Lineage is the way the House perpetuates itself through people, decisions, and the measure of what is permissible. It coincides with neither kinship nor ownership: one can enter the lineage through adoption into the House, while an heir by blood can fall out of it. The lineage preserves not a set of rules but the ability to discern what is right for this House.
That which remembers itself
A lineage is recognized by recurring choices, not by identical actions. Two mistresses of a house may receive a guest differently, yet both will leave the same boundary uncrossed. If the form remains but the measure is lost, this is called not a continuation but an imitation of the lineage.
A lineage is not a name, nor is it blood, nor is it the way a mistress repeats the same movements each morning; a lineage is that which, in those movements, remembers itself more powerfully than it remembers you; and so, having lost the lineage, a person goes on walking for a long while, eating, speaking, sitting by the fire—but all this now follows not them, but the empty place left on the shelf where the key used to be laid.
Transmission
A lineage is transmitted through participation in the inner circle: the junior member does not receive ready-made knowledge but gradually becomes responsible for decisions whose consequences others will see. The first sign of transmission is considered to be the moment when the House upholds their exception to a rule as confidently as it once upheld the rule itself.
Keys, names, and household books aid transmission but do not create it. A stolen key therefore grants access to a room, not a place in the lineage. Conversely, someone without property rights may preserve the lineage alone—as a custodian does between the death of the master and the heir's adoption into the House.
Rupture and continuation
A lineage can be broken by an improper induction, forced admission, a severe Shift, or gradual Cooling. The rupture becomes apparent when the House still repeats its former decisions but ceases to distinguish between circumstances. Fidelity to custom then hastens the loss: people reproduce a form that no longer has anything to measure.
A lineage cannot be restored by repeating it in reverse. Sometimes its continuation is accepted into another house, carrying over not possessions but an unfinished obligation. This gives rise to a dispute over two lineages: the new one is not a branch of the old, but is responsible for what the old one did not manage to complete. The conflict of Norven Above the Archive is built on this distinction.