---
title: "The Rose"
summary: "The passive tree, where a fallen's white settles: the heaven it remembers, drawn round like a rose window and lit place by place as it grows."
status: decided  # Decided in the design notes, not built yet
section: "The Fallen"
html: the-rose.html
source: www/content/fallen/the-rose.md
---

# The Rose

*The passive tree, where a fallen's white settles: the heaven it remembers, drawn round like a rose window and lit place by place as it grows.*

> Close your eyes and you see a city you have never been to, and you know every street.

Every kill leaves a little white on your hands, and the passive tree is where it settles. It is drawn as the heaven you remember, and since the white remembers heaven before you do, it is drawn as heaven from the first level, long before the climb gives back any memory of it. Decided by Alex on 25 October 2026. It is called the Rose, picked at Alex's request on 26 October 2026 (below); the rest of this page is proposals, the four rules of its shape among them.

The tree is in the game's rules and in the [build planner](../game/planner.md), but not yet on a screen in the game: a character there has only its gate lit. It has one start for each archetype (decided by Alex on 26 October 2026). The version in the rules today is a prototype of the shape proposed below, made on 26 October 2026: 510 places on six petals and 54 in 6 Seats, whose names and numbers are placeholders. Every place, notable and keystone is listed on [the wiki](../wiki/rose.md). Characters that persist between sessions come with its screen, the next step on the [roadmap](../dev/roadmap.md). How the Rose fits a build, with skills and gear, is on [Builds](../game/builds.md).

## The Rose's shape

The first Rose, built on 26 October 2026, had a fault: every build ended up the same. Its six keystones sat on one ring around the House, six to twelve points from any gate, and four of every five roads into another quarter crossed that ring. A point every two levels lit two places in five by level 100, enough for a build to take its whole quarter and most of both neighbours'. Alex chose four rules to fix it on 26 October 2026, and later that day took attributes off the Rose, moved the gates in to ring the House and asked that every dead end be a notable; the rules are proposals until the planner shows they work.

> **Proposal** (concept, not decided):
>
> **A point every two levels, and a fully built fallen lights a tenth of the Rose at most.** A fallen gets 49 points by level 100, and its attributes come from levels instead, so no place on the Rose is an attribute and every point is a choice. The Rose is sized so that a fallen at level 100 with every memory lights no more than one place in ten (both decided by Alex on 26 October 2026, see [Builds](../game/builds.md)). The prototype has 510 places on its petals, so 49 points light 9.6% of them. About one place in 5 is a notable (108), much as in Path of Exile; the rest are small places that each name something specific, not attributes or plain damage.
>
> **The gates ring the House, and the petals fan out to the rim.** The House at the centre is drawn but never reached: every gate opens beside it, and each petal widens as it runs out, so builds that set off together drift apart, and the keystones sit near the rim, where there is the most room (Alex's choice, 26 October 2026). Measured, where the gates are drawn changes nothing by itself: what decides how builds spread is how the places are joined. The inner ring is shorter than the old rim road, so your neighbours are nearer, and the room at the rim gives two petals a second place to meet, out where their branches end.
>
> **Power sits off the roads.** The roads are short and plain: an inner ring runs from each gate to its neighbours, and a road of two places runs out to a crossing. The power is in notables and on dead ends. From the crossing three branches fan out, two running small place and notable in turn to a keystone and one running straight out to a notable; small clusters hang off the roads and the branches as dead ends, each ending on its notable, so no point goes on a place that leads nowhere; between two petals a seam runs out to a keystone that both petals reach; and near the rim a wall joins the two petals' outer branches. Nothing joins the keystones to each other: a neighbour's keystones cost a few points more than your own and the far side's about twice, and you walk to one only because you want it, never on your way to something else.
>
> **Places name a mechanic, not a number.** Increased damage and life stay on the roads. A petal's branches each name one way of fighting: the Hedgewitch's frost and fire, the Sexton's burning, the Huntsman's long shot and crits. A fire build gets nothing from the frost branch, so it never fills its own petal, and two Hedgewitches may share little beyond the roads. A keystone is a trade that changes a rule, not more damage for every spell. The prototype makes do with the numbers the game has; the places get their real mechanics once the skills are studied.
>
> **The Seats: one for each fallen, lit by memories.** Beyond the rim sit the Seats, the seats of heaven the fallen are climbing back to, and a fallen takes one, for good. They are not lit with points: each act boss's memory lights one place, 6 over both climbs, in a Seat of 9 places, so even a fallen with every memory leaves part of its Seat dark. No road joins a Seat to the petals. This is what Path of Exile does with its ascendancies, tied to the story: the strength a memory gives back is a place in your seat in heaven.

> **Proposal** (concept, not decided):
>
> **Ideas kept for later (concepts).**
>
> - **Glass.** A rose window is stained glass. Panes of glass are loot, set into sockets on the Rose, and each recolours the places in its reach: life places near a red pane also give fire resistance, damage near a blue one turns to cold. The same Rose then makes different builds, and the endgame gets a chase tied to the tree.
> - **The House's shadow.** Lighting a place deep in a petal darkens its mirror across the House, so a build that goes deep one way closes the far side. The opposites fall out of the attributes: Strength against Dexterity and Intelligence, Strength and Dexterity against Intelligence, Dexterity against Strength and Intelligence. Kept back in case builds still converge.
> - **A faction gate.** After the choice at the top, the second climb opens a second start on the Rose, on your faction's ground (the Wardens' City, the Heirs' siege lines, the Apostates' undercrofts), so a faction reaches a far part of the Rose without walking there.

> **Proposal** (concept, not decided):
>
> **The first Rose's names, kept.** Six petals ring the House, clockwise from the top in the order of their attributes: the Quarryman's foundations (Strength), the Sellsword's walls, the Huntsman's outer bridges (Dexterity), the Sexton's crypts, the Hedgewitch's cloister garden (Intelligence) and the Penitent's cells. The places' names are heaven's plain words: the bone stair, the cistern, the barbican; the Seats are heaven's own: the seat of judgement, of the sword, of keys, of the watch, of song and of mercy.

> **Proposal** (concept, not decided):
>
> ## What you see
>
> Heaven drawn in ink, the way the paintings of heaven are: the City seen from above, its walls, bridges, stairs and courts laid out like the plan of a cathedral. Every place in it is a node, and every street between two places is a path.
>
> - **Unlit, it is a drawing.** The tree opens as faint ink lines on the dark: a city you have never been to, which you know anyway.
> - **The white fills it.** Every point spent lights one place, and it fills with white, with a small flare as it catches. As a character grows the drawing turns into a white city, which is what heaven looks like and what the corruption is. The coal at the centre of the screen, which is you, stays red.
> - **The House is the one blank.** At the heart of the tree the House is drawn as a shape with nothing in it. No path reaches it and no point lights it. Every gate opens beside it.
> - **You start beside the House.** The [archetypes](../game/builds.md) begin at different gates on the ring around it, biased toward attacks, spells or defence, and each petal of the remembered city opens out from there to its walls, so every character can reach anything but nobody can take everything. The undercrofts and foundations for the Quarryman, the walls for the Sellsword, the outer bridges for the Huntsman, and so on.
> - **Great places.** The gate, a bridge, a stair of the court: larger nodes that carry the effects that define a build, in the spirit of Path of Exile's notables and keystones. They take longest to reach, and they change a fallen most.
> - **Readable at a glance.** Lit places are white and unlit ones faint ink, so the path a fallen has taken reads as one trail of white across the dark.
> - **Your faction shows on it.** After the choice at the top, your banner's ground in the remembered city takes your faction's mark (cosmetic only): the Wardens' City, the Heirs' siege lines, the Apostates' undercrofts.
> - **Places you don't remember lighting.** On the second climb the tree is the same, and you keep every point. A memory may show you a lit place you have no record of reaching.

## Why the Rose

Heaven's plan is round: courts, bridges and stairs ring the House at its heart, the way the panes of a cathedral's rose window ring its centre. So the tree is the Rose, and every place in it is a pane that the white lights. The name is short enough to say mid-fight ("two more points in the Rose"), it names what you see on the screen, and it keeps the House as the blank at the heart that every build circles. It was picked over *the Undersky* (the earlier story's name, made for going down) and *the Remembered City* (exact, but long).

> She knew every pane of the Rose before she had seen a single court of heaven.

How a point is taken back again is a proposal on [Builds](../game/builds.md): with the Tide's water, since fire remembers and the tide forgets.

## The earlier concept

![The Undersky as first imagined, for the earlier story: a dark sky of unlit coals inside every fallen, then called the Kindled](../art/paintings/undersky.jpg)

The Undersky as first imagined, for the earlier story: a dark sky of unlit coals inside every fallen, then called the Kindled

Before 25 October 2026 the passive tree was the Undersky: a dark sky full of unlit coals, which a fallen (then called the Kindled) saw on closing their eyes, lit coal by coal with ember orange and gold. The new tree keeps its shape (a dark screen that fills with light as you grow, great nodes at the heart of clusters, one trail across the dark) and changes its light from warm to white, because the tree is now where heaven's corruption settles. *"Steer by the coal you lit, not the coal you wish you had,"* said the Hearthfolk; it would still do.