accurate. Where the CLC had stumbled into the claim, the CHC made it deliberate. It would not, in 2019, actually coordinate the affairs of all of Clivilius — but it was the first body in Bixbus's institutional history that intended to. From its founding sitting, the High Council's eight members worked from the assumption that the long-range future of Clivilius would be coordinated, integrated, and overseen — and that they were the body whose job it was to do the coordinating.

This was an ambitious posture for a council whose actual reach in 2019 was still confined to Bixbus, its immediate satellites, and a small number of footholds beyond. But the posture was load-bearing. The CHC's authority would, in the years that followed, scale as the settlement scaled, and the institutional habits established at the founding — secrecy, monthly cadence, candid deliberation, deliberate authorisation of subordinate bodies — would persist as the body grew into its name.

The Founding Members

Eight members convened the inaugural Conclave on 29 April 2019.

Paul Smith moved from his position as Lead Strategic Operations Coordinator on the CLC into the role of High Council Overseer, providing overall direction to the body's deliberations and serving as the institutional bridge between the new strategic layer and the administrative work of the Secretariat below.

Luke Smith, Paul's brother and the Guardian liaison who had been a member of the CLC in name only since the previous August, took up the formalised role of Guardian Advisor. The position carried the Guardian Order's perspective into the CHC's deliberations without subordinating the Order to the Council — a relationship whose asymmetry would prove central to the body's character.

Leila Grantley, the archaeologist who had crossed into Clivilius in late 2018 and become an early architect of Bixbus, took the position of Earth Liaison. The role made her responsible for the High Council's relations with the influential Earth-side organisations whose cooperation the long-range future of Clivilius would require — and whose discretion would have to be earned and managed individually.

Isabella Rossini, a cultural heritage expert whose background lay in art history and archaeology, joined as Master of Cultural Affairs. The role oriented the High Council toward the question of what Clivilius would inherit from Earth's cultural memory and what it would build of its own — questions which, in 2019, were only beginning to be asked.

Victor Mendes took the position of Inter-Settlement Coordinator, with responsibility for the High Council's relations with settlements elsewhere in Clivilius. By April 2019, contact between Bixbus and the wider Clivilius had begun to reveal scattered, sometimes ancient, sometimes resistant communities whose existence had been only partially understood from the river-bank perspective of the Lead Council's first year. Coordinating a relationship with these communities — practical, diplomatic, and in some cases delicate — was Victor's domain.

Nina Volkov was named Strategic Intelligence Liaison, the position designed to bridge the deliberative work of the High Council with the operational intelligence work of its sister body. Where the Clivilius Secret Service handled the field execution of intelligence operations, Nina's role on the High Council was to translate that operational reality into strategic deliberation — and to carry the deliberations back into Field Operations as direction.

Celeste Marlowe took the position of Secretary of the Conclaves. The role was responsible for the procedural integrity of the High Council's sittings — the maintenance of its archival record, the management of its deliberative conventions, the protection of its secrecy through the careful design of how its meetings were called, attended, and remembered. As the body's institutional vocabulary developed (Conclave, Overseer, Advisor), Celeste was the figure most responsible for it.

Omar Al-Farouq was named Provisioning Coordinator, with responsibility for the long-range resourcing of the High Council's ambitions. The CHC's strategic work could not be done without supplies, equipment, and infrastructure that the Portal-based supply chain from Earth would have to deliver — and the question of what to bring through, when, in what quantity, and through which channels, was one of the most consequential strategic questions Clivilius faced. Omar's portfolio sat at the intersection of logistics, economics, and dimensional access.

The Conclave Cadence

From its founding, the High Council met every thirty days. The interval was deliberate: long enough to allow the body's strategic work to develop between sittings, short enough to prevent the kind of drift that quarterly cadence in a deliberative body can encourage. The sittings were called Conclaves — a term chosen for its connotations of seclusion and weight, and for the distance it placed between the High Council's gatherings and the more workmanlike weekly meetings of the Lead Council.

The first five Conclaves followed the cadence with only minor drift: 29 April, 29 May, 28 June, 28 July, and 27 August 2019. Each was held in private, attended only by the eight founding members, and concluded without public minutes. Decisions made in Conclave were communicated outward through intermediaries — sometimes through the Lead Council's Secretariat, sometimes through the Clivilius Secret Service, and sometimes not at all. The High Council's archival record was maintained by Celeste Marlowe and accessible only to its members.

The cadence held in subsequent years, with successive Conclaves following the same approximate thirty-day rhythm and the same procedural conventions established at the founding.

Secrecy as Operational Necessity

The High Council was, from its first morning, a deliberately secretive body. The identities of several of its members were protected in public discussion of the body's existence, and the substance of its deliberations was — and remains — communicated outward only through intermediaries.

The secrecy was not a stylistic choice. It was the operational consequence of trying to coordinate the long-range affairs of a place whose constituencies could not always be publicly reconciled. The High Council's work required candid deliberation across factions whose interests sometimes ran in different directions: the inhabitants of Bixbus, the Guardian Order, the scattered communities of the wider Clivilius, the Earth-side organisations whose cooperation the long-range future would require, and — increasingly, as the years wore on — the bloodline-related concerns whose sensitivity was of an entirely different order. Each of these constituencies could have their interests served only if the deliberations that affected them were not subject to public negotiation in advance.

The High Council's secrecy, in other words, was load-bearing. It was the condition under which the body could function at all.

Headquarters

The High Council took its operational base within the Clivilius Office of Strategic Intelligence — the building constructed to house the Clivilius Secret Service in the northwest corner of Unity Plaza in Bixbus, completed between 2021 and 2022. The shared headquarters was a deliberate institutional decision: the High Council and its sister Service occupied the same building, used the same secure infrastructure, and benefited from the same physical separation from public Bixbus that the Office's design enforced.

The Conclaves themselves were held within the Office's secure upper floors. The day-to-day administrative work of the High Council was conducted from the same spaces, in close coordination with the Secret Service's command operations on the building's lower levels.

In the years before the Office was built, the High Council met in temporary secure facilities arranged within Unity Plaza's earlier structures and in the council quarters of Bixbus's first administrative buildings. The transition into the permanent headquarters in 2022 marked the formal architectural anchoring of what had, until that point, been an institutional intent without a building.

Sister Body: The Clivilius Secret Service

The Clivilius Secret Service was established in the same single act that created the High Council on 29 April 2019. The two bodies were sister institutions from the morning of their founding — not parent and subordinate, but complementary halves of a single response to the same strategic problem. The High Council deliberated; the Service executed.

In practice, the relationship has been intimate. The CSS provides the High Council with the operational intelligence on which its deliberations depend, executes the field operations its decisions require, and protects the physical security of its members and headquarters. The High Council in turn provides the CSS with strategic direction, authorises its operational latitude, and shields it — as far as the CHC's own secrecy is able — from the kind of public scrutiny that would compromise its work.

Nina Volkov's position as Strategic Intelligence Liaison sits at the operational seam between the two bodies. So, less formally, does the shared headquarters that joins them in a single building.

Liaison: The Guardian Order

The Guardian Order is, by the standards of any institution in Bixbus, ancient. Founded during the centuries that followed CLIVE's awakening in 2320 BCE, it had existed for over four millennia by the time the High Council convened its inaugural Conclave. The Order is deliberately decentralised, sacred in its self-understanding rather than administrative, and structurally resistant to any kind of external authority. The High Council does not — and cannot — oversee it.

What the High Council has, instead, is liaison. Luke Smith's position as Guardian Advisor is the formal channel through which the Order's perspective enters the High Council's deliberations. The relationship is asymmetric: the Council depends on the Order's cooperation in matters that touch on Portal access, bloodline carriers, and the long-range continuity of the Guardian role itself, and the Order does not, in any equivalent sense, depend on the Council. The Guardian Advisor's position on the High Council reflects this asymmetry — the post carries the Order's voice but not its instructions.

The relationship has held, with adjustments, since the founding. Its long-term trajectory remains an open question.

Authorised Bodies

One of the High Council's principal institutional functions, established at the founding and exercised with increasing frequency in the years that followed, has been the authorisation of new bodies. The pattern is consistent: when a problem emerges whose scale or sensitivity exceeds the capacity of Bixbus's day-to-day administrative architecture, the High Council convenes, deliberates, and brings into existence an institution designed to address it.

The Lineage Authority, established in early 2024 by the High Council in response to the bloodline marker degradation that followed the COVID bioweapon of 2020-2023, is the most consequential example to date. The Authority was situated within the restricted sub-levels of the Clivilius National Library at Unity Plaza, and was authorised to maintain the most comprehensive bloodline genealogical database ever assembled, to issue authentication profiles for portal access and Guardian candidacy, and to coordinate with the Earth-side Preservation in tracking marker integrity across populations. The High Council's decision to bring the Authority into being was the institutional response to a problem whose scale and urgency the Lead Council's administrative architecture was not built to carry.

The Cartographic and Heritage Commission, also authorised by the High Council, was established to address the related but distinct work of mapping the wider Clivilius and preserving the heritage material that the settlement's growing reach was beginning to encounter. The Commission's full scope and operational history remain to be set out in detail.

Each of these bodies traces its institutional lineage to a Conclave decision. Each was created by a deliberation conducted in private, communicated outward through intermediaries, and made permanent through the High Council's authority to call new institutions into being.

The Conclave Record

The High Council's meetings since the founding have been recorded in the Council's internal archive, maintained by the Secretary of the Conclaves and held in the secure spaces of the Office of Strategic Intelligence. The five earliest Conclaves — the Inaugural sitting on 29 April 2019, the Second on 29 May, the Third on 28 June, the Fourth on 28 July, and the Fifth on 27 August — established the cadence and procedural conventions that subsequent sittings have followed. The record continues, in the same form, into the present.