Chapter One
Everything an ordinary Eapheroni picks up between learning to walk and learning to haggle.
The Hub City
Ontstead is the city most things on the continent eventually pass through. It is the largest settlement Eapheron has, the seat of the Council, the headquarters of the Expundeus, and the only place where every region's people, languages, currencies, and grievances can be found inside the same square mile. If you spend any meaningful time on the continent, you will spend some of it here.
The approach gives fair warning. For the final miles, the land changes: the soil darkens to red and black, the scrub thins to nothing, the ground hardens into a flat scorched earth that has not grown a blade of grass since the God Wars. The walls of Ontstead come into view above this barren ground, and they are not the kind of walls people forget. Once through the gate, the city surprises. It is not merely a fortification. It is the cosmopolitan crossroads of the continent.
Most work happens in places. The chapter you have just read is the floor of where you will be working. What it does not tell you, what no chapter can tell you, is what each place feels like at the moment you walk into it. That part is the work. Walk into the place. Read what you find. Bring it back.
— Dumphries, Supreme Commander, ExpundeusThe oldest part of the city, its administrative heart. The Council Building sits at its centre, the Expundeus headquarters built against the cliff itself. The Pilgrim's Path begins here. Locals look slightly tired and slightly important. Visitors look slightly lost.
The beautiful district. The botanical gardens, the Grand Temple of Gwema, and beneath it the Mausoleum of Pilgrims, where every pilgrim who died on the Ascent across twelve centuries is interred. The Pools of Perseverance occupy a complex of chambers fed by glacial springs through the Worldspine stone.
Where Ontstead's craftsmen actually make things. Workshops, forges, alchemists, enchanters. The concentration of skill here is the finest available on the continent. If something can be made, it can probably be commissioned in Clangtop.
The commercial engine. The Broadway market runs through its centre. The money changers handle the currency exchange that an international trading city requires. Loud, purposeful, and accustomed to handling more goods in a day than most regional capitals see in a month.
The military district. The Cogworn, the city's standing force, is headquartered here alongside the technical station that maintains the Fingers of Lumis. Spare, functional, full of the specific quiet competence of a force that has been doing one job correctly for a very long time.
The working-class residential district and where the southern gate opens. First impressions of Ontstead are usually Shinnykins impressions: the noise, the density, the cheerful and almost aggressive friendliness of a district accustomed to newcomers.
Where the city's cultural life happens. Theatres, music venues, galleries, gaming-houses, buzznut houses. The food is good, the drink is cheap by Ontstead standards, which means expensive by everyone else's. The district stays awake later than the rest of the city and the rest of the city pays for it the following morning.
Not a district in the official sense. The shanty community that has accreted along the south road outside the walls, where people who cannot afford Ontstead's rents or do not qualify for citizenship have settled. The Council's official position is that the Reach is the external population and is not a Council responsibility. The Reach's official position is that the Council can keep its responsibility.
Most travellers come in through the southern gate into Shinnykins, having paid the gate fee and had their identity checked against the entry register by a Cogworn soldier whose suit ticks faintly as they turn. The walls run around three sides of the city. The mountain is the fourth. The Fingers of Lumis towers you saw on the approach are defensive installations. They are not pointed at you. Probably.
The Continent
Six regions divide the continent between them. Each has its own history, its own dominant peoples, its own particular flavour of food and religion and architecture, and its own deeply considered opinions about each of the others, which the people of each region will be thrilled to share if asked, and frankly a little hurt if you don't.
Vast, stone-hard country organised around old codes of strength and law. Everything in Brutalis looks like it was built to work, because it was. The region knows exactly what it is for. It stands between the Broil Cascade to its north and everything else, and it has been doing this without interruption for twelve hundred and thirteen years.
Brutalis is governed by the Imperix: the Eyesights handle intelligence and investigation, the Gauntlets are the military, the Justicars administer law. Each branch governs its own domain with genuine independence. Visitors who appreciate plain speaking and institutional reliability find the region restful in a specific way. Visitors who prefer ambiguity or the kind of conversation where what is meant is gently distinct from what is said find it exhausting. Both reactions are common and both are correct.
Brutalis produces more reliable intelligence than anywhere else on the continent, for the same reason its roads are in good repair: the institutions take maintenance seriously. When you are in-region, assume your conversations are being noted by someone.
— Ottoline Inch, Commander of Analysis, ExpundeusNotable settlements: Valoraxis (capital), Wakehaven (diplomatic city on the Salanthe border), Melgrange (called Meatgrinder in the ranks, the northern frontier city nearest the Broil Cascade), Cascade Station (largest permanent operational base on the Cascade's edge), Outmarked (Justicar-administered detention island).
The most verdant land on the continent: lush, deeply forested, rolling hills giving way to deep woodland with the specific quality of being more alive than forests elsewhere. The elven courts of its woodlands are older than any city on the continent. By general consensus, the most beautiful things on the continent are made here. The consensus includes, through gritted teeth, those who would prefer the most beautiful things to be made somewhere else.
Salanthe is governed by the four courts of the Wistful Many, running by consensus since before the God Wars. The Court of Colours holds the casting vote when consensus fails. The fifth court, the Court of the Moon, was destroyed when the god Mundus was sealed in the Broil. The chair sits empty in the consensus chamber. The name Wistful Many itself comes from this loss. Twelve centuries later, most citizens do not know what it refers to. The older elves do.
Salanthe's welcome is genuine and it is also assessed. Both things are true without contradiction. The Court of Delight has been hosting visitors for nine hundred years and they are interested in you as a person, and also interested in what you represent, and also interested in whether you understand the difference between being a guest and being an opportunity. You are usually all three.
— Brother Envoy, Commander of Accord, ExpundeusNotable settlements: Shimmerclear (shared capital, seat of the consensus chamber), Lor'Testa (the Court of Song's primary city, home to nine hundred years of continuous performance tradition), Omem Del (the Court of Delight's hospitality capital), Mundeth (heart of the continental Buzznut trade), Hus'Sol (surface beauty, criminal underbelly).
A forested patchwork of orcish tribes and mixed communities organised around a sporting and competitive tradition that is also, somehow, their politics. The Zhunchordia, Quroth's grand competition league, is the seat of regional governance: the highest-ranked team holds the title, the title holds the government for a four-year term, and the system has worked, with periodic adjustments and a great deal of shouting, since shortly after the founding of the Calm.
Quroth is also home to the Werezetch, the continent's craft people, whose family Houses sort themselves into four vocational categories: the Fingersmiths who make the things, the Loremasters who remember the things, the Bullious who sell the things, and the Dunkers who consult the chaos about the things. They convene at Keystone, their mountain capital, in the firm belief that every other people on Eapheron would benefit enormously from a touch more engineering and a touch less opinion. Quroth tends to seem chaotic from outside and intelligible from inside. The Quroth would tell you this is correct.
Old. The Zuzemari, Rixin's institution of magical and philosophical scholarship, traces its lineage continuously back into the Incarnate Age, and conducts itself accordingly. The Sublimus, Rixin's other great magical body, has its own origin story, which it tells with great conviction, often, and to anyone who will listen. The Sublimus are, in the wider continental view, slippery bastards: charming when they need to be, opaque when they don't, and rarely in a room for the reason they've given.
Rixin is the continent's intellectual centre by reputation, and its towers, libraries, and academies are the visible expression of a regional commitment to the proposition that knowing things matters and is worth the work, even if one or two of the institutions doing the knowing might bear watching.
Spread along the southwestern coast, bordered by the strange expanding desert that every generation's cartographers obediently redraw and quietly hope will stop. The Vitra church, Neranara's dominant faith, is the closest thing the continent has to a unified regional religion, and it manages this largely by being terribly relaxed about the whole business.
The Luminox church, the other major Neraranan faith, takes a notably different view of the spiritual life, which is to say that the Luminox take a notably different view of nearly everything and would like to discuss it with you at considerable length, ideally before breakfast. The two churches' coexistence is one of the small, careful arrangements the continent has worked out over twelve centuries.
Not so much a country as a place where the boundary between the material plane and the Broil, the prison-dimension where the Denied are sealed, has worn rather thinner than anyone would prefer. People do live in the Cascade, in a way, although "live" is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.
The weather is wrong. The wildlife is wrong. The dreams of people who spend long enough there are wrong in ways that follow them home, when they come home, which they do not always do. The Brutalan postings are rotated regularly because the alternative is worse, and because the families of the troops have long since learned to count the months and to keep a candle lit on the eve of every rotation, just in case the candle is the last thing of theirs the Cascade lets keep burning.
Southwestern Archipelago
Off the southwestern coast, across the Wellweather Strait, the Zhonk archipelago maintains its own traditions and its own considered opinions on mainland affairs, though it tends not to share them unless asked, and sometimes not even then. Zhonk is the home of the lost and the forgotten, and of those who simply wanted to be gone, gathered up in the warm and unhurried embrace of the local Tortle people, who will give you a meal and a bed and a polite vagueness about your past for as long as you need any of the three.
Also home to the reclusive Llenghoto goblins, who are notoriously difficult to talk to, deeply committed vegans, and producers of what is, by general continental agreement, the finest fruit smoothie a mortal will ever drink. Most Eapheroni have at least one favourite food that originated on Zhonk. Most Eapheroni could not point to Zhonk on a map without being prompted.
Zhonk has no formal government. Tortle elders coordinate through consensus. The Lleghoto coordinate through whatever internal process they use, which they have not described publicly. Ontstead's continental law applies in principle. The Expundeus maintains an interest in practice. Neither has ever been tested on Zhonk because Zhonk has never produced a situation requiring external arbitration.
The Gods and the Broil
The gods walked here once. There were wars among them, vast and slow and world-altering, fought on a scale that broke continents and unmade peoples, and then Gwema, goddess of peace, gathered a coalition and put a stop to the whole exhausting business. The gods who refused to withdraw were sealed in the Broil. The gods who accepted Gwema's bargain withdrew to demi-planes of their own, from which they continue to receive their worshippers' faith and grant divine magic, but from which, by long-standing arrangement, they do not walk among mortals.
The world the Eapheroni have inherited is not, in their telling, a world recovering, twelve centuries being rather too long for the present generation to feel the wars as personal injury, but it is a world that knows itself to be the product of a settlement, and the settlement is the central fact of Eapheron's civilisation.
The gods who accepted Gwema's bargain. They withdrew to demi-planes and left the material plane to the people who lived on it. Their faith continues to flow back to them. Their iconography is everywhere: sun chickens on harvest tables, three-headed snakes above courthouse doors, two-headed coins pressed into the hands of departing children.
The gods who did not accept, or could not, or whose nature did not permit the bargain Gwema offered. They were sealed in the Broil. Most are not actively remembered outside the regions that once worshipped them. A handful are remembered everywhere, for reasons each of them earned the hard way.
The gods who, when the wars ended, slipped quietly under the floorboards and hoped nobody would notice. They are still here, smaller now, scattered and strange, sustained by the odd handful of believers in places sensible people don't go. Hunting them is one of the Expundeus's standing missions, and not a popular one.
Sustained by the work of the Silent Sanctuary, the Light is what keeps the Denied where they are. As long as the Light burns, the world is the world. The Sanctuary has burned without interruption for twelve hundred and thirteen years. Most people would quite like things to remain that way.
Time and Observance
Eapheron's calendar was formalised by the Founding Compact in 12 PG and has been used continuously on the continent ever since. The system is the same in every region. Years are counted PG (Post-Gwema) forward from the lighting of the Silent Sanctuary's Light. The current year is 1213 PG. There is no Year 0: the lighting of the Light is the pivot, and the system runs directly from 1 BG to 1 PG, on the firm view that nothing useful was achieved in the gap.
Months are thirty-two days long. There are twelve of them, giving a year of 384 days. Weeks are eight days long, with the eighth day, Gwemaday, the traditional day of rest and temple attendance.
Icemelt
Late winter, the first thaw
Greening
Early spring, first planting
Clearsky
Spring. Gwema's Day on the first.
Longlight
Late spring, lengthening days
Highsun
Early summer. Midsummer Vigil on the sixteenth.
Waneheat
Late summer, the slow decline of the heat
Harvestrise
Early autumn, the first harvests gathered
Redleaf
Autumn, the trees turning. Feast of the Departed on the first.
Harvestend
Late autumn, the last of the year's bounty
Firstfrost
Early winter, the cold settling
Deepwinter
Winter, the year's dark heart. Long Night on the sixteenth.
Coldwane
Late winter, the slow return of the light
Rakday is named for a Denied god. The name is a philological fossil from before the Banishment, already too embedded in regional vocabularies to excise without chaos when the Founding Compact's drafters compiled the system. The few people who know this find it a useful reminder that the pre-Banishment world was not, to the people who lived in it, a world of good gods and bad gods.
The calendar is, like so much else in Eapheron, a piece of infrastructure maintained by institutions that predate everyone now alive. It works. People use it. They rarely stop to think about the fact that every month they name, every festival they observe, and every weekday they greet is, in its way, a quiet monument to a war that ended twelve hundred and thirteen years ago.
The Pantheon The Expundeus