Caldra is an industrial world built on the belief that nothing is unknowable, only unstudied. It is the homeworld of Mechanica, a civilization that turned the study of magic into a hard science. Its cities are defined by towering foundries, sprawling railways, humming power stations, and countless metal automata. This was all made possible by a strange energy current that occurs naturally throughout the planet they call Luminance.

The discovery of how to gather and refine Luminance transformed Caldra. Construction of the Golden Engine became the foundation of Mechanica's industrial expansion, and the Wellspring carries its output through Ironhold to the reactors that power the city. Refined Luminance exists nowhere else on Caldra.

But Caldra is not entirely industrialized. Regions beyond the reach of the reactor network remain comparatively untouched, relying on older methods of agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing. The result is a world divided not only by geography, but by access to the power that built modern Mechanica.

Brasswick is the old capital that created Mechanica's future, only to watch that future become Ironhold's. It was once the center of Caldran civilization. Its engineers conceived, funded, and constructed the Golden Engine, but the reactor itself was placed far beyond the city's territory after the immense dangers of its early experiments became apparent.

The decision was meant to protect Brasswick, but instead it led to its direct shadow. The settlement surrounding the Golden Engine grew rapidly as engineers and workers gathered around its industry. Eventually the new city surpassed Brasswick and became the seat of Mechanica's government, leaving the old capital to watch its greatest achievement transform a distant settlement into its replacement. Ironhold was now the new center of power.

A century later, Brasswick has never forgotten, and a bitter grudge remains held against Ironhold. 

Brasswick is without access to Luminance. Its automata are exclusively clockwork, and its traditionalist engineers build as much as they can without Ironhold's energy resources. The Iron Assembly calls this obsolescence, but Brasswick claims independence. The old capital looks like an earlier draft of Ironhold, with the same smokestacks and rail yards, just at a smaller, more weathered scale. 

They have been pursuing research the Iron Assembly considers impractical and a waste of resources while challenging the authority of the guilds that now govern all of Mechanica. The rivalry between the two cities has endured through generations, fueled by the idea that Brasswick built the foundation of an empire it was ultimately denied the right to lead. The appearance of the Nexus has given that old resentment something new to fight over.

In Brasswick's disused rail yards, the Lumenguard keep a hidden shelter for Luminants that have escaped Ironhold. Brasswick has no access to Luminance, so they are unable to keep the machines operational. A Luminant brought here inevitably becomes dormant as its core runs down. The Yards holds dozens of these drones, laid in rows or standing in cars with their inner light reduced to nary a sparkle. The engineers who tend them keep a record of every model, every name. These units will remain silent until their energy stores are replenished, which as of now, is impossible if they wish to remain free of the choke of Ironhold.

Ironhold is the city that grew around the machine that changed Caldra forever. It began as little more than a settlement built around the development and construction of the Golden Engine. The experimental reactor had been deliberately constructed beyond the capital city of Brasswick's borders, far enough from the population that its dangerous early tests could be conducted without putting the city at risk. Engineers came to operate it, workers came to support them, and the framework of industry soon followed.

Generations of expansion transformed the settlement into the largest city on Caldra, supplanting Brasswick by leaps and bounds. The Wellspring became the city's arteries, carrying Luminance beneath streets crowded with foundries, rail yards, workshops, and towering industrial districts. Airships cross its skies while clockwork drones and Luminant automata labor throughout the city.

Ironhold has no master plan. Its districts grew along the Wellspring, the conduit network that carries refined Luminance out from the Golden Engine, so its streets follow the paths the energy takes beneath them. The city's four districts each belong to one ofthe four great engineering guilds, and each guild holds a reactor that draws from the Wellspring. Instead of neutrally held ground, the Iron Assembly convenes in the center of Coreward as a show of implied authority, much to the annoyance of the other three.

Ironhold is now the seat of the Iron Assembly, whose four guilds control the reactors that power Mechanica. Each guild governs its own territory and interests, but all depend upon the same network of Luminance that made Ironhold possible. Brasswick may have designed the Golden Engine, but Ironhold built everything that came after.

Coreward is the oldest district of Ironhold and holds command over the Golden Engine which draws the energy current that runs through the surrounding land and condenses it into a form that can be stored and moved. Everything the Wellspring network carries began here. Coreward's own reactor sits beside the Golden Engine and draws from the same output as the other three remote reactors.

The Coreward guild treats the Golden Engine as a right and the other districts as subjects. Its streets are the most orderly in the city, its buildings constructed with the most ornamentation, and its engineers the least inclined to admit a transgression. Not even Coreward's top minds fully understands the Golden Engine's inner process. Guildmaster Baldrec Hoss holds the most control of anyone in the city whether earned or not. The motto he and the other members of Coreward follow: "What we built, we keep."

Ashfall is the outermost foundry district of Ironhold, where heavy industry and armaments are produces at mass scale. Its reactor feeds furnaces and assembly lines that run all day and night without pause. The Ashfall guild has a reputation for not exactly abiding by established rules, case in point by pushing machinery past its limits to meet quota. Stacks, cranes, and massive heads of slag are found wherever the work required.

At its reactor hangs a Rift referred to as the Ashfall Breach. Its creation produced machines no engineer had designed and power surges that cascaded through the Wellspring into the rest of Ironhold. The reactor complex and a wide ring around it are sealed, but research continues inside. Guildmaster Grenda Marrow publicly defends the district's production culture with their maxim, "Output above all." 

The other three guilds have begun questioning whether the site should remain in Ashfall's hands.

Emberlight abides by the adage "If it can be imagined, it can be built." It is truly taken to heart as the city's research and development district. Its reactor powers laboratories, prototype yards, and test halls that the other guilds would not permit within city limits. It was within the walls of the Emberlight guild that many of Ironhold's most ambitious projects were designed, including the first Luminant cores. 

The guild willl approve nearly any concept it finds interesting, though several of its projects have been expressly restricted by the authority of the Iron Assembly. 

Guildmaster Osric Odessa IV has a long history with Varris Kane, and personally approved the Luminant research program at his behest prior to the Breach at Ashfall. Varris rose through the ranks of the guild at Emberlight, and its engineers still speak of him as one of their own.

Ironvein holds key transit and logistics operations including the reactor which powers the rail yards, airship docks, and freight terminals linking Ironhold's districts together. Everything the other guilds make or need passes arrives without the assistance of Ironvein. 

Overseeing its operations is guildmaster Fennick Ess. He presents the guild as neutral, however they are anything but. Ironvein's holds a light grip on the processes of the city which can quickly turn to a chokehold if it suits them. Every vote on the Assembly is cast knowing that Fennick could slow or outright stop the results.

A world where civilization exists as a part of nature rather than above it.

Veyruun is immense beyond measure. Forests older than memory stretch further than thought possible, oceans are presumed endless, and mountains have outlasted stars. Much of the planet remains untouched by anything that calls it home, a pristine jewel in a vast cosmos.

There is no central government on Veyruun, or even a dominant species. Its peoples live in countless clans, packs, tribes, and spiritual orders spread across an immense and varied wilderness. Humans, Beastfolk, intelligent animals, floral beings, and stranger forms of life share the world without any single species overshadowing the others.

All things on Veyruun are connected by the lifestream, the animating current that runs beneath Veyruun and through its living inhabitants. Upon death, the essence of life eventually returns to it, maintaining a cycle that has endured for longer than anyone can remember.

But Veyruun's balance is not immutable. The Hollowing has erased entire tribes before, while the invading Hadria Combine's extraction has left poisoned scars across the planet through the slow spread of the Withering. And along the Sundered Shores, incursions from beyond the world have begun to overwhelm ecosystems that had never evolved to face them.

Veyruun has never asked for a ruler, but it is in dire need of defenders.

The Hollowlands were not always known by that name. They are a remote stretch of highland on Veyruun where Kaita Bloodtooth's pack once lived. Thirty five winters ago, every living thing in the region died in a single night. Kaita was the only survivor, though she has yet to discover why. This event became known as the Hollowing.

For years, the highlands were left untouched. The wilderness continued to grow around what remained, but the people who once knew its hunting grounds were gone. To the clans of Veyruun, the region became a place defined by loss, and they came to call it the Hollowlands. The land itself has not fully recovered. Strange remnants of death remain scattered throughout the highlands: barren stretches where nothing grows, a ominous hush is deafening, and anything that lingers too long begins to weaken. Hunters have attempted to mark these areas with stone cairns, but no marker can account for everywhere the Hollowing left behind. Kaita can sense the remnants, allowing her Bloodtooth Clan to navigate the highlands safely. Those raised in the Hollowlands learn the cairns before they learn to speak.

Kaita eventually returned with a tribe of her own, choosing to settle the same highlands where her first family was lost. The Bloodtooth Clan hunts its mountains today, turning a place defined by absence into a living home once again.

Blightsoil are the grounds along the margins of Combine mining scars, where water undrinkable is and the earth has been stripped or poisoned. Plants are either are dead and gray, or growing in ways nature never intended. Few Primal clans will cross Blightsoil, and the Withered live in these lands for that very reason. Their homes are blackened timber taken from dead groves, and every well is warily trusted, a lesson the survivors of the Withering learned at great cost. From the Blightsoil, they watch the nearest outposts and raid them when they judge the risk as acceptable. Perhaps they can even deliver a taste of the death the Combine created in return. 

Longrise is the old-growth heartland of the Bloomward, the most ancient and vast woods in the known the planet. Nothing within it has ever been cut down. The Bloomward are quite literally rooted in its soil. Their structures are living objects, formed over generations rather than built. They read the groves' history in the layers of growth. The closest thing Primal has to a continuous memory is kept in wood rather than words. Distances are hard to judge in Longrise because every step often looks like those before it; an endless wall of venerable trunks and dense foliage. It stretches for countless miles, yet the Bloomward know what goes on in every inch.

On the borders between Blightsoil and the old groves, a strip where the land is all but dead, yet the Bloomward are working to grow things anyway. They plant beneath the surface rather than on it and tend what takes root. Growth does not need hope, but patience. Roots push through ground, unveiling pale and unlike anything in Longrise. The Withered see the Graft as acceptance of the Combine's damage, and therefore a betrayal to Veyruun's sanctity. Attempts continue regardless.

Before the Convergence, the Sundered Shores were among the richest coasts on Veyruun: salt marshes, tidal flats, reef shallows, and high sea cliffs crowded with nesting colonies. The ecosystem had spent thousands of winters settling into balance. Every hunter had prey that knew it, and every prey had an evolved trick that worked just often enough.

The Rifts opened along the beaches without warning. What came through had no predators and no history with the land, and it treated everything native as food. Species that held the coast for a millennium were gone within weeks. The things that replaced them leave no tracks a hunter recognizes, no familiar territory markers, and no pattern as to when they feed or move.

The Keth'ri clan has lived along the Shores have sent a call beyond its borders: help. Many of the other tribes have met repeatedly, but most who might answer have refused. The Reach is simply too dangerous, and few are willing to risk their hunters against beasts no one understands. 

Kaita Bloodtooth ignores their warnings and has answered the Keth'ri pleads. She returned to the Shores where others would not, determined to quell the creatures' spread before there is nothing left to save. These are lands that are learning what it is to be eaten.

Gresk is the principal Hadria city on Veyruun and the Combine's regional seat for everything it does there. It stands at the rim of the largest excavation on the planet, an immense pit whose walls are terraced into mining levels and whose depths no Primal scout has seen. Towers of glass and steel rise from its edge and are lit at all times, visible from the horizon.

Little else is known of Gresk. Veyruun's atmosphere and biology are hostile to Hadria bodies, so the city is sealed and its inhabitants appear outdoors only in pressurized suits. Mimir laborers move in shifts between the pit and the towers, and drones patrol the perimeter. 

Veyruun Natives who ventured too close to the city's reach out of curiosity have not returned. Rivers that pass the city run clean upstream and poisoned below. Whatever the Combine is digging for has not been found, nor will they stop until they do. And perhaps not even then.

Centov is the homeworld of the Hadria Combine, and the planet where the organization learned the lengths it is capable of going in consuming a planet. Centuries of razing, mining, and extraction have left its surface unfit for most life. The Hadria exhausted the very resources they needed to sustain themselves, forcing them to adapt through advances in bioengineering. They remade their own bodies and sealed themselves inside pressurized suits; partially for survival, partially to continue their unapologetic exploitation. The solution that saved them on Centov is the same one they now carry to every world they oversee operations on.

Its cities are brutalist towers of glass and steel rising from the mining scars they were built to serve. Combine overseers command from within them, while engineered Mimir laborers and vast drone populations keep the machinery running. The Mimirs are legally property, a fact the Combine's records conceal behind careful corporate language. Outsiders are not welcome.

Centov is dying by the Hadria's own design. The scars of extraction cover its surface, while the bodies of its people bear the cost of enduring what they did to their own home. Veyruun is only one of many worlds the Combine has since put to the same use.

The Empyrean has no fixed location and cannot be mapped. It is not entered by crossing the Veil, because the Veil is a rule that keeps the Realms separate, and the Ilyri have always ceased to be subject to that rule. Mortals who sense the Empyrean describe the experience not as seeing a destination, but as being observed by something that exists beyond their sight.

Those who have entered it report geometry that does not behave as geometry itself does. Structures rise without visible foundations, stairways return to where they began, and distance has no consistent meaning. The closest comparison mortal understanding can offer is the edge of a black hole: a place where distance becomes meaningless and everything seems to stretch outward to an unreachable horizon. The light is measured and clinical, closer to a cold interrogation than a warm sunrise.

Some believe the Empyrean to be a place of holy succession, where those whose toil merits eternal reward are granted a place among the Ascended. These assumptions are not entirely wrong, but they are wildly incomplete. Beings do exist eternally within the Empyrean, but their permanence is granted only at the discretion of the Tribunal. And the Tribunal has little interest in whether anyone's deeds were noble.

The Watchtower is the seat of the everlasting Ilyri and the infinite observatory from which the Tribunal orchestrates matters of the Realms below. It rises without end, its upper levels stretching ever farther the higher one climbs. An observer looking down from its heights can see every Realm at once, each rendered not as a place, but as a pattern of consequence.

Most Ilyri who work within the Watchtower never become Arbiters. They track causal patterns, maintain records, and perform the endless administrative work required by an eternal order. Arbiters pass through between assignments. Corrections are decided here and carried out elsewhere, most often by Emissaries who have never been granted leave to depart their home Realms and bear witness to the Watchtower itself.

At its summit stands the Spire, where only the five members of the Tribunal have standing. No Arbiter enters without invitation, and certainly no being of lesser status. Since the Convergence, the Watchtower has devoted an increasing share of its attention to the Nexus, which it records constantly yet cannot predict.

The Spire of Stars is the summit of the Watchtower and the meeting place of the Ilyri Tribunal. It contains five seats and nothing else of record. No instruments, archives, or attendants are kept here, and no being is allowed access without express invitation. The Watchtower below collects and measures, but the Spire is where the Tribunal decides what those measurements mean.

Only the members of the Tribunal have standing within it: Auctorum, Mireth, Ilessara, Corvain, and Sevrael. Arbiters present findings from below and do not enter unless invited, and few have been. What is said in the Spire is not carried down unless the Tribunal chooses to speak it. A Correction arrives below as a decision without deliberation or explanation.

Since the Convergence, the five have met here more often than at any prior time, and rumor has begun circulating that it is becoming a problem they are having trouble agreeing on how to solve.

Within the Watchtower is the Rescriptuary, a closely guarded chamber where every Correction ever rendered is recorded together with the outcome it replaced. For each Correction, documentation is preserved of the full course the original consequences would have become as well as what would have transpired a thousand generations thereafter. These records are written in the Ilyri's causal notation: a script impossible to decipher outside of the few who know it.

Those who maintain the archives are not privy to their contents. The Rescriptuary is the only place where the Tribunal's judgments could be checked against what they prevented, but no one outside of the Tribunal has ever been able to.

The Rel Galaxy is the largest inhabited region of Kovanthe, and the Legion has taken most of it. Hundreds of worlds answer to its rule, along with once-powerful civilizations that now deliver unwavering tribute and service to their conquerors. The distances are too great for any garrison to be everywhere, even one as vast as the Legion's. Control of the outer worlds instead depends on critical logistics, the constant shifting of fleets, and the knowledge that those fleets can arrive.

The Legion rules by brute force and preserves whatever it can use. Its High Conclave directs the largest campaigns, while the newest and most aggressive of its forces is the Dominion warhost under Primearch Gladius, who treats conquest itself as a basic test of worth.

Resistance exists on many worlds, and most of it is crushed before it can grow. The exceptions are the movements the Legion has begun to track by name, AEGIS among them. The Legion can afford to lose a world, but it has yet to learn if surrender of many is even an idea worth entertaining.

The Morgath System is the Legion's primary operational center in the Rel Galaxy. Fleet yards, supply worlds, and garrison stations orbit its star, and campaigns against distant worlds are planned and launched from here. 

Central to the system is Morgath Prima, a conquered planet that Primearch Gladius claimed as the seat of his throne and rebuilt as the heart of the Dominion forces. Stone castles reinforced with advanced alloys crown its mountains, heraldic banners hang beside massive plasma batteries, and aristocratic commanders direct mechanized armies from within their citadels. The Legion tolerates Gladius's rule because he wins, but the Conclave watches Morgath more carefully than it openly admits.

Morgath Prima was an occupied world before Primearch Gladius claimed it as his own, and he did not leave it standing. The cities of its original people were razed to ash, their stone carried away and rebuilt into the great keeps that now cover its continents. Each was constructed from the remains of a place that no longer exists. Old inscriptions face inward on the walls, forcing every soldier within to look upon the language of the conquered; a reminder that everything belongs to Gladius, even a culture itself.

The primary keep from which Gladius rules is built from concentric ringed walls surrounding his golden throne. No two rings were constructed by the same hands, a design intended not only to make the fortress more secure and its defenses impossible to fully understand, but to serve as a test. Whenever Gladius takes new recruits into his armies, their passage comes at a price: a wall. Those who prove themselves worthy of avoiding immediate execution are given a ring to construct around the last. Some do not survive the work, but those who do earn their place among the ranks.

Because each layer was designed by different hands, the rings share little in common. Least of all their traps and defensive mechanisms. Builders know their own ring and the outer face of the one before it, but no living person knows the fortress in its entirety. Any assault must breach each ring in succession, and the defenses of one provide no preparation for the next. The only direct route to the throne passes through every ring, save for the use of a phase portal. Gladius himself carries a modified, Legion-designed near range teleportation device at all times to easily enter and egress from his throne room.

Enormous banners bearing the heraldic sigil of Dominion hang from walls mounting high-focus plasma batteries and heavy artillery. Smoke from open fires, forced-labor camps, and endless weapons production blackens a sky that would otherwise reveal several moons and neighboring planets. The Conclave maintains a Legion delegation within the outermost keep, whom Gladius refers to as his guests. Their welcome is little more than forced tolerance, and everyone understands how quickly that tolerance can end.

The worlds of the Halix System fell to the Legion just like those before them, and rebellion followed as it did everywhere. Most of those uprisings end quickly and unceremoniously. AEGIS has not.

On Halix-1, AEGIS has established a stronghold where hidden bases and fortified settlements shelter soldiers, engineers, defectors, and civilians with nowhere else to go. From here, AEGIS coordinates strikes across occupied territory, hitting garrisons where they are weakest and often disappearing before reinforcements arrive. Lately however, they have begun staying to meet those reinforcements, eager to put their newest creations to the test: weapons that have begun to turn the tide. Every world in the system now carries a Legion garrison, and every garrison reports to a commander who has seen firsthand what AEGIS armor can do.

Darkhold is the largest fortress occupied by Nethrys. It stands where the incessant caverns of the Abyss open onto the sky, the twin moons above casting an eerie crimson glow across its walls. Hordes muster here before crossing into other Realms. Its great halls are built from what the Abyss gives up: bone, slag, black glass, and the remains of what was spent to raise them.

At the heart of Darkhold, an empty throne sits silently that no creature of Nethrys has ever been permitted to occupy. Every one of them knows whose it is. Since the Veil began to weaken, those who stand watch in the throne room have reported that it is no longer entirely empty.

Acheron is the great descent at the lowest known reach of the Abyss, a river of black water that falls through a series of vast chasms toward a bottom that does not exist. The dead of the Abyss drift toward it. Nethrys regards death as one stage among many, and Acheron is where they believe that stage is completed. It is the deepest place in the Realm, and the last from which anything returns.

No creature descends beyond a certain depth willingly. Those who have gone further describe a hunger in the waters and the sense of being measured against something much, much larger. Beneath Acheron, in a place no one can account for, an ancient keep unlike any other holds something that should not be there. No living being of Nethrys knows what the chasm contains. Is it a grave? A prison? Or something for which neither word is sufficient?

Lately, a voice can be heard echoing from deep below.

Eionaris is the homeworld of Nexahl V'oth and the center of the Xeno collective, although calling it a world may itself be a mistake. Almost everything known about Eionaris comes from those it has sent beyond its borders. Their accounts disagree about its terrain, its climate, and even the types of species it hosts. Nobody can say whether this reflects a world that changes, observers who were changed, or both. Every account is sincere, and yet none of them seem to agree.

Those who return from Eionaris are different. They speak with a calm certainty and describe the world as though they have finally understood something that everyone else missed. Their accounts are often contradictory, yet they never seem to recognize the contradictions. They agree on little, but all share the same conviction: Eionaris is exactly as it should be.

Whether the  creatures on Eionaris originated there on or arrived from elsewhere in Ythram is unknown, and the truth has been impossible to determine.  The Xeno themselves offer no answer, and never seemed particularly interested in where they began. What matters to them is where everything else will end.

All is a world in Ythram that was named by its own people. Its cities stand tall, its fields are toiled, and its population is alive and thriving. Yet none of its people answer to their own names. They speak, work, trade, raise families, and go about their lives with the quiet certainty that they belong exactly where they are.

The first outsiders to reach All found no wreckage, no mass graves, and no signs of violence in its recent history. Yet every population center appeared to have been abandoned all at once. Records named people who no longer recognized those names. Graves were filled, but no one could say who had been buried in them. The inhabitants insisted that nothing was wrong.

Those who came to investigate eventually stopped trying to leave. Traveling to All means entering a world that does not seem to imprison anyone, because its prison has convinced everyone inside that they are free. Those who remain eventually become part of it, their memories and identities worn away and replaced with whatever All requires of them. The population never seems to diminish; when someone disappears, another is already there to take their place.

No one in All seems to notice that the world is not keeping its people alive. It is keeping the world alive.

Phoenix-A is the ultramassive black hole at the heart of the spiral galaxy containing Eionaris. The name comes from authors long ago who hoped that anything at all sent to survey it might someday return. Over thousands of cycles, Nothing ever has.

Around the horizon of Phoenix-A's accretion disk, space collapses in on itself in layered shells where distance and duration refuse to agree. This area of space has been named the Fold. Probes sent into the outer shell limits of the Fold have provided a lifetime of records after minutes of travel, although the observations provide no result any sense can be made of. Every civilization that has studied it has collected the same details, and anything about the Fold has never been explained. 

Unbeknownst to an observer, a great mind once existed inside the Fold. Life is not the correct term for its existence, nor can it be found there anymore. Nexahl V'oth has a deep connection to Phoenix-A and the Fold, although it is a difficult one to make sense of.

The Daylands is the corporeal world of Quill, the realm where mortals live, struggle, and fight over what they claim is theirs. Its inhabitants describe existence as a place suspended between the Dawn Above and the Dusk Below. This depiction is not entirely wrong; inhabitants from both the Empyrean Plane and the Abyss have intruded on the Daylands throughout its history, and the myths born from those incursions have shaped its religions, its laws, and its kings.

Four independent empires hold most of the settled territory: Aetherion, Haskul, Asendria, and Far Reach. Between them lie enchanted forests, ruined citadels, and settlements older than any kingdom's records. In the Daylands, legend is not distant history. Dragons, wizards, and fabled warriors share the world with ordinary farmers and tradesmen.

It has always been a land seemingly trapped between greater realms, touched by forces it could never fully understand. Since the Rifts opened, that boundary has ceased to matter. What was once reached only through prophecy now has a path directly into the Daylands. The world that once stood between others has become a crossroads for all of them.

Aetherion is the kingdom of the Ancient; a medieval land of keeps, high roads, and prehistoric forests resting upon something far older than all of them. Far beneath its stone, the Aer churns: a primordial force that can be molded into weapons, spells, and living enchantments. Aetherion was raised around that power, and every generation since has produced guardians sworn to keep it from those who would wield it without restraint.

Many of its citadels are ruins now, and some of its settlements have been forgotten entirely. The Ancients may lack the armies and resources of the greater empires beyond their Realm, but they hold the line through exceptional individuals: immortal champions, legendary beasts, and warriors entrusted with relics whose names have outlasted their makers.

The Nexus has complicated their guardianship. The Ancient first treated it as a foreign threat, but they now know it holds forces that may rival the power of the Aer. Aetherion's wardens spent centuries preparing to defend the Aer from enemies they understood. They have no doctrine for defending it from something they cannot fathom.

Haskul is a mountain kingdom built around deep mines producing the strongest and rarest minerals. Its wealth comes from below, as does its trouble. The Aer runs through its stone in veins that make its metals particularly unusual and its tunnels that much more dangerous. 

The deepest levels of Haskul open into places that have proven a consistent ingress from the Dusk Below; pits and cavernous hollows that seem to travel endlessly into the dark. Haskul's kings have kept seals and wardens on these levels for as long as the kingdom has had records. Lately, additional guards have been required near the seals.

Asendria is a kingdom established on dozens of plateaus who appear to float weightlessly. As denizens of the sky, its rulers claim authority from the Dawn Above. Each coronation includes a petition to the light for confirmation, but no approval has ever come.  Empyrean interventions that have touched the Daylands left marks in Asendrian histories that its scholars read as signs. 

Observatories oand a massive fleet of winged creatures allow for constant surveilance over the lands below. Almost no one travels to the scattered lands of Asendria without their assistance.

Far Reach lies across the great seas, at the Daylands' farthest edge from Aetherion and farther still from the Aer. Where that power never arrived, common spellcraft never took hold. A few sorcerers and charmers keep the old tricks alive, but the kingdom does not miss the rest.

What it has instead is its beasts. Far Reach's beastmasters command creatures of immense power, from sea-hunters the length of a warship to winged things that nest atop cliffs no ship can approach. The bonds are bred rather than taught. A beast is raised from birth by one line of handlers and answers to them alone. When a breeder line ends, the animal is released back into the wilds, or passes to a successor who must earn it. The latter has led to wars.

Mainland empires like Aetherion see a distant, pragmatic province. Far Reach sees a kingdom that hoards a power and justifies it as duty. Interactions between the two ends of the world are few and far between.

The Dawn Above is the name the people of the Daylands give to the realm of light they believe lies beyond their world. Mortal legend holds that angels watch over the innocent from it. The reality behind it is the Empyrean Plane, whose Ilyri have reached into the Daylands throughout its history. Those on the receiving end of a Correction rarely recognize it as one. A drought that ended, a war that stalled, or a line of kings that failed is credited to fortune or to the will of the Dawn.

Quill's faiths do not pray to the Ilyri, because they do not know the Ilyri exist. They pray to an idea of the light, and the Ilyri do not answer. Corrections arrive regardless, according to a logic mortals have never been shown. The Dawn Above is a belief the Daylands built to explain events, while the events had other authors with vastly different concerns.

The Dusk Below is the name the people of the Daylands give to the darkness beneath their world. Its myths speak of demons that rise through wells and caves, spirits that follow travelers underground, and things that wait where the stone sounds hollow. Parents tell these stories to children as cautionary tales, meant to teach them where not to wander and what not to disturb. Some of them are a little too accurate.

The true source of the Dusk Below is the Abyss, a Realm that cannot be reached by ordinary means and yet has intruded upon Quill many times. Villages tell of nights when the darkness itself seemed to move and of those who passed into the beyond only to return alive and unchanged, at least on first glance. Since the Veil was damaged, such incidents have become far more frequent. The people of the Daylands learned to fear the ground long before they learned why.

Azhur Khaal is the largest gathering of the Unbound in the Nexus, a trade city built around a thriving mercenary market. It is a refuge assembled from whatever the Nexus happens to provide. No faction governs it, and no laws are posted; order is enforced arbitrarily by whoever has the power to do so. Agreements between its inhabitants hold because everyone understands what it costs to break them.

The city stands where several strong Axion Currents converge, allowing it to persist while most Nexus settlements drift and dissolve. Realmborn exiles and Nexusborn merchants pass through its streets, and almost anything can be purchased if the buyer knows what the seller values. That is rarely coin. Information, favors, protection, rare materials, and violence all have their price.

Most who arrive intend to leave soon. Many never do, whether by choice or a lack thereof. Azhur Khaal has a way of turning temporary refuge into something much more permanent.

The Sea is the largest known body of volatile Axions in the Nexus. It cannot be measured, and it can barely be described. It appears as countless pools of blinding light made liquid, though nothing rides atop it as a vessel would navigate an ocean of water. Those who study the Flux believe the Sea is where displaced potential most often gathers after a Shaper's work, drawn away from those who altered reality and left behind without a place to become.

Echoes surface in the Sea more often than anywhere else in the Nexus. Rejected possibilities drift through its currents until they settle or fade, and a few have even been seen to walk out from it. Only fools willingly enter the Sea without the help of the Guide. Those who have attempted to cross it without their aid are never seen again, and even those who enlist the Guide's expertise do not always return.

The Sea does not simply consume those who enter it. Sometimes, it gives something else back.

Stratum Infinitus is a region of the Nexus where the same Anchor has been contested so many times that the environment itself has accumulates into overlapping, competing outcomes. Each clash between Shapers leaves its result behind, adding another layer to an ever-growing amalgamation of conflicting possibilities.

Within the region, landscapes from countless Realms collide. Forests of glass rise from shimmering seas of molten rock, while immense biological machinery spans the sky above them. Each new contest of the Anchor adds another layer, further distorting and complicating the impossible terrain.

Yet the Anchor has never been resolved. No Shaper has possessed enough influence to establish a final outcome, leaving every rejected possibility behind as an Echo. Over time, those Echoes have accumulated alongside the landscape itself, creating a region where countless possible outcomes exist simultaneously, unable to be resolved.

What the Anchor actually represents remains unknown. Whatever its nature, its persistence and the number of possibilities bound to it suggest a potential of extraordinary magnitude. And with every new contest, Stratum Infinitus grows deeper.

From a distance, the Thousand Spines are a forest of black masts. Each is thin and tall, leaning at slightly different angles. But walking among them shows their true arrangement. The spines stand in enormous circular rings. They are empty in the center, and the emptiness is deceptive: each ring grows out of the back of a sleeping god.

Unbound surveyors have sorted them by their spines: glass clear or iron black or bone pale. Each color variant is a separate species, unrelated to the others and to anything native to the Realms. It is said that each is an Echo of something passed. If one were to wake and find a Rift, the Incursion would end a Realm that had already survived that ending once before. 

The smart stay far away from the Spines for fear of accidentally disturbing the beasts. More brazen salvagers who strip the outer Spines report that the stones hum at different frequencies. The name of the region counts the spires, but nobody has tried to count the gods.

The Grey is the name given to what lies beyond the Veil, past every Realm and the Nexus. The Nexus lies between the Realms the way a corridor lies between rooms. The Grey, however, lies outside the walls of every room and of the corridor. Its survivors chose the name because every other word was more specific than their experience. The few who have been there were taken when a Rift failed while they crossed it, leaving them in neither Realm nor Nexus until the connection reformed or something else pulled them out. Most who find themselves in it do not return, and almost no one alive has seen it.

Survivors cannot describe it. They have words for what it did to them, but none for what it was. Accounts say the same thing in different ways: it was pain. The hurt had no location or cause, and everything about it was too much to perceive and too constant to endure. Matter fails to function as it should, atoms failing to remain connected to one another. All sense of all things is pulled apart into individual pieces until there is nothing left but everything.

Spacetime disagrees about how long they were there; what may have been a moment perceived as an eternity. None return unchanged, though no two changes resemble each other. Should a being find themselves within the Grey, every part of them will wish they hadn't.