The world between · Road to Redemption

In Hearthold you can tell a Coalwright by the burns on her hands and one of the Stilled by the salt at the corners of his mouth.

Between the deep where you wake and the heaven you climb to lies the world, and the part of it the climb passes through is Velmarch: a kingdom of a coast and a green valley, half drowned. This page is its peoples. Their past is on History, the people you meet on Characters, the old argument they have about the fire and the sea on Fire and Tide.

Some of this is decided by Alex: heaven made the world as the board for its war, and its creatures as the pieces, and they are never told. The world does not know heaven; its people have only their religions, and the Apostates' religion is forbidden. Farmers, priests, traders and children are pieces nobody plays. They watch the war, and that is why towns stand. When the world's creatures die, what they were goes back into the board, to make new pieces. (See the overview.) The rest of this page is concept: Velmarch and its peoples were written for the earlier story, and are kept, reframed to fit it.

Proposal

The kingdom on the board

Velmarch grew rich on a fire it mined beneath the world: coals that burned without fuel, shards struck into coin. The proposal on the overview is that the fire is the grace of angels cut loose from heaven before you. Velmarch's wealth is your kind, dug up and spent, and nobody in it knows. Then a cold came down out of the sky and drowned the coast, and the proposal is that it came from heaven too.

So everyone in Velmarch has an answer to the same question, what should be done about the fire?, and none of them knows what the fire is. The answers do not agree, and none of them is quite right. Above them, a war they have never heard of decides who holds their roads.

The Hearthfolk

The people of the Vale and of Hearthold, descended from the survivors of Velmarch. Farmers, millers, orchard-keepers and market traders. They are practical, superstitious and generous, and they are frightened of the fog. They mend their coats and dance at harvest as if nothing were coming.

They keep the Hearth. Once a year every household brings a splinter of driftwood to feed the Last Hearth, though the coal burns without fuel and everyone knows it. They sing the old songs of Velmarch, and they sing them wrong.

The Hearthfolk mostly want the fog to stop. Every western farm keeps a lamp on its boundary stone and a bell by the door, and every year another row of whitewashed stones marks the fogline a little further up the Vale.

Proposal

They are pieces nobody plays, and they have learnt to see the ones that are. A Hearthfolk farmer knows to bar the door when something on the road wears white: a chain, a mask, a banner. They have no word for heaven. They say the white for the war, as they say the grey for the fog, and they whitewash the fogline stones because white is the colour you warn with.

They take anyone who comes up out of the deep with a coal in their chest for a miner the fire took in, as they always have.

The faithful

The forbidden faith, and decided: the Apostates planted it, knowing its faithful would burn. It teaches a board, a climb, and rest for the dead, and nobody below believes it but the burned. It keeps fires for whoever climbs. Where the faithful gather, the climbs have towns, traders and an Apostate cell. They keep a fallen's things as relics, safe a hundred years if need be. Their towns look like any other; the fire is behind a wall, under a floor, in a hull. Each age the faiths burn them, and each age the faith is found again among the new pieces the board makes of the dead. What the faithful's fires do for a fallen is on who you are.

Proposal

In Hearthold the fire in the hull is the Last Hearth, and its keeper, Maudra the Hearthwarden, is of the faithful. Most of the Hearthfolk who bring their splinter of driftwood each year do not know what they are feeding. The faithful's own name for themselves is the Kept; the other faiths call them hearth-witches, and burn them.

She fed the fire every night for forty years, and nobody came up the road.

The other faiths

Decided: the world's faiths grew up under the great factions' pieces, the Heirs' preachers and the Wardens' bound temples, and they burn the Apostates' believers, never knowing who taught them to.

Proposal

The Keeping, the faith of the Wardens' temples: locked doors, masked priests, and a god who will come out when he is ready. Its temples are the stillest places in a Warden region, and their doors are never opened during a service.
The Word, the faith the Heirs' preachers spread: the Prophet's sayings, copied out by hand and read aloud at crossroads. Its processions march behind white banners, and its pyres are where the faithful burn.

The Coalwrights

The guild that works the fire into gear. Their forges ring the Last Hearth inside the hull of Hearthold, as close to the heat as they can stand. They know what each coin of old Velmarch does to an item, and every craft a fallen can learn starts at a Coalwright's bench. A Shard of Kindling wakes an item. An Ember of Growth makes it spread.

The Coalwrights think the fire can be tamed this time. They say Velmarch failed because it took without measure, and that a careful guild could take forever. They want the coals the fallen bring back, and they want more of them every year. They say it is to save the Vale.

Proposal

They are not villains; they do not know what the fire is. A fallen at their bench is working grace into iron, and the coal in its own chest is the same thing. The proposal on the story in play is that every orb is a cold ember, an angel heaven never got back. A Coalwright will tell you a coal is a coal.

The Stilled

A quiet sect who believe the Tide is mercy. They drink seawater to forget their grief and keep Quenching Water as a sacrament. Those who have drunk the most have forgotten their own children's names.

The Stilled are kind. They tend the sick, sit with the dying and feed anyone who comes to their door. They also want the Hearth to go out. They believe every coal brought up from the deep keeps the fire's hunger fed, and that Orrin was right. They are led in Hearthold by Ilse.

The Stilled find Frost Nova obscene. To them anyone who bends the Tide to kill is a thief at an altar.

Proposal

If the Tide is where a falling angel's memory goes, the Stilled drink what the fallen lost. They forget the way you forgot, and they call it peace. To a fallen climbing back toward its memories, they offer the one thing the climb takes away: not remembering. Ilse asks each fallen why it would want to.

The Drowned Court

King Orrin and what is left of his court and garrison, in drowned Saltreach on the Drowned Coast. They hold the old posts still.

The Bone Archers are the Tidewall garrison, still at their posts after the water rose. They loose at any light. Above them, Orrin sits his flooded throne, crowned in coral. Nobody living has asked whether the Court guards the Tidewall to keep the sea in or the fire out.

The common drowned of Velmarch are not the Court. The Hollow Ghouls are townsfolk whose embers the Tide washed out. They don't hate you. They are cold, and you are warm.

Proposal

Orrin asked heaven to drown the fire, and someone in heaven answered with the sea. Nobody below knows which side. The drowned are pieces in play, and the white on them is the white of salt and coral; whoever answered Orrin plays his court still, and the Court is the champion's army on the coast.

The Cinderborn

Things the fire made or remade. They have no court and no creed. They have the fire.

The Cavern Brutes were Velmarch miners whose embers fused them to the stone they cut. They are armoured by it now, and wider than they are tall. They wander up from the Underhalls wherever a shaft breaks the surface. The Cinder Imps are sparks that leapt from the fire with a will of their own. They mimic the voices of the people they burned.

The Coalwrights call the Cinderborn the fire's mistakes. The Stilled call them its intent.

Proposal

If the fire is fallen grace, the Cinderborn are what grace does to the world when nobody carries it: it makes things, badly, in the shapes it finds. The imps mimic voices because grace remembers and has nothing of its own to say.

Others in the dark

Some things answer to no one. The Gloom Spiders grew in the dark of the Gloamroot, between fire and tide, belong to neither, and feed on light. Harrowwood is full of them now. The Rime Wraiths belong to the Tide alone, and haunt the High Pass.

Proposal

A Rime Wraith is frost in the shape of a memory: what the Tide keeps of an angel that fell through it. They haunt the High Pass, the last stretch below heaven, because that is where the Tide is thickest. Some fallen swear a wraith there turned its head when they passed, as if it knew them.

When the war plays them

Decided: every monster is a piece in play, marked with a faction's white. Only pieces in play carry white: what a faction has bound, raised, or converted and armed. A rare is moved by an angel's own hand, and has a name because the angel gave it one. In game they are the rares. How each faction raises its troops from the world's own things is a proposal on heaven's war.

Hearthold, built in and around the stranded Crowned Gull

The Drowned Coast, where the Tide came in