Other Realities¶
The Hearth is one room of a larger house — the faiths' standing metaphor, chosen carefully: rooms share walls, walls carry heat, and some doors should stay shut. Five other realities are close enough to matter. None of them is "another world" in the traveller's sense; they are adjacent conditions of the same world: its deep places, thresholds, dreams, hidden circulations, and the cold outside its windows.
The game's magic, dreams, death, and deep places all lean on these. Expansion hooks are deliberate.
The Long Dark¶
The outside. The cold before and around everything.
Not a place so much as the absence the Hearth is an exception to. The Long Dark is what the First Burning drove back and did not destroy: cold that is patient, total, and — its one personal quality — satisfied. It presses at the edges of creation evenly, the way night presses at a window, and it does not hate the light. It is simply older, and it can wait.
Something like life persists there, in the sense that a riddle persists in a book. The Unkindled — the faiths use the word carefully — are patterns in the Dark that never caught light: they have shape without warmth, motion without hunger, and no discoverable wants, which is what makes the far-pass stories about them so difficult to finish hearing. The watch that watches for them is considered paranoid. It has never once been considered wrong.
Where it touches the game: the far passes, deep winter nights, and every cold thing that behaves a little too deliberately. Expansion room: the thing on the other side of the Iron Gate has, at minimum, opinions about the Dark.
The Pyre¶
The between. Where the Phoenix burns, and souls wait warm.
The Phoenix does not burn in the world — the world is what's left of the burning. The Pyre is where it actually happens: the standing fire between ages, outside time's usual bookkeeping, where the next Saga is banked and building. The faiths describe it exactly once in scripture, in a line the Lanternkeepers have annotated to death and never improved: "a fire with room in it."
Mortals brush the Pyre at two moments. At death, the soul passes through on its way to Umbrel's Banked Fire — and pauses at the Hearth of Return, the Pyre's threshold, where what is unfinished is weighed. Most souls pass on. An ember — an adventurer, in the doctrine's sense — is set back down instead, at whatever chapel fire is keeping the chain that reached them. That is the theology under the respawn mechanic, stated by the clergy without embarrassment: you came back because the Flame checked, and you were not done.
The second brush is Emberwake dawn, when every rekindled hearth is held to draw its first heat from the Pyre directly. Sensitives say the moment tastes like standing in a doorway with summer on the other side.
The Veil of Moths¶
The shallows of sleep. The Moth-Queen's country.
Everyone crosses the Veil nightly; dreaming is the crossing. It lies against the waking world like frost against glass — a gray, lantern-lit shallows where distance runs on relevance instead of miles, and the Moth-Queen's moths ferry sleepers between the lights they need. Deep in, past where dreams stay personal, the Veil has geography: shared places, old lights, and tenants — the mothkin crossed the whole of it once, fleeing through a tear, and their songs about the deep Veil are noticeably reluctant to rhyme.
The Veil remembers what the waking world forgets, imperfectly and in the wrong order. Scholars have tried to use it as an archive. The Veil's order has been compared to a storm-scattered library.
Where it touches the game: dreams, visions, the mothkin's history, and any future content wearing the shape of sleep. The Moth-Queen permits passage. Nothing in doctrine says she is the only thing in there permitting.
The Veins¶
The world's circulation. Where elemental magic is drawn from.
Under the Hearth's skin runs its living heat — the Veins, the deep channels the First Wyrm dug and lined in the age when he still spent. They are not tunnels, mostly; they are currents in the stone, warmth moving on errands older than any map, surfacing as hot springs, hearthsprings, and the raw supply every elemental caster taps. Wizards speak of the local Vein the way rivermen speak of their river: a temperament, a schedule, a handful of quirks it is cheaper to respect than correct.
Deep enough, the Veins are territory — the Deep Mother's, by the dwarves' firm testimony — and they converge, every deep chart agrees, toward the north. Toward the range. Toward the vault the digging was for. The Delvings brushed a live Vein once. The winze has been sealed since, and the Forgefellowship's report on why runs one sentence: "It was warm, and it should not have been."
The Underchain¶
The prison-dark. Half place, half sentence.
Beneath the Frostspine, below the deepest honest stone, lies the space the Chaining made: the Underchain — the vault, its seals, and the strange margin around them where the sentence bends the world. It is not on any plane's map because it is between: too real to be elsewhere, too wrong to be here. Heat moves backward in it. Sound arrives before its cause. The chains themselves — Ashwing's hoard, forged — are said to sing very slowly, one note per winter, a song the Forgefellowship refuses to confirm having transcribed.
Through its one flaw, the Crack, the Underchain leaks: sorcery's supply, the occasional other thing on the Quiet Order's short list, and — the age's ugliest open question — possibly whatever has been waking the range. No mortal has entered the Underchain and reported back. The sealed adit above the Highreach and the Delvings' winze are, by the only charts that exist, the two nearest doors.
They are locked from this side. That detail matters.
| Reality | What it is | Touches the game as |
|---|---|---|
| The Long Dark | The cold outside creation | Far passes, deep winter, the Unkindled |
| The Pyre | The Phoenix's standing fire | Death, respawn at the chapel, Emberwake |
| The Veil of Moths | The shallows of sleep | Dreams, mothkin history, future dream-content |
| The Veins | The world's deep heat | Elemental mana, hearthsprings, the mines |
| The Underchain | The Wyrm's prison-margin | Sorcery's source, the sealed adit & winze |