The Gate of Heaven

Art in progress

The angels on the bridge have dust on their shoulders, and none of them turns to watch you pass.

Above the High Pass the track ends at a bridge over the cloud sea, and the bridge ends at a gate. This is the top of the climb and the end of the third act, the Ascent: the gate's keeper is its last fight, and through the gate is heaven, white and colourless and at war. What heaven is, and the rules of its war, are decided, in the overview; what this page adds, and which act the gate sits in, is a proposal.

What you find

White. After a whole climb of colour coming back, it all goes. Heaven is drawn in ink: spires, flying buttresses, pointed arches nested inside pointed arches, and walls like cliffs over a sea of cloud. There is no sun, and no colour anywhere but the coals of the party, red in the white.

The bridge is long and crenellated, and lined with angels standing where they stopped, with dust on their shoulders. Some of them stopped playing a long time ago. Others are posted, and on the far bridges, across the cloud, the hosts of heaven stand facing each other, close enough to touch, and nobody strikes. Angels may not fight in heaven. The board fights for them.

Art in progress

The gate's keeper

The last fight of each climb is the fallen who keeps the gate that age. Whoever holds the gate sets a fallen in it, so that only fallen strong enough reach the top, and stakes on its keeper something carried up long ago. Whoever passes takes it. All of a party fights the keeper, and any fallen already in heaven may come down the bridge to join them. Only a fallen that has beaten all three acts goes through.

It is the climb's first fight against one of your own kind, and the only one where a stranger may come to help.

Through the gate

The City, far too big for its keepers: whole wings shut and empty, figures on the walls who are still angels, and processions in the streets that go nowhere. At its heart, the House. The first time a party arrives, it does not see it. The House shows only in the memory the gate gives back: the processions stop at the edge of its court, and nobody goes further.

Art in progress

The choice

At the top of the first climb each fallen chooses its faction, for good, in its own time; the party's fire waits. Three voices have found you on the way up, and here they ask:

• The Wardens, through the Doorward, who keeps the House's door with his back to it.
• The Heirs, through the Prophet himself, who listens at that door.
• The Apostates, through the one who lit your first fire, and who has been beside you the whole climb.

See the factions. Then she asks for what she is owed: one more fall. In the dark, under the walls, she cuts you loose a second time, and you go down keeping everything.

How it plays

• A quiet approach. The bridge has no horde: the armies stand, and nobody strikes. The walk to the gate is the climb's one long silence, then its hardest fight.
• Heaven is a hub, not a map. Past the gate there is nothing to clear on the first climb: the City, the choice, and the fall.
• The colour rule turns over. Up here white is everything, so the party's warm coals are what the eye finds first.

On the second climb

A hundred years on, a fallen of that age keeps the gate, and what it stands on has changed hands. Where you arrive follows your faction: inside the City for a Warden, in the Heirs' siege lines for an Heir, under the walls for an Apostate, and your seat is given back on your banner's ground. From it you go down into the world again, as your faction's champion: the endgame, the contested world. See the second climb.

In the game

Heaven is not in the build. Nothing of the campaign is yet; see the campaign.

Rumours

• One of the still angels on the bridge has moved since the last climb. Nobody agrees which.
• The gate's keeper is always someone who once passed it.