The age and depth of a House are different characteristics. Age belongs to the building and the history of its masonry; depth shows how many lines, decisions, and generations a House can distinguish as a coherent order. A young House may quickly become deep after a joining, while an ancient arkivit building may remain an ordinary house.
Two Distinct Characteristics
The age of a building is established from its masonry, city records, and the sequence of alterations. The depth of a House is determined differently: by the number of distinguishable lines, the stability of its inner response, and how long an earlier decision continues to act after the residents have changed.
These characteristics often coincide, but describe different things. The volume of accumulated retention makes a House old, while an origin before the Rift makes it pre-Rift. A pre-Rift House has usually had time to become deep, but its origin does not guarantee an active line. A young House may retain more after a difficult joining than an ancient building that remained ordinary for centuries.
Two Boundary Cases
In “Ash Beneath the Garbitus,” correctors inspect a recently built House into which three damaged lines were brought over the course of a single winter. The bricks still bear the marks of recent firing, but the rooms answer with such differences in timing that it seems as though generations have lived between them. The House is young in construction and old in the depth of its retention.
The House was younger than its mistress, but answered her in the voices of those she could not remember; the corrector recorded two ages and called neither the principal one.
The opposite case is found in an old port warehouse in Raven-Lest. Its lower masonry survived the Rift, but the endless turnover of goods and tenants prevented a line from forming. The building is ancient and partly built of arkivit, but remains an ordinary house: it preserves traces of use without responding to people as a whole.
How Depth Is Measured
Depth cannot be expressed as a single number. Correctors compare the range of responses across rooms, the number of distinguishable generations, and the House’s ability to accept a new decision without confusing it with the previous one. The archive provides an external check: to what extent the House’s memory distinguishes events that documents attribute to different people. The result is always comparative—deeper than a neighbouring House, but weaker than its own line was before an alteration.