Overview

Art in progress

You wake in the dark with a coal in your chest and no name.

The premise

You play a fallen angel. You wake at the bottom of the world with no memory of who you were, and you climb back up, act by act, learning who you are, toward the seat in heaven that was yours. At the top you find heaven corrupted, and you learn what made your fall possible, though never exactly what you did.

At the top you choose your faction, for good, and then you fall once more: willingly this time, keeping your memories. You wake at the bottom a hundred years later, in a world your choice has made worse, and climb it again. Then the endgame.

The name, the premise, the climb and the second climb were decided by Alex on 25 October 2026 (a repeating rebirth was decided and cut the same day), and so was the background of the fall, below. The proposal blocks are ideas for how the world this site already describes fits them. The rest of the World and the Fallen sections were rewritten for this story on 25 October 2026, and the rules once gathered here moved to the pages they belong to (see "The rest of the world", below); nothing decided was changed in the move. Where any other page still tells the earlier story, about going down, this page wins.

Why you fell

The exact cause of your fall is never told to the player. What the climb reveals is the wider background: what heaven is, what went wrong with it, and why angels fall from it at all. Alex decided both on 25 October 2026.

• Heaven is a castle-city. At its centre stands the House, a round domed house where God is supposed to live. Nobody is allowed to enter it, and whether anyone is inside is never answered. Heaven lives on nothing: it carries on by habit.
• The corruption is a war. Heaven's factions fight an eternal and pointless war, born of hubris and the ambition to sit on God's throne. There is no hell; hell is in heaven.
• The world is heaven's chessboard. Heaven made the world as a battleground, to wage its war without damaging its home. The angels play it by proxy from above, almost as if heaven were playing a game. The creatures of the world were made as its pieces, and are never told.
• The board is closed. Nothing of the world rises to heaven unless a fallen carries it, and heaven takes nothing from it. When the world's creatures die, what they were goes back into the board, to make new pieces. Heaven wants only one thing from the game: to know who wins.
• Ground for ground. Angels may not fight in heaven. The law is older than the House's silence, and heaven keeps it by habit, like everything else; the board fights instead. Each region of the world is bound to a place in heaven, a gate, a wing, a bridge, and whoever holds the region holds its twin above. The Heirs' siege of the City moves only as their regions below do. Whoever held the whole board would hold the House's court, and nobody ever has. The law binds angels, not the fallen: having fallen once, you are the only kind of angel who can fight in heaven, besides the Apostates who break the law. That is what each faction wants you for.
• What winning would mean. If either great faction won, the world would probably end, since nobody keeps a board once the game is over. If the Apostates won and heaven were destroyed, the war in the world would stop, and the world might at last be at peace; or it might vanish with heaven. Nobody knows.
• Angels don't risk themselves. Heaven holds a narrower set of angels now, and they never stake their own existence: they play. A champion on the board is a piece, worked from above like a glove; losing it costs its angel nothing.
• The Apostates found a way to kill an angel, and it works only in heaven, where fighting is forbidden: the board is safe, and home is not. Every fallen was cut loose in heaven, and what the Apostates kill does not end: it falls to the bottom of the world, cut loose from heaven against its will, and loses its memory. That is how every player arrives. The Apostates make angels fall in the hope that the fallen become a third force beside them, to destroy heaven for good, from the world and perhaps from heaven itself. Who cut you loose, and why you, are never told.
• The Apostates raise you back up. Having freed you against your will, they build you back up and try to convert you while you ascend back to an angel's status. Ascending restores your place in heaven, and at the top you choose a faction, for good. Ironically, you may refuse them, and make all their effort futile.
• The great factions need the Apostates. Only a fallen can fight in heaven, and only the Apostates can make one. Both great factions buy fallen from them in secret, through go-betweens, while their faiths below burn the Apostates' believers. Each thinks the other doesn't know.
• You fall once more, willingly. The Apostate who raised you asks one thing back for it: one more fall. You owe her, and you pay. She cuts you loose a second time, and this time you keep your memories; she drops you a hundred years on, so you see what your choice cost. You wake at the bottom in a world made worse by what you chose, and climb it again. There is no third fall. Each act boss of a climb gives back a memory. More on the second climb.
• What heaven looks like. Medieval gothic: spires, flying buttresses, pointed arches nested inside pointed arches, and walls like cliffs over a sea of cloud. It is white and has no colour, because in this game white is the colour of evil; the world below is dark, with some colour. The House does not show the first time the party arrives. Heaven is drawn in ink, like the deep.

The factions

Two great factions and one renegade fight the war, and what divides them is what they say about the House. Alex decided them on 25 October 2026.

• The Wardens say God chose them to protect the House, and forbid anyone to enter it. The dominant faction, and a declining one: they hold the City where the House stands.
• The Heirs follow a prophet who says God has asked him to claim the throne, and want the door opened, for the Prophet alone. They wage war to enter the City from cities of their own.
• The Apostates, the renegades, say there shall be no God, whoever is inside, and want the House broken. They make the fallen, and fight by insurgency.

At the top of the first climb you choose one of them, for good. Each is right about one thing and wrong because of it, and any two that beat the third fall out, so the war never settles. All of it, with how angels look in the world and the paintings of their champions, is on the factions.

The rest of the world

Every rule decided for the story has a home, and this page only summarises them:

• The factions: the Wardens, the Heirs and the Apostates, each in full; angels in the world and their true forms; how the factions play, and the Apostates on the climb (proposals).
• Heaven's war: how the war comes down, the fallen in heaven's war, the law, the door and the trade, broken ground and how the board moves; heaven's ground and how the war is fought below (proposals).
• Who you are: the fires and who keeps them, guttering, kin, the white that comes off the dead and what the white makes, memories, and what the players are called: the Fallen. The passive tree, the Rose, is where the white settles.
• The world between: Velmarch and its peoples, kept from the earlier story and reframed: the Hearthfolk, the faithful, the Coalwrights, the Stilled, the Drowned Court.
• Fire, tide and white, History, Characters, Mysteries, Glossary and how to write for the world.
• The story in play: why each system of the game is the way it is.