The world
Three kilometres, five bands, one way up
The bands are the progression — each one is a stage of your life, at the size you actually are. The nineteen reaches inside them are the ecosystem, and they are why the deep is a system rather than a corridor: a band with one ecology is a level, and a band with four is somewhere you go back to for the thing you missed.
This page goes down. It ends three kilometres under a village that has never heard of you, in the chamber where you start.
The map is a cross-section, because depth is the one axis that matters. It is drawn by the same fault code that cracks the wordmark.
Daylight
adult · 2.600 mNothing up here is bigger than you. That stops being a comfort at the walls.
Lit by the sun.
Pasture, thatch, livestock, no wall. Undefended calories, and the reason the drakes come west at all.
A square, a militia, and iron in a tower. Where the Toll was worked out, and where it is rung earliest and most hated.
Walls built by people who have read about you. Engines on the towers, ranging stakes in the fields, and a plan.
Old forest, elf-held, and the only ground in the world that has ever brought a flying dragon down.
Mountains. Dwarf country -- halls cut into the rock of a range, high and dry, with a hard floor under them. They mine downward and they do not live down there.
Burnt, open, and full of orks, who are not there by accident: ground you have denied to everyone is ground nobody contests.
Standing water, reed and mist, and a sky full of fairies. Nothing heavy crosses it and nothing dry lives in it.
Moor, grave-mounds and ruin, under a sky that never quite clears. Dark elf country, and the darkest ground above the surface.
Eight reaches, and every one of them is held by people rather than by fauna. Who holds what, and what each of them can take away from you, is below.
The Undercroft
subadult · 1.850 mSomeone else cut these. The first straight lines you have ever seen, and the first enemy that plans -- though it goes home at the end of a shift. This is the one band people enter and the only one nobody lives in.
Lit by lamps at intervals.
Live human mine. Props, ladders, mules, lamps at intervals, and men who fight because you are between them and the ladder.
mine mule
Burden
- watch
- Nothing. It is livestock.
- take
- Endurance and carry. Unglamorous, and the difference between reaching the surface and dying in a shaft.
Penned, slow, the easiest meal of the whole climb. Taking it is what brings men.
pit hound
The Baying
- watch
- How a pack fixes something in place before it commits.
- take
- Sound-location. You can hunt in the dark without burning, which means without announcing yourself.
Kept at the shaft heads. Does not hunt by heat -- hunts by sound, and you are now large enough to be loud.
deep miner
None -- and that is the lesson
- watch
- Everything. Tools, ladders, timing, retreat, the fact that a thing your own size can plan.
- take
- Nothing at all. Humans have no innate magic to transfer, so they are the one species on the whole climb that cannot be learned by eating.
Not a soldier. A man with a pick who fights because you are between him and the ladder, and who is far better at it than that sounds.
Worked out, propped badly and walked away from. Nobody lives here and nobody ever did -- these are the mines the surface finished with, and the deep has been quietly taking them back.
Older than any mine, square-cut, and cut by nobody anyone can name. The surface assumes dwarves and the dwarves are certain they did not. Whatever made them did not stay.
The Middens
juvenile · 1.050 mWide, wet, crowded. The first place something hunts you on purpose rather than by accident.
Lit by cinder moths: light without heat.
Cold, deep, running. Blind eels in numbers, and the only route the Lung lineage ever takes.
blind eel
Waterlung
- watch
- How to move in a current instead of against it.
- take
- You can breathe water. The Lung lineage is born with it; everyone else has to eat for it.
Fat, slow, rich, and underwater -- which is a problem for an animal made of fire.
Vaulted, and lit -- badly -- by cinder moths in drifting columns. Gets darker every generation, for reasons that are entirely the dragons' fault.
cinder moth
Coldlight
- watch
- Nothing. It has no behaviour worth the name.
- take
- Light without heat. You can see and be seen without being felt, which is the difference between hunting and being hunted.
Harmless, and the only light in the Middens. Easy to eat, and eating them leaves the gallery dark.
tunnel swine
The Set
- watch
- How to turn and face something bigger than you, which no dragon works out on its own.
- take
- You cannot be moved. Bracing that holds against a pull -- and the only known answer to a Rising.
Blind, tusked, and it turns to face you. The first thing that leaves a mark that stays.
A slow rot-basin where everything the Middens kills ends up. Rich, crowded, and the single best place in the deep to learn.
pale crawler
Heat-sight
- watch
- How to hunt something that cannot hide from you.
- take
- You see heat. The single most useful sense in the dark and the reason a grown dragon is never ambushed twice.
Long, many-legged, and it hunts the one thing you cannot switch off. It ate your siblings.
sink toad
The Stillness
- watch
- How to stop being a thing that is happening.
- take
- You can go quiet across every channel at once -- heat, sound, movement -- for as long as you can hold it.
Does nothing, ever, extremely well. Almost never found, because finding one is the whole difficulty.
The Warrens
fresh hatched · 0.480 mFirst tunnels. You are the smallest thing here that hunts, and the shellbiters were here before you hatched.
Lit by the same heat, further from it.
Shell spoil and rockflea beds. The nursery, in the sense that it is the only place a 0.48 m animal is not the smallest thing.
rockflea
The Teem
- watch
- How a swarm turns without a signal.
- take
- Reflex speed. Costs thousands of them, which is the point -- it is the cheapest trait in the world and the slowest to earn.
Thumb-sized, lives in shell grit, eaten by the hundred.
Kilometres of hot narrow crack. Chalk grubs in the seams, and the first real hunting a dragon ever does.
chalk grub
Stone-softening
- watch
- Very little. It has no tactics. It is a first kill.
- take
- You can soften rock and move through it. This is where burrowing comes from, and every burrowing dragon in the world is holding a grub trait.
Arm-length, soft, slow, no defence at all -- and carrying the single most valuable trait in the Warrens.
Fused rock, mirror-smooth, and the only place underground where a dragon can see its own reflection. Glass ticks live on the sheen.
glass tick
Mirrorskin
- watch
- How to sit still on a reflective face and not be a shape.
- take
- Your heat signature scatters. The direct counter to anything that hunts by heat, which is most of the deep.
Lives on the sheen in the Glass Galleries and is almost impossible to see, which is the entire advertisement.
The Ashbed
egg · 0.469 mWhere clutches calcify. Too hot to hold anything that could eat you, which is exactly why eggs end up here.
Lit by the heat column.
The ring itself. Nine eggs, a pale collar of grown floor, and a heat column that stalls overhead.
shellbiter
Seam-sense
- watch
- How to work a flaw instead of attacking a face.
- take
- You can feel the fault in anything calcified -- shell, plate, mortar, a city wall.
Flat, wedge-headed, built to get into eggs. It is in the Ashbed before you hatch. Your first enemy with a motive, and the first thing worth learning from.
Where the column vents sideways. Nothing lives here; things melt here, and what survives melting is worth eating.
slag lizard
Heat-drinking
- watch
- Where in a vent it is survivable, and when.
- take
- Heat stops hurting you below a threshold that would cook anything else.
Lives inside the temperature that kills everything else. Rare, hard to catch, and the reason some dragons can nest in a vent.
This is the floor. Nine eggs in a ring, a pale collar of grown floor, and a heat column that stalls overhead. Nothing on the surface has ever reached it, which is why the queue never stops.
Out of it
Five routes up, five kinds of animal
The route explains the anatomy, and the anatomy decides which ground it owns once it is out. One surface domain each — a lineage that does not change how a fight is fought is a reskin.
| lineage | route up | domain | born holding | what that makes it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western Drake | the dry vent | open air | sustained burn | The only lineage that can stay up and stay lit at the same time. Wings arrive late because wings are useless in a tunnel, so it surfaces and flies the same season. |
| Fire Wyvern | the chimney | crag | the vertical | Climbs on its wing knuckles, so it perches where nothing can follow and comes down the way a stone does. One compact bolt rather than a gout -- a sustained gout in a chimney cooks the animal that made it. |
| Eastern Lung | the drowned route | water | waterlung | Born holding what everyone else has to eat eels for. Owns rivers, coasts and anything flooded, and arrives at the surface without being hungry -- which is why it is the only lineage anyone has ever managed to talk to. |
| Crystal Wyrmling | the mineral seam | rock | stone-softening | Does not use tunnels; makes them. The slowest lineage to the surface and the only one that arrives underneath you, which is what a wall is least ready for. |
| Thicket Hatchling | the root ways | forest | the small | Soft-shelled, stays small, and is the only lineage that can turn inside standing timber. Its four sparks and a cough are not a weapon -- they are a way to set a forest on fire and let the forest do the work. |
What is waiting
Six peoples, and each denies you exactly one thing
You are seven systems stacked on each other. Six of them can be reached by somebody: the air you draw, the breath you hold it in, the sight you stole, the fire itself, the room to turn, and the sky. The seventh is the shell, and nothing on the surface has ever reached that.
| people | magic | takes | holds | pays in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dark Elves | The Guttering | sight | The Barrowlands | conditions |
| Dwarves | The Narrowing | room | The Spine | economic |
| Fairies | The Smother | air | The Fens | positional |
| Forest Elves | The Rising | sky | The Greenwood | scarcity |
| Humans | The Toll | breath | The Bell Towns | beacon |
| Orks | The Red Hour | fire | The Wastes | cooldown |
The Guttering
Dark Elves · The Barrowlands
They take the heat out of a place. Every fire, lamp, forge and warm body drops to the temperature of the stone around it, and an animal that hunts by heat is suddenly hunting a flat grey nothing. It does not blind the dragon's eyes. It blinds the sense it stole.
Pays in conditions. It works on everyone, including them: a Guttering is fought blind by both sides, and the elves win it only because they are standing on ground they have walked for nine generations. It cannot be held under a sun, so it is strictly a night counter -- and everybody on the surface knows which nights those are.
The Narrowing
Dwarves · The Spine
They do not build walls, they move the ones already there. A gorge closes to a throat, a pass becomes a gate, a hall becomes a doorway -- and the animal that was arriving at you is a head on a long neck in a gap, which is the oldest way there is to kill one. They mine downward for the iron and they go home up the ladder at the end of it; nothing that lives in a mountain lives under one.
Pays in economic. You can only narrow what you are prepared to lose. Every Narrowing takes the road, the seam or the hall with it, and those were the point. Dwarves price a dragon in galleries and say the number out loud.
The Smother
Fairies · The Fens
The only people small enough to get inside a vent. A swarm goes in through the flank and the draw stops -- no draw, no burn, for as long as they can hold it.
Pays in positional. They fly, but low and wet: a fairy out of the fen mist for long is a fairy drying out, and a drake at four hundred feet might as well be on the moon. It is a hold and not a kill -- water, a roll or a hard bank shakes them out, and a shaken swarm needs a day.
The Rising
Forest Elves · The Greenwood
A seed goes into prepared ground and arrives rather than grows -- trunk, then a crown that takes hold of what is above it. It brings the animal down and holds it still, and holding it still is the only thing in the world that lets everything else land.
Pays in scarcity. Eighty years to grow a seed worth planting. The tree survives if the thing it caught is killed quickly, so a Rising spent well is a Rising you keep -- and a forest that misses has spent a lifetime on one afternoon.
The Toll
Humans · The Bell Towns
Struck iron held on one note. The resonance will not let a dragon hold a draw, so a gout breaks up into coughs -- it reduces a drake to a wyvern. Humans have no innate magic whatsoever; they found this by writing down what happened and reading it back.
Pays in beacon. A ring carries for miles, and it does not only reach the dragon you have. Every animal in range hears where the people are. Towns that ring early save themselves and are widely hated for it.
The Red Hour
Orks · The Wastes
They take the heat in and hold it. Fire does not stop an ork in the Red Hour; it loads one. They walk up the gout and arrive harder for having been burned, which is demoralising for an animal whose entire argument is fire.
Pays in cooldown. What goes in has to come out. They survive it and then they are finished -- slow, sick and useless for a season, which is why ork bands sell the Red Hour dearly and spend it late.
And they are not a coalition
You never meet the peoples. You meet whoever holds that valley this decade
Trade buys the materials and never the magic. Alliance puts two counters in one place. War points a counter at the wrong target — which is why inter-people wars are so ugly, and so useful to you.
| this decade | who | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| ALLIANCE | Dwarves + Fairies | The Throat and the Swarm. Dwarves narrow a gallery until the animal cannot roll, and a swarm that cannot be shaken out is a swarm that wins. Adjacent bands, shared enemy, no border to argue about. |
| ALLIANCE | Forest Elves + Humans | The Ring and the Rising: the best pairing anyone has ever fielded, and the reason the western bell towns are the worst ground in the world for a drake. Uneasy -- the elves think the Toll is noisy vandalism and they are not wrong. |
| TRADE | Humans + Dwarves | Iron for grain, and specifically the ring itself: every good bell in human lands was cast underground. Humans could not make the Toll without dwarves and are quietly aware of it. |
| TRADE | Humans + Fairies | Mercenary. Humans pay to have a swarm carried to a fight, which is the only way a fairy reaches one. Neither side pretends it is anything else. |
| WAR | Dwarves + Dark Elves | Older than the mines. Two peoples who both want the same shafts and only one of whom is prepared to bury them. The Narrowing happens to be devastating against dark elves, who fight in small parties in tight ground, and everyone involved knows this was an accident. |
| WAR | Orks + Humans | Long, cyclical, and the single greatest gift the surface has ever given dragons: it moves the Red Hour away from the towns that need it, on a schedule you could set a clock by. |
| WAR | Orks + Forest Elves | Orks burn ground to deny it and the elves have spent eighty years per seed on ground that burns. There is no version of this that ends. |
The most any one place can field is 2 of the six.
Eight regions grown from the authored place and biome on each daylight reach and then blended, so borders are gradients rather than seams. The wars and alliances are deliberately not drawn on it: seven straight lines across a continent turned the map back into a diagram.
Open, and deliberately so
Five things this world refuses to answer
The Ashbed's origin
Something concentrates the heat that forms clutches. The moment it becomes a mind or an intention, the setting stops being geology and becomes a pantheon, and it is stronger as geology.
Whether a dragon can choose
Nothing physical compels an adult that has fed. Whether one that has run out of reasons can stop, and what that would make it, is the strongest story available.
What a dragon does with the politics
It already learns by watching, and the surface is visibly divided. The first dragon to attack during a war on purpose is a different kind of story.
The Lung's arrival
The one lineage that reaches the surface without hunger, in a world where every other lineage arrives starving.
Whether anything ever counters the shell
A clutch sits three kilometres down in a chamber too hot to stand in. Nobody has ever got to one.