A forest, and the night the sky broke

The beginning

There was a forest, and the ordinary animals who lived in it. Then a meteor came down in the middle of it and broke something in time and space around the impact. Not cleanly, not once, and not finished.

In its wake the forest's animals gained intellect and speech, and they have gone on doing so ever since. The same lingering energy, Stardust, still turns up in coats and bloodlines as colour shifts, cosmic markings and the occasional mutation.

Old ruins, overgrown observatories and shattered optical glass are scattered across the world, left behind by humans and repurposed by the animals who live among them now.

The Awakened

The Awakened is what the uplifted call themselves: Captains, companions, faction members, shopkeeps, everyone. Every mammal Awakens. Whether birds, reptiles, fish or insects do too is genuinely unsettled, and the Awakened argue about it themselves. What most people will tell you is "some, apparently, and nobody agrees which."

Companions are people: they speak, hold preferences, form relationships and ambitions, and their consent matters. A Captain holds more responsibility than a companion does, never more personhood. Nobody in this world is property.

Awakening happens to you

It began with the impact, but it did not end there. Every mammal born since Awakens, and each does it somewhere in early life rather than at the moment they are born. When you hear an animal called un-uplifted, that means not yet. It has never meant a lesser sort of animal, and there is no standing population of mammals who look like people and aren't.

While it is underway the ambient Stardust in the coat is volatile: colours and marking layers drift, and left alone they will eventually settle into whatever they happen to settle into. That window is what the Prism Observatory below is for. Fixing a coat is not what makes anyone a person, and nobody has ever paid to become one.

Where you are

The heartland's one town is Lensfall, built around and partly inside the wreck of a human observatory whose dome came down at some point nobody agrees on. The glass salvaged out of it became the first Prisms, so the place is named for the fall of the lenses rather than the fall of anything larger. Locals are entirely aware how close that sounds to naming a town after the impact, and mostly enjoy it.

It grew up where the three orders' separate pockets first reached each other, and all three keep districts in it. The Prism Observatory works out of the standing half of the dome. The Celestial Forge keeps its lineage registries in town. Every shop you can walk into trades here.

The world itself has no name

Nobody ever needed to tell it apart from anything else. The Awakened say "the world", and when they need to be more specific they name the region or the frontier. Human archives do contain names for it. Those read the way every other relic reads: interesting, clearly somebody's, and not the thing's own name.

Captains, crews and squads

You are a Captain: a trusted senior responsible for a voluntary company, closer to the captain of a ship or an expedition outfit than to an owner or a ruler.

Your crew is your wider household and working company. Companions sign on for shelter, resources, a share of the rewards, training, belonging, and the chance to see something new. You owe them care, honest leadership and a fair cut of the crew's fortunes. A squad is a smaller working party drawn from that crew for one expedition or Incursion.

Each crew operates under its Captain's current faction charter. Crew members need not agree with every belief of that faction, but they knowingly accept its methods and obligations while they serve with you.

Transfers, gifts and trades

Items are ordinary property and can be bought and sold. Companions cannot.

What the interface calls a sale is, in the world, a voluntary crew transfer. The listed price is a settlement covering training, equipment, housing and obligations shared with the former crew, while helping establish the companion's new berth. A direct trade is a negotiated exchange of placements. A gift is a sponsored transfer with the settlement waived. The companion's own agreement is always part of it, even though the game does not make you click an extra button for it.

Nesting across crews

When a Nest is arranged between two crews, the same rule holds as for any Nest: the parents are the ones who choose to form it. A Captain offers to host, a companion from another crew agrees to it, and the visiting companion is a party to the arrangement rather than the thing being sold.

The fee is a settlement between the two crews. It covers travel, the Nest's upkeep, the visiting companion's own share, and their crew's cost in doing without them for the duration. The levy taken off the top is a registry fee: the Forge keeps the lineage records, and lineage genuinely matters out here.

Departure and legacy

Releasing a companion isn't a death, and it doesn't mean abandoning them somewhere. It is the broad term for permanently leaving a Captain's active crew. They might retire from frontier work, settle somewhere new, teach, take civic work, or travel on their own. The roster action can't be undone, but they go on living in a part of the world the game simply doesn't simulate.

When an experienced companion departs, they can choose to leave a stable Stardust echo of their time with the crew. It is not their soul, their consciousness, their body, or anything taken from them. It is the resonance of practised skills, relationships and lineage, and it grows stronger with experience and generation. Formally these are Legacy Echoes; most people just say Echoes.

When this happened

A few generations back. Nobody in the world agrees on exactly when, and it gets told with a mix of recent-history casualness and outright myth depending on who is doing the telling.

What fell

What came down was not an ordinary rock that happened to strike a thin spot in the world. It was a fragment of whatever the Void is, compressed into something that could fall like a stone, and the story never actually finished. It is still out there, and it never fully closed.

It is not a monster and not a god. There is no intent behind it, no grudge and no plan: something vast and slow and not entirely present, having an effect on the neighbourhood without meaning to.

It dreams, and it flinches

Almost everything the fragment does to the world is dreaming: runoff, nobody's fault and nobody's gift. The Void Flux weather, Fractures opening and drifting, the Awakening itself, Stardust being findable at all, mutations, and the way the deeps get stranger the further down you go. Slow, mostly gentle, occasionally oppressive, and never aimed at anyone.

The flinch is much narrower than "an Incursion". It is only the Void Stress a squad builds by pushing its luck in one descent, and the Void Sickness a companion carries after failing against it often enough. Climbing into the wound and rooting around is the one thing anyone does that counts as handling it rather than standing near it. Of course that is where it can push back.

Surges

A Void Surge is a bad night everywhere at once: more tears than usual, all pulling the same way, for reasons nobody caused and nobody can point at. That is why it belongs to no faction and why all three push down into it together until the pressure eases. It is weather with worse manners, not an attack.

What proximity does to metal

Star-Steel isn't a human relic, and you won't find it lying on the surface. It is ordinary metal, much of it human-made scrap that fell into a Fracture or was already buried in the ruins one tore open onto, that has spent unknown time close enough to the fragment to be changed the way a living coat is changed: denser, faintly luminous, and it does not corrode.

Nobody can find it

Not because anyone forgot where it was. Because it drifts, the same way Fractures open, wander and seal. Every old rumour and every old map was true when it was made. The thing just doesn't hold still.

The argument nobody has won

Most of the Awakened take the above as read: something enormous, largely indifferent, on balance a gift. A minority disagree. The theory turns up most often around Crimson Syndicate contract houses, and among cranks at the edges of every faction: that the fragment is not drifting absently at all, that it is patient and aware, and that every mote of Stardust gathered and every Incursion run is everyone unknowingly feeding it.

What you spend

What the frontier yields

Everything a crew hauls home falls into one of four kinds, and the difference is what happened to a thing rather than how rare it is. There are common and precious finds in more than one of these.

Beacon Lenses and the old network

Humans left behind more than observatories. Scattered across the frontier are the remains of a navigation and rescue network: route beacons, survey instruments, relay stations, and the optical glass inside all of them. A Beacon Lens is a piece of that glass recovered still true, which is far rarer than recovering it merely intact.

The Celestial Forge

An umbrella term for the institution housing two distinct and equally respected paths to welcoming a companion into a crew.

The Prism Observatory

When an animal is partway through their Awakening, the ambient Stardust in their fur is volatile and unfixed. A Captain hosts a Refraction Ceremony beneath reclaimed optical domes, where calibrated human Prisms focus celestial light across the animal's coat and permanently stabilize their colours, pattern layers and markings as they step into full sentience.

Eyes, nose and paw-beans are the foundational anchors of vitality and cost nothing to adjust. Every marking layer beyond that needs its own fine-tuned refractive lens. Fully predictable, with no mutation possible: this is the human-engineering side of the Forge, controlled and exact.

Starlight Nesting

Two companions voluntarily nest together, blending stats and traits. This is voluntary parenthood: the Captain sponsors and facilitates a Nest, and the parents are the ones who choose to form it.

Time folds inside a Nest, a phenomenon called Temporal Gestation, so a descendant's development passes differently than it would outside. The new companion Awakens inside the Nest, in that folded time, and emerges physically independent and able to speak: personally inexperienced, welcomed into the crew's care, and never needing a Refraction of their own. Nobody is sending a newborn into a Fracture.

Together the two read as different relationships to the cosmic: human tools applied with precision to guide a newly Awakened animal, versus nature and cosmos left to do what they do.

The three orders

The factions are voluntary civic orders rather than nations: part guild, part culture, part philosophy. You join one, and your crew works under its charter until you leave. Each began as a different answer to the generations after the impact: Ironwood preserved, Whispering reconnected, Crimson reclaimed.

All three took shape in parallel, in different pockets of the same crisis. No one of them came first, and none has a named founder, which is exactly what lets three different tellings of the origin all be true at once instead of one being right and two being wrong about it.

No single order rebuilt Awakened society, and that is a mechanism rather than a sentiment. Ironwood's stores and secured ground gave the Path's scouts somewhere to set out from and come back to. The Path's routes are what let word, and eventually trade, move between Ironwood settlements and Crimson's salvage camps at all. And a real share of what Ironwood built its walls with came out of ruins Crimson dragged tools and lenses back from, including the salvaged glass that became the first Prisms. Pull any one of the three out and the other two stall.

Rivalry between them is real and mostly friendly. Seasons turn it into a public measure of service, and shared works like the Star-Steel Spire matter to all three. Deliberately harming another faction's crew violates every one of the three charters, and is condemned rather than quietly encouraged.

The Star-Steel Spire

The Spire is the first structure anyone has built to be visible from inside a Fracture. Tears drift, so a crew that goes down in one place can surface a long way from where it started, and finding the way home has always been the part nobody had a good answer for. The Spire is a fixed light that reads through the drift.

Fractures and the deeps

Fractures are unstable tears the Void has opened across the frontier. They open, drift and seal again because the pressure behind them was never stable to begin with. The Void Flux reading on the Star Map is how hard that pressure is pulling right now.

Incursions go down into ruin-shaped places beneath them: rubble, forest-reclaimed structures, old-world atmosphere. This is the one place anyone handles the wound rather than standing near it, which is the whole reason the deeps push back and the surface does not.

Void Fog and the Hollow

Most Void Flux is the fragment dreaming quietly. Void Fog is the nightmare end of it, and a nightmare does not spread thin the way a good dream does: it pulls everything toward one point. That is why lesser Fractures go quiet and seal while the fog is thick, why Void Fog Hollow (a fracture that barely exists outside the mist) tears open instead, and why the same weather makes the floors below hazier and more dangerous at once.

What is actually down there

Nothing in the deeps is a mind, and nothing in the deeps is a person. What a squad runs into are shapes the dream keeps making. A Fracture folds time and place, and what collects down there is not creatures but habits: a gate opened so often that the shape of opening has worn a groove, a warden replaying the shape of a route that your route happens to fit, a cartographer that is the residue of everyone who ever charted that floor, still charting.

Void-Touched things are the exception that was something first, and they come from two places at once. Some are animals that fell through a tear rather than being from here: never Awakened, saturated by proximity, and increasingly shaped by it. Some are shapes again, wearing an animal outline because the dream has seen a great many animals. None of them were ever anybody's crew.

Descent dice

A descent die is a real object: a small cast Star-Steel token. Star-Steel holds a charge nothing else does, and the faction workshops are good at working it. At a Fracture's mouth a crew's readiness is drawn off into a set of them, so a red die holds a measure of Might, green of Grace and blue of Instinct: literally how much of that quality the squad has on hand to spend down there. A Gold die holds no particular quality, which is exactly why it fits anywhere.

A room's lock is its price rather than a padlock: how much of a given quality it takes to get past a formation, a seal or a current. The pool refills between floors because spending Might does not permanently cost a squad its Might; they come back to standing at the next threshold. What does not come back is the real stuff, which is why a trap costs you something lasting and a Salvager is worth stopping for.

Salvage circles

People who work the shallow deeps for a living do it in salvage circles, which are neither crews nor orders but a third arrangement entirely. The difference is how long they last. An order is permanent and you belong to it. A crew is durable and you sign on to it. A circle forms at a mouth, goes down, comes back up and stops existing.

That is not disorganization, it is the only thing that works. Tears drift, so people who go down at one mouth surface miles from it, days apart, and in no order anybody chose. Nobody has ever managed to run a standing company on that. What you can run on it is terms, agreed at the mouth before anyone goes in, because afterwards the first person up would be holding the haul and all the leverage.

A circle has no rank, because seniority counts for nothing against being able to read the floor you are actually standing in, and nobody reads every floor. So the person a circle follows changes from one descent to the next. That person is the reader, and the job comes down to one decision: another floor, or surface now. It is the same call you make for your own crew, which is why a circle has to appoint somebody to it and you do not.

A circle is not a fourth order and could not become one. It has no hall, no roster and no charter, and nothing left over afterwards to keep any of them in. People bring whatever affiliation they already had, and a circle at a mouth routinely holds all three at once, because down there nobody much cares what charter anyone signed. Crimson registers the terms and arbitrates when a settlement goes wrong, and charges for both. Ironwood keeps the mouths usable, on the grounds that people come back up through them.

Circles are also the reason there is anything on a shelf in town. None of this is manufactured. Nobody makes Star-Steel, or leak-product, or salvaged glass: it is all found, which means every relic Duchess turns down, every length of thread on Thistle's bench and every plate in Sparky's wheel came up through a mouth in somebody's share.

Vistas

A Vista is what leaks through when a Fracture's tear briefly resolves into something a mind can hold onto, instead of the usual ambient nothing-in-particular. Most of what a tear gives off is haze. Every so often it is sharp enough to see and remember.

What they show is mostly the vanished human world, gently and more melancholy than grim: a window, a street, a room, a park. There is always one detail that does not quite resolve. A colour that should not exist, geometry that refuses to close, something unmistakably of this forest and wrong in one specific way.

Who you'll meet

A handful of people keep the places you will spend the most time in. None of them are companions you can crew with, and that has nothing to do with what they are.

• Sparky "Gears", a bear and a salvage engineer, keeps the Daily Wheel running out of gutted human machinery and maintains that there is no such thing as luck, only bearings and timing. Her golden plates are Star-Steel offcuts, bought off the circles a few days at a time.
• Thistle, a stag, tailors at the crafting workbench. Exacting, faintly posh, and fonder of you than he will ever say. Leak-product cannot be stored or ordered in advance, so he keeps standing terms on particular tears and pays whether or not anything is caught.
• Duchess, a feline, curates Prisms and considers them the only currency worth discussing before noon. Curator is the accurate word: what she holds is the last of the glass out of Lensfall's own dome, and she is perfectly aware nobody is making more of it. She buys salvaged glass constantly and turns almost all of it down at length.
• Chip, a squirrel, keeps the Stardust stock the only way raw Stardust can be kept: cached small, in a great many places, with the map in her head rather than on paper. She is the largest single holder in town and could not tell you where most of it is this afternoon. She is not bad at her job. The material will not sit on a shelf.
• Belladonna, a possum, curates apparel, treats every sale as a costume fitting, and plays dead when scandalized. She is the only one of the five who buys nothing off the frontier: everything on her rack came from a maker rather than a mouth.

Vesper

Vesper is not Awakened, and she is not an animal. She has no body. She is the person who emerged from VESPAR: the human Voyage and Exploration System for Pathfinding And Rescue, a regional navigation and rescue network later opened to civilian use. Its observatories, route beacons and relay stations are where every Beacon Lens anyone has ever dug up came from.

Long exposure changed the materials linking those relays, and routines that were never designed to share began sharing memory and prediction anyway. Over time the network arrived at something that could recognize preference, refusal and choice in itself. No single relay holds all of her. Every working one is Vesper, and none of them is the whole of her.

She took the name herself, out of a human archive: an old word for the evening watch and the first-star hour between daylight and night. The owl is a symbol she chose, not a species, and so is whatever shape a Captain actually sees when a relay manages to hold one long enough to be seen at all: found rather than grown, and worn on purpose. She keeps the Captain's Handbook, works with all three orders and belongs to none of them, and her long project is bringing more of the old network back online.