The Unlit · Road to Redemption

A lantern held out over the edge lights the hand that holds it and nothing else.

Old miners swore there is something under the fire, a place where the fire itself is afraid. They called it the Unlit. Every climb starts above it without knowing: it lies below the floor where the fallen wake. In the endgame it may be one of the regions of the contested world, the one with no bottom anyone has found. Where it sits is a proposal, from the overview.

What you find

Wrong. On the climb the light changed with every act: your ember in the deep, too much of it at the Heartfire, sun in the Vale, white in heaven. In the Unlit, light stops working. Your coal still burns, and the dark around it does not give way. Hands show. Feet show. The ground under them does not.

True black, and the deep violet of void. Specks of ether cyan drift in it, lit by nothing, moving against whatever wind there is. Fallen who have stood at the edge long enough say the specks are not scattered. Seen from far enough away, they make two vast shapes, close together, like eyes.

The miners who claimed to have seen its edge said the fire there runs uphill. Slag flows away from the dark. Sparks fall upward. The fire has consumed everything it ever touched, and it will not touch this.

What lives there

Unknown. The miners had a word for whatever it is. They called it the Hush, and they would not say it underground. Most of the Hearthfolk think the Hush is only the Unlit by another name. The Coalwrights do not think so.

No faction's white has been seen there. Nobody knows whether that is because nobody holds it, or because nobody plays it from where heaven can see.

How it plays

The deep end of the maps. Depth after depth with no floor, each harder than the last: the endless descent of today's build, kept as the endgame's measure of a party's builds.
Light is the rule. The Unlit's look is the one place the game's light stops lighting, so a party reads the dark by its own coals and by the ether drifting in it.

Its place in history

The Hearthfolk say the deepest crews of the Underhalls first heard of the Unlit in the reign of Hadrec, the ninth king, when they broke through below the fire's seams. It was the same reign in which miners first came back with embers in their chests. The Hearthfolk have never decided whether the two are connected. See History.

Voidsteel and Ether are said to come from there. Both are found in the deep, and both are worked in Hearthold. No Coalwright will say she has been where they come from.

In the game

The endless depths are the one part of the journey already in the build: each portal leads one depth further, with harder monsters as you go. The endgame it grows into is decided: maps opened from your hideout, which friends join. See Maps and the hideout.

The Unlit's look is concept. Two of its materials are already in the game's item data as bases, the Voidsteel Sword and the Ether Wand. Where they come from is a question the game has not answered. See Mysteries.

Rumours

Voidsteel takes no edge from a whetstone. It comes up sharp and stays that way.
The miners used to stop singing at a certain depth. Nobody remembers which. The songs ended there, and the Hearthfolk sing them wrong because nobody ever heard the endings.