---
title: "The Heartfire"
summary: "The great heap of fallen grace that Velmarch mined for three hundred years, white-gold and glass-floored, the first light a fallen comes to."
status: concept  # A proposal: the story, world and art direction, invented for Alex to keep, change or cut
section: "The Journey"
region: heartfire
act: "Act 1: The Deep"
html: heartfire.html
source: www/content/journey/heartfire.md
---

# The Heartfire

*The great heap of fallen grace that Velmarch mined for three hundred years, white-gold and glass-floored, the first light a fallen comes to.*

> The floor is glass, and through it the light goes down further than the eye will follow.

Up from the feather floor, the dark ends all at once. The Heartfire is the fire under the world, the Ember that Velmarch mined toward for three hundred years, and the first light a fallen comes to. It is in the first act, the Deep; which regions sit in which act is a proposal, from the [overview](../world/overview.md).

## What you find

Holy and unbearable. After the feather floor, there is suddenly too much light. White-gold comes from everywhere at once, with no source the eye can find. The floor is glass, fused from the stone by the heat, and the light rises through it. There are no shadows. Colours bleach out until your own gear looks white, and the coal in your chest, the only light you had, can no longer be seen at all.

It pulls. Your coal strains toward the heart of it the way a compass needle swings north, and the closer you walk, the harder it pulls.

## What it tells you

What the fire is. Everything the fall burns off an angel on the way down comes to rest here, and keeps burning: grace with nobody in it, heaped up over more falls than anyone has counted. Velmarch grew rich on it. Every coal that burned without fuel and every shard struck into coin was cut from here, or from what ran out of it into the stone. You are standing in your own kind, and in some of yourself.

Nobody above knows it. The Coalwrights who still mine it are not villains; they think it is fire.

## How it plays

- **A crossing, not a hunt.** No monster follows you into the light. The danger is the pull: the nearer the heart, the slower you walk, as if the heap wants you back.
- **The first thing you understand.** It is where the climb shows you what the world is made of, before anyone tells you.
- **The way up is a shaft.** At its rim the oldest workings of Velmarch reach down to it, and the climb goes on up them, into [the Underhalls](../journey/underhalls.md).

## On the second climb

A hundred years more of mining have cut it back: the Coalwrights' shafts reach further in, and the light is a little less. A hundred years more of falls have fed it. Which way that balance tips is the second climb's question here. See [the second climb](../game/second-climb.md).

## Its place in history

The royal mint of Velmarch struck one [Sovereign Spark](../wiki/items/currency/sovereign.md) from the Heartfire for each reign. The Hearthfolk say the miners who cut those sparks went down with their eyes bound and were led by the hand. When Orrin opened the Tidewall, the Heartfire is what he meant to drown. The sea came down the shafts after it and never reached it. See [History](../world/history.md).

[Sereth the Ashen](../world/characters.md) reached it from above, and went back up with his ember burned out. Asked what lives in the Heartfire, he has answered only once. *"It does."*

## In the game

The Heartfire is concept. The Sovereign Spark is in the game: its [wiki page](../wiki/items/currency/sovereign.md) says what it does and how often it drops.

## Rumours

- The glass floor is not a floor. It is the top of something.
- Sereth was not the first to come back from the Heartfire. He was only the first to come back alone.