Clarify lore articles: accessibility wave 10

Eusocial Interbeing/Civilizations/Pre-Imperial Airawa Tribes.md

@@ -1,34 +1,23 @@
 # Pre-Imperial Airawa Tribes
 
-Pre-imperial Airawa tribes lived in regional networks centered on [[Matriarch Trees]]. Their politics were local, ecological, and memory-dependent.
+Before the empire, Airawa tribes formed regional networks around [[Matriarch Trees]], also called mother trees. These trees preserved communal memory, allowing a tribe to retain knowledge beyond the lives of its members. Political life depended on that memory and on relationships with the surrounding ecology. Authority was local, and identities were distributed across ties to particular places and ancestries.
 
-## Strengths
+## Living With the Network
 
-- durable communal memory;
-- strong ecological integration;
-- ritualized obligations to non-Airawa partners;
-- visible craft signals that identify which ecological contracts protect a
-  person, household, route, or archive duty;
-- distributed identities tied to place and ancestry.
+These communities were closely integrated with their local ecosystems. They maintained ritualized obligations to non-Airawa partners, making those relationships part of communal life. Craftspeople made the agreements visible: what someone wore or carried could show which ecological contracts protected a person, household, route, or archive duty.
 
-## Vulnerabilities
+The network gave tribes durable memory and strong ecological connections, but it also gave others ways to control them. Mother trees could withhold memory. Rival tribes could use ecological intermediaries to isolate one another. Fear of breaking continuity with the archives constrained innovation: trying something new could put a community's connection to its remembered past at risk.
 
-- mother trees could withhold memory;
-- rival tribes could be isolated through ecological intermediaries;
-- innovation was constrained by fear of losing archival continuity;
-- network trust made later memetic infection catastrophic.
-
-The empire's founding tribe correctly identified a coercive dependency. Then it built a worse one and called that liberation, because history enjoys this stupid little move.
+Trust held these networks together. Later, that same trust made memetic infection catastrophic.
 
 ## Contract Dress
 
-Pre-imperial Airawa crafts were portable diplomacy. Clothing, bindings,
-ornaments, tool wraps, climbing harnesses, dyes, carved plate inlays, and
-bioluminescent filigree could identify active relationships with mother trees,
-pollinator guilds, fungal roads, defensive symbionts, wetland archives, or other
-local interbeings.
+Clothing and equipment helped Airawa communicate their relationships to strangers. Clothing, bindings, ornaments, tool wraps, climbing harnesses, dyes, carved plate inlays, and bioluminescent filigree could identify active agreements with mother trees, pollinator guilds, fungal roads, defensive symbionts, wetland archives, or other local interbeings. Craft served as diplomacy that a person could wear or carry.
 
-The point was not only intimidation, though intimidation was useful. Contract
-dress let strangers read which obligations would be disturbed by theft,
-violence, seduction, trade, trespass, or rescue. A beautiful object could be a
-threat, a receipt, a mourning record, or an invitation to negotiate.
+A stranger reading these signs could judge which obligations they might disturb through theft, violence, seduction, trade, trespass, or rescue. Even helping someone could involve relationships extending beyond the person in front of them.
+
+Intimidation was one useful purpose of contract dress, but its meanings were broader. A beautiful object could carry a threat, serve as a receipt, preserve a record of mourning, or invite negotiation.
+
+## The Imperial Response
+
+The tribe that founded the empire correctly recognized the coercion in this dependence on the trees and their networks. It then built a worse dependency and called it liberation.

Eusocial Interbeing/Species/Matriarch Trees.md

@@ -1,27 +1,23 @@
 # Matriarch Trees
 
-Mother Trees are memory-bearing ecological hubs native to the [[Airawa Home Continent]]. They store communal memories for Airawa tribes and coordinate local biological networks through root, fungal, chemical, electrical, and symbiotic channels.
+Matriarch trees, also called mother trees, are native to the [[Airawa Home Continent]]. They hold communal memories for Airawa tribes, gestate their young, and coordinate the living networks around them. Their connections run through roots, fungi, chemical and electrical signals, and symbiotic organisms.
+
+Airawa communities depend on these trees for both knowledge of their ancestors and the birth of future generations. That dependence gives the trees considerable power over the people they sustain.
 
 ## The Bargain
 
-Pre-imperial Airawa communities depended on mother trees for continuity beyond living memory. In return, the trees demanded nutrients, tending, defense, reproductive assistance, and deference.
+Before the empire, Airawa communities relied on mother trees to preserve memories beyond the lifetimes of their members. The trees demanded nutrients, tending, defense, help with reproduction, and deference in return.
 
-This bargain was intimate and coercive at the same time. A community that defied its mother tree risked losing ancestral memory, ecological warning, and legal continuity.
+These were close relationships with coercion built into them. A community could defy its mother tree, but it risked losing access to ancestral memory and warnings about ecological conditions. Its legal continuity was also at risk, though the precise way the trees upheld that continuity is not specified.
 
 ## Gestation
 
-Matriarch trees are literal Airawa gestators, not only symbolic ancestors or memory
-servers. They receive compatible gametes through contracted pollinator species,
-manage developmental environments, and bind young Airawa into local symbiont
-memory, lineage, and ecological obligation before birth.
+Matriarch trees physically gestate Airawa young. Contracted pollinator species bring them compatible gametes, and the trees manage the environments in which the young develop. Before birth, they bind young Airawa into the memory held by local symbionts, into a lineage, and into ecological obligations.
 
-This makes reproduction inseparable from politics. An Airawa child is not only
-born from parents. They are permitted by a tree, carried through a contract,
-delivered through pollinator traffic, and introduced into a network that already
-has claims on their future.
+Having a child therefore depends on more than the parents. A tree must permit the reproduction, a contract governs it, and pollinator traffic carries it through. The child enters a network whose members already have claims on their future. Reproduction is a political relationship from the start.
 
 ## Imperial Rupture
 
-The [[Biological Memetic Engine]] was created to break this dependency. It converted the tree network from negotiated archive into imperial transmission infrastructure.
+The [[Biological Memetic Engine]] was created to free Airawa communities from this dependence on mother trees. It turned the tree network into infrastructure for imperial transmission. Access to communal memory, once negotiated with the trees, came under imperial control.
 
-The engine did not abolish hostage memory. It changed the hostage-taker.
+Communities could still have their memories held hostage. The power to do so had changed hands.