In the cities where wealth pools, Expression has become the parlor game of people who collect secrets the way others collect art. They rent manor houses, stitch sigils into dinnerware, and hire scholars to recite fragments from the Desert Manual between courses. Membership fees fund libraries, initiation robes, and the sort of legal defense that keeps authorities from shutting them down. Outsiders call them dilettantes. I’ve seen enough to know at least a few circles manage to stir the Strata, even if most only succeed at self-mythologizing.

These societies argue about authenticity the way courtiers argue about fashion. Some insist on vegetarian vows and meditative fasts, trying to recreate the austerity the Manual praises. Others swap discipline for spectacle, hosting séances and theatrical rites that thrill patrons more than they move reality. Rival lodges poach members, leak each other’s sigils, and publish pamphlets mocking failed workings. Every scandal convinces skeptics the Expression is nothing but performance, until someone disappears in a locked room with scorch marks tracing an unfamiliar glyph.

I write them as both comic relief and genuine threat. A bored aristocrat with partial access to the Expression can shred a political alliance as easily as a conjured fire. Whether the power is real or not almost matters less than the belief that it could be. That tension keeps the societies thriving in the gray space between miracle and con, especially in cities where the Strata fights back the way I describe in Strata Keeps Score.