The Brethna did not define jurisdiction by territorial lines. Authority lived in relational presence—not mapped ownership. You carried law with you. Breach wasn’t about crossing a border, but about disrupting relational patterns. This post explores how the Brethna approached space, mobility, and conflict through flow—not fences.
You Brought Your Obligations With You
Travelers, poets, foster-children, and traders all moved across regions. Their status, rights, and liabilities moved with them. Brethna law did not rely on geographic boundary to determine legitimacy. The contract was carried in the body, the kinship, the memory—not in mapped plots of land.
Not Where You Were—What You Did
If harm occurred, the issue wasn’t “where” it happened—but what relationship was broken. You could be in your own tuath and still be the offender. Or far from home and still hold duty. Jurisdiction was relational, not spatial. Legal obligation emerged from kin, oath, memory—not municipal outlines.
Control Required Cartography
Colonial systems demanded borders. Not just for land—but for authority. The fence allowed taxation, census, war, extraction. The Brethna, by contrast, held power in the weave of people—not the perimeters of terrain. This was unintelligible to bureaucratic conquest.
So Brethna space was reframed as lawless. Its refusal to fence was rebranded as threat.
What If Jurisdiction Was Carried, Not Fixed?
What if legal presence traveled with people, not stayed with servers? What if relational entanglements—not static location—determined dispute resolution? The Brethna proposes a model where law lives in the network of recognition, not in the coordinates of a registry.