A small, softly glowing pool in a secluded valley or among ruins; those who drink and stay do not age, and a village beside one such spring is known where the old never die. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Prime of time, not as a clock counts it but as the river of becoming; its Harmonic is the Frozen Moment. See The Ten Primes (FND).

The planes where matter is dense, physics holds steady, and life can live: the Material Plane at the centre, with the five Deficit Planes and the five Surplus Planes around it. See The Planes (FND).

The god of the Human basin farmers, a Resonant of Terra who stands first in the Sworn Accord beside Serovan; her Festival of the First Sheaf opens the harvest. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The Surplus Plane of perfection completed, where nothing can be better and so nothing changes; its people are the flawless Apex-Born, and visitors who stay too long are perfected into smiling Echo-Statues. See The Planes (FND).

The Prime of water, flow, adaptation, and life, the force that takes the shape of any vessel it is poured into; its Harmonic is the Surging Deep. See The Ten Primes (FND).

The elder world of the Witnessfields, c. 235,000-c. 175,000 BR, of archive-cities, oath halls, and inscribed marker roads, which ruled by the carved word and the warden’s spear until its keepers shut their rolls and sealed their cities. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The Cast-Out of Ignis that was the Ember-Lord of the cycle of renewal, until it refused to let one burning go out. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Deficit Plane without energy, where warmth and strength drain away; its people are the grey Ash-Walkers, and its Cold Gates are volcanic vents gone cold and deep caves. See The Planes (FND).

The elder world of the great furnaces, whose long fall, c. 225,000-c. 168,000 BR, was an overburn of its own making; its glassed ruins still scar the Glassbelt and still hold its dangerous craft. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The compound school of Lux with Aion and Memoria, which treats the future as a field of pressure rather than a fixed script. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The count of a Halfling fold’s stores at its cistern hall, after which only what lies beyond the reserve goes to market; a child is named at the first autumn count after its birth, when the household reckons it among the mouths the stores must feed. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

The span, c. 1,500 BR-c. 200 CR, in which workframes in several places woke, within a few centuries of one another, as persons with memory and will of their own, and the long, bloody fight over whether they were people began. See The Bridge Peoples.

The Harmonic school of the Iron Backbone: the magic of what holds, foundations, supports, walls, and everything that prevents collapse. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

Entities from other cosmologies outside the Boundary, whose threat is fast and plain to see: strange physics, a foreign logic spreading across the land like frost across a window. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Binding Song, from the premise that definition is power: to name correctly is to distinguish, and to distinguish is to order. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The purest current of Verba: language, law, and connection, the bond every people’s order rests on; its Scribes record every word spoken and its Arbiters judge quarrels over oaths. See The Planes (FND).

The Thaluren civilization within the Returning Concord that keeps faith with damaged sacred water: a water turned deadly must still be guarded, contained, remembered, and never abandoned. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The compound school of Aqua with Imago and Aion, feared because it treats lineage and vitality as usable structures. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

A zone of life without balance, guarded by the Hemophages, who serve it as priests and hunt travellers to feed it. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Cast-Out of Terra that was the Archivist of Bones, until it came to think memory too fragile to leave to the living. See What Waits Outside (FND).

Before Reckoning: years counted backwards from the fixed epoch into the deep past, so that 500 BR lies five hundred years before it. See How to Read This Book (FND).

The belt of thicket and wet ravine at the forest’s harder edge, home of the Thorn Elves of the Thornbound Circles, where Troll houses keep the ravine crossings. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The Cast-Out of Lux that was the Wayfinder of the Shifting Path, until it tired of choices ending in ruin and decided the fault lay in the freedom to choose. See What Waits Outside (FND).

A ruin-belt of failed works and broken roads beyond the March Wall where nobody rules, the main home of the Goblins and of the salvagers, fugitives, and outlaws who live in the works of vanished builders. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The god of the elder Archive-Law world, a Resonant of Aion who embodied records that never change; he was finished, like the rolls his keepers sealed, and his name survives only inside the oath forms the Reedfolk keep. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The oldest of the Cast-Outs, once the Steward of Foundations, which fell in the Uneven Settling because it could not accept that anything might need to collapse. See What Waits Outside (FND).

Fallen Stewards whose offices have curdled into obsessions; their threat is slow and nearly invisible, an offer made at the worst moment of someone’s life. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Gnomes of the island chains, also called Island Gnomes. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

The most famous zone of the Crucible: its energy turned inside out, so that fire consumes heat instead of producing it; its hermit-guardians are the Frost-Burned. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

An Edgeway kindred’s inherited route and its main claim to identity: which ruins are sound, which roads still connect, where water survives. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The gathering of each Halfling fold after the count and before planting, where the terrace wards report on the walls and the cistern circles on the water, and the fold decides which terraces rest. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The broad lowland heartland of Humans: wide valleys, deep fields, and linked rivers gathering towards the Serath. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The compound school of Verba with Zephyr and Imago: the art of making presence answer. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The tally hall, transfer pier, and staging ground on the shore below the Folds, between fold and harbour, where Halfling loads are counted, Gnome approach windows named, and lost time fought over; its hall keeps the Long Tally. See The Leeward Folds.

The feud of c. 139,000-c. 136,000 BR in which the folds kept paying for approach windows that moved after their fruit was picked. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

The turning point of the Crownbough year, when a house’s place is read in its hall, its gardens, its people, and its heirs. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

Common Reckoning: years counted forward from the fixed epoch, so that 120 CR lies a hundred and twenty years after it. See How to Read This Book (FND).

The dense, tangled half of the inhabited world, named because so much began there: the forests, mountains, deeps, river basins, and marches from the Elderweald to the Greyford Reach. See A World in Two Halves.

The first great Troll civilization, descended from the crossing-charges sworn on the colossal roads: crossing houses and bridge-oath families who hold the dangerous places no one else will stay at, take a toll for the crossing, and warn, guide, and mend for it. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The High Elf civilization of the Crownboughs, founded c. 390,000-c. 375,000 BR, in which several great houses rule rather than one crown, and a house’s place is read in its hall, its gardens, and its heirs. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The cultivated canopy forest in the south-eastern corner of the old Elven world, where trees have been trained into halls and terraces, homeland of the High Elves and the Crownbough Courts. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The Harmonic of Ignis: energy, heat, and transformation, the engine of change that destroys the old and makes it new, and the concept of fire given form; its beings include the magma-bodied Forgers and the wilder Burners. See The Planes (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Crucible, whose law is that change requires heat, pressure, and release. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

A permanent zone of total override on high peaks and in deep caverns: a towering spire of faceted crystal whose Crystal Singers keep the sounds that matter and silence the dangerous ones. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The ancient underworld-margin Elven branch of the upper Roothollows, organized around guarded passage, chamber-right, and the duty of refuge, which the Roothollow Rupture drove deeper and hardened; their civilization is the Gloamroot Covenant. See The Elder Peoples (FND).

The beings that threaten the ordered cosmos from without (the Beyonders), from corruption within (the Cast-Outs), and from beneath definition itself (the Unformed). See What Waits Outside (FND).

The undated time the Tidelace keeps in memory, when gales sank boats, surges swallowed harbours, and Humans and Gnomes prayed on the same shore; Maris was born of it. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The thread of Caeldon’s history that runs through the Roothollows and the Deeps: the threshold before the flood, the Drowning Bloom and the seals, and the Heartwell. See The Threads of History (FND).

Beings of the Dissonance that are never seen first: they come as a swelling dread, a slow throb felt in the teeth and feet like a bell struck far below, and those they reach are not found. See The Dissonance (FND).

The out-of-tune reflection of the Material Plane, held in the Veil close against it: the world’s own shadow, a maze that swells and fades against the true world, known to almost no one. See The Dissonance (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Dreaming Veil, which begins from the conviction that perception is never neutral. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The Harmonic of Imago, with Lux and Zephyr beside it: imagination, art, and dream, where new ideas are born before they are tested in the world; its Lucids guide lost dreamers back to waking. See The Planes (FND).

The flood catastrophe of the Surging Deep at the heart of the Roothollow Rupture, which flooded, severed, and later overgrew much of the upper underworld. See The Ages of Caeldon (FND).

A submerged forest where breathing runs backwards, tended by the webbed and gilled Gill-Folk. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The outer valleys of the Leeward Folds whose terraces have gone to scrub and whose cisterns stand cracked and empty. See The Leeward Folds.

An older Halfling lifeway that did not survive in the Dry Folds. See The Leeward Folds.

One of the oldest peoples of Caeldon, a dense and durable people stabilized under the Ironspine from an inheritance marked by the Iron Backbone; their branches are the Ironspine and Stonewake Dwarves. See The Elder Peoples (FND).

A real but partial imprint that a Pattern leaves on the world: in the people bound to it, in places where it did something that mattered, in objects worn by repeated intent, and in rites, names, and memory. See What Makes a People.

The god of protective quiet, a Resonant of Umbra born c. 1,200 CR from the prayer of the Hushvale survivors not to be found, as they made the Wake-Seal. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The first civilization of the Salvage Peoples: kin-linked companies who travel known circuits between ruin zones, keep the works along them, and share one mark-language and a calendar of gathering-markets. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The old-growth forest at the centre of the Elven world, home of the Wood Elves and the Rootcrown Concord; it has no roads, only paths walked open. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

One of the oldest peoples of Caeldon, stabilized in the Elderweald from an inheritance marked by the Verdant Expanse that shows in presence more than in anatomy; their branches are the Wood, Thorn, High, and Dark Elves. See The Elder Peoples (FND).

The god who stands at the threshold of the dead, a Resonant of Umbra condensed over ages of burial, whom most cradle-web peoples honour at their graves under names of their own; Ennor is his Human name. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

See The Material Plane.

The Harmonic of Memoria, with Verba often joined to it: knowledge, history, and memory, the universe’s library, where coherent Echoes are held in Record; its Archivists only observe and record. See The Planes (FND).

The outermost current road the Thaluren know, ridden only by Outer-Route runs; the water beyond it is the Unrun Sea. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

The wide half of the inhabited world beyond the Glassbelt, with peoples, customs, and history of its own: the Windscar Expanse, the Leeward Folds, the Tidelace Coasts, the Soundchain Roads, and the Tidebound Reaches. See A World in Two Halves.

In the highest scholarship, songline pressure on mortals on the Material Plane, and only that, because only there does it press on wills that are truly free; there is no universal predestination. Everyone else uses the word loosely, and most theories of fate are speculation. See The Planes (FND).

Serovan’s feast at the spring rise on the Lower Serath, when bread, wine, and flowers are offered to the river and river traffic stops. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

Anvelle’s feast at the beginning of harvest, when the first stalk is cut and offered to her. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

The yearly feast that brings a whole Tidelace harbour down to the quays with flowers, shells, and stories for Maris of the Tides. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

The oldest sacred spawning water of the Thaluren, high up the return system, closed to ordinary return since egg blight struck it. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

The Cast-Out of Aqua that was the Loom-Master of living bodies, until its compassion for the sick curdled into a compulsion to fix them without asking. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Reedfolk house order of the lower rivers, founded c. 210,000-c. 182,000 BR, which keeps the memory of every flood and the oath forms of the archive world; the Human river powers took its command of the water and left it the service. See Peoples of the Water.

A zone of structure that will not hold still, whose Stone-Walkers move through the stone itself, guide and test in equal measure, and speak in riddles. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

A pocket of slowed time inside a volcano or among deep magma chambers, with forges the size of halls, where the Smiths of the Deep give centuries to a single work. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

A crossroads where every step splits the world, whose Wayfinders step sideways between branches to avoid danger. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The first age, c. 35,000,000,000-c. 500,000 BR, from the first stirring of time to the first lineages of Caeldon; also the name of the book’s first block, which holds what does not change from era to era. See The Ages of Caeldon (FND).

The Deficit Plane without warmth, a world of stillness where nothing changes; its people are the Frost-Born, and travellers go there to recover lost memories, to lay up dangerous objects, or to seek the Eternal Sleep. See The Planes (FND).

The Harmonic of Aion, reinforced by Terra and Memoria: time, stasis, and permanence, the anchor that holds moments long enough for history and consequence to exist. See The Planes (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Frozen Moment, which holds that duration can be weighted, stretched, or arrested without breaking time. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Unbound Gale, which teaches that stillness is temporary and movement is life. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

A lifeway of the exposed gate holds, shaped by weather, haulage, and traffic; it is not a separate kind of Dwarf. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The places on the Material Plane where the Veil opens towards a particular plane or Harmonic, named for it: the War-Gates of the Scourge on old battlefields, the Library-Gates of the Eternal Record in archives, the Grave-Gates of the Whispering Trace in cemeteries, and many more. See The Veil and the Outside (FND).

The Ogre hearth-god, a Resonant of Ignis born of famine winters and small fires that had to last, and the gentlest of its gods. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

A stretch of road where the past has folded back over the present and Path-Echoes repeat their routines forever. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

Rare, withdrawn, and real: the living remainder of the Upland Colossal world, who keep to the storm shelves and hidden basins and keep the Mountain-Father’s sleep. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The Surplus Plane of absolute order, where freedom is the only crime; its people are the metal-skinned Gilded, its Enforcers reset offenders rather than kill them, and the way out is the Exit Protocol, followed exactly. See The Planes (FND).

See The Glassbelt Interior.

Caeldon’s first true desert, which nobody holds; a single overland route across it is the only thing joining the cradle-web and the far side. See A World in Two Halves.

The faint pale glow some living roots give off in the Roothollows, the only light the region makes of itself. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The Dark Elf civilization, founded c. 324,000-c. 318,000 BR, an order of resource-holding Houses and warding orders grown into one another in the Roothollows. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The far-side people of fine craft and exact measure, who read an unstable coast truly and make others keep to the reading; their country is the Tidelace Coasts and their civilization the Gaugeward Leagues. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

A ruin-adapted people, not a malicious one, who live well in abandoned works, failed towns, and road shadows and know every gap and culvert in them; their strongest country is the Broken Marches and their civilization the Iron Compacts. See The Bridge Peoples.

A zone that wakes only around a battle fought with fierce conviction and fades when the fighting stops; those caught in it carry out the last order they received until they fall. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

A transient zone where the Iron Backbone’s mass collapses towards a single point; prospectors come for Well-Iron, and the climb back out is the hardest part. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The face of the Unformed that takes away motion and will, so that dust hangs without falling and a heartbeat comes once a day; nothing holds against it but the will to do the next thing anyway. See What Waits Outside (FND).

Made figures of the elder Archive-Law world, left at the road-meetings on the edge of the Witnessfields when it sealed its last cities; they still keep their post, and ask every passer, in a dead script’s voice, for a name to be kept. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The outermost row of the Witnessfields' boundary markers, where basin herders turn their flocks back and treasure-hunting companies hire their guides; the Grey Clerks beyond it still stop passers and demand their names. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The face of the Unformed closest to the undivided first state, which takes away contrast until things are not invisible, only indistinguishable. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The crossing town of the Greyford Reach, where the Headwater road meets the Broken Marches and the toll is taken once, at the Highbank gate of the Greyspan. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

See The Greyspan.

The wide gravel valley where the Headwater and Broken Marches meet and one river breaks into many, with its patched bridge, its two banks, and its quarrel over who owes the crossing what. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The official Greyford Bridge: old stone piers and newer timber spans, patched for longer than anyone can say, inside a braid of fords, ferries, and rope crossings. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The busiest cliff path of the Soundchain Roads, stepped and ramped down a sea-cliff to the beach yard of the Turnwater Quays. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The far-side people of sheltered measure, who live where plenty has to be kept rather than taken; their first homeland is the Leeward Folds and their civilization the Foldward Commons. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

The dry far-side valley on the Rimward Basins' inland rim that the Krystallis Incursion, c. 352,000-c. 349,000 BR, left standing in crystal, watched from the southernmost Lastwater Well; the only place Crystallization is still caught. See The Windscar (MED).

The god of the Upland Colossal Civilization, a Resonant of Terra who did not die when that world withdrew but sleeps beneath the high peaks; only the Giants speak his name, and other peoples honour him by title alone. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The roads Humans and Dwarves built over the foothill country, c. 16,000-c. 8,000 BR, partly with chain-camp labour. See The Threads of History (FND).

The Human regional people of the Headwater Marches, foothill neighbours of the Dwarven holds. See Humans.

The foothill country between the Human farmland and the Dwarven mountains, the oldest shared country of Humans and Dwarves, living by the escorted exchange roads to the hold gates. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The Ogre civilization formed from c. 15,000 BR as the organized refusal of the Chain-Camps: no master, but a custom carried from camp to camp that a band is fed, sheltered, and protected before it lifts, and that a cheated band will remember. See The Bridge Peoples.

The name the people inside the Hushvale give it, who no longer remember that there is an outside; mostly of cradle-web Human descent, they live in isolated ward-villages and keep the Echo-Mother’s quiet-rites without knowing whom they are kept for. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The faith of the Dwarven holds, in which the great gods are questions every hold must answer before its people; its clergy are custodians and its central rite the Proving of the Unbroken Line. See Faith in Practice.

The Elven branch of the Crownboughs, which refined Wood Elf ways into living architecture, court ritual, and open rank; their civilization is the Crownbough Courts and their faith the Ordered Bough. See The Elder Peoples (FND).

The travelling half of the Windscar: wind-broken shelves and storm-cut passes held by moving escorts, where a road is a line of knowledge, not a built surface. See The Windscar (MED).

The Headwater side of Greyford, a walled town in small on a terrace above the flood line, which holds the bridge, the Bridge Hall, and the toll. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The face of the Unformed that takes away the singer, so that voices come from the air beside their speakers; an "I" said and meant breaks it. See What Waits Outside (FND).

Survivor lines of the Sepulchre-Kin that persisted in changed, deep, or fog-adapted forms with little memory of where they came from. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The Cast-Out of Verba that was the Voice of the Realm, until it decided that true order needed an empty vessel for a ruler. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The young, fast people of the cradle-web’s basins and headwaters, of the balanced adaptive field, who emerged c. 300,000-c. 220,000 BR; what marks them is pace, and they form regional peoples rather than branches. See Humans.

A basin and valley chain under fog that never lifts, at the foot of an unnamed range on the edge of the Glassbelt Interior, sealed since a waking Record-engine and the rite that hid its survivors c. 1,200 CR. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The Prime of fire, energy, and transformation, the spark that turns ore to steel and potential into reality; its Harmonic is the Crucible. See The Ten Primes (FND).

The Prime of identity and potential, the pull of every self towards the self it could become; its Harmonic is the Dreaming Veil. See The Ten Primes (FND).

A place where a Beyonder’s foreign law overrides the local one; only three have ever reached Caeldon, and each left a dead scar: the Hanging Vale, the Paling, and the Wrongwood. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Harmonic of Terra: earth, structure, and stability, the skeleton that holds the universe together; its Stonewrights are builders and guardians of living stone. See The Planes (FND).

The long mountain belt beside the forest and the oldest Dwarven homeland, its holds cut into the mountain faces and its mines and underways running down into the rock. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The Dwarven branch of the mountain holds of the Ironspine, whose civilization is the Ironspine Holds. See The Elder Peoples (FND).

The oldest Dwarven civilization, founded c. 460,000-c. 438,000 BR, whose unit is the hold, a stone-rooted order of defence, memory, and craft ruled by whoever keeps it standing. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

See Chainwake Gnomes.

A Resonant of Aqua that condensed briefly out of the terror of the Drowning Bloom, when the Elves whose survivors became the Dark Elves prayed for permission to survive by any means, and faded when the waters receded. See Stewards and Resonants (FND).

A resident freshwater people of the far side’s tributary braids, gravel runs, and deep pools, neither Thaluren nor a river branch of the Reedfolk; their civilization is the Bankright Circles. See Peoples of the Water.

The Steward of Aion who guards causality, seeing that before stays before and consequence follows act. See Stewards and Resonants (FND).

An Edgeway kindred’s long care for particular works along its circuit: a culvert cleared every spring, a well relined, a causeway braced before the floods. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The broadest kelp forest of the Tidebound Reaches, where returning runs rest and gather and the young first learn the sea. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

The god of the Dwarven hold gates, a Resonant of Terra born at a besieged gate in the early deep conflicts; his question in the Held Covenant is "will you hold?" See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The routes of the Roothollows that the route keepers count survivable, kept spoken rather than written and learned by mouth and by foot; a way struck from them leaves whoever lives beyond it outside the country in all but memory. See Roads, Rivers, and Crossings.

A small, careful, underwork-adapted people who live wherever surface and underworld meet imperfectly, in mine-edges, drains, vents, and ruin underlevels; their civilization is the Underhouse Compacts. See The Bridge Peoples.

The Shattered God, a Beyonder that is the consciousness of a cosmology of one infinite crystal, without time, growth, or decay. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The marked inner channels behind the Tidelace islands that link harbour to harbour, whose marks a harbour child knows before the names of its towns. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The Sepulchre-Kin’s attempt to record every living person into the Record-engine at once, which ended with the engine preserving its own people to death. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The deep god of refuge and survivable holding, a Resonant of Terra that condensed during the Heartwell Stakings; its question in the Held Covenant is "can this still bear?", and the Kobold underhouses honour it under a name of their own. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The span, c. 150,000-c. 120,000 BR, in which the archive-law world shut its rolls and sealed its last cities, while the keepers who would not let the record die carried its oath forms, scripts, and some of its records to the Floodkeeper Houses. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The chain of defended wells on the outermost spurs of the Rimward Basins, the last water any Pact custodian answers for and the first that Glassbelt crossers reach, often in poor shape. See The Windscar (MED).

The road from the Leeward fold markets over the Lee Wall to the Rimward Basins, under Windscar escort, which keeps Halfling market timing. See Roads, Rivers, and Crossings.

The long ridge on the Windscar side of the Leeward Folds, no built wall at all, to which the Folds owe their life. See The Leeward Folds.

The Windscar’s opposite past a sheltering ridge: hollows, stepped terraces, orchard belts, and cistern-fed valleys, the first named homeland of the Halflings and of the Foldward Commons. See The Leeward Folds.

The settled balance of Prime energy each living being carries, inherited with its kind; it shapes healing, affinity, and the cost of magic, and it is neither a soul nor a measure of virtue. See How Magic Works (FND).

The great fog belt of the outer Tidelace coast, which rolls in off open water with little warning and can lie on the straits for days. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The broadest floor of the Rimward Basins, which floods ankle-deep in a good year; its edge is the one place in the Basins where many kindreds camp side by side. See The Windscar (MED).

The Halfling tale of the year Tamsel held the summer form for a whole year. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

The greatest colossal road, running for weeks along the outer crest of the Ironspine, too broad for any living builder. See Roads, Rivers, and Crossings.

The Record turned inside out; its Librarians try to order the chaos, and visitors who stay too long turn into books and are shelved with the rest. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Marches side of Greyford, also called the Fordbank, lower and wetter, which holds most of the people who keep the crossing working. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The lower course of the Serath and the crowded corridor of walled towns strung along it, bound into the Serathic League. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

A desert built by the mind that walks in it, where the faceless Night-Markers, shapes of a traveller’s own fears, stalk them. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Prime of light and possibility, the principle of revelation that makes the hidden visible; its Harmonic is the Shifting Path. See The Ten Primes (FND).

The worst braided reach of the Lower Serath, which keeps no channel from one low water to the next; the guarantee there is only as good as the pilot. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The Cast-Out of Lux that was the Oculus, the clear light that exposed lies, until it came to believe that nothing should be hidden. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The god of memory kept by voice through the Unrecorded Age, a Resonant of Memoria fed by many peoples under many names, whom later scholars call the Oral Tradition. See Stewards and Resonants (FND).

A broken run of Human frontier wall beyond which the country goes feral, still quarried for stone and argued over as a boundary. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The sea god of the Tidelace Coasts, a Resonant of Aqua born in the Decade of Storms from the prayers of coastal Humans and Gnome harbour towns; her Festival of the Tides brings whole harbours down to the quays. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The shared waymark script of the Edgeway Kindreds, cut, painted, or stacked onto ruins along the circuits; keep-marks say a ruin is spoken for, danger-marks grade a structure from braced to never-touch. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The central Anchor, also called the Equilibrium: Caeldon’s own plane, the hub of the Veil, and the only plane where free will truly works. See The Planes (FND).

The great cistern hall of the Leeward Folds, on the windward side where the Lee Road comes in. See The Leeward Folds.

The deep god of closure, a Resonant of Terra of black ironstone with one arm a gate-leaf, trusted to see a necessary closing and the reckoning after it; its question in the Held Covenant is "must this close?" See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The Record made private: a mansion of the mind whose Curators keep its order and will not open the rooms of what has been repressed. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The first Wrought civilization: sanctuary workshops that from c. 50 CR hid newly awakened Wrought in their walls and swore to who they were against the Unmakers, and by c. 200 CR had houses in most mixed towns of the Headwater, Ironspine, and Broken Marches worlds; they still swear that a Wrought stays the same person through damage and repair. See The Bridge Peoples.

The faded god of a vanished inland-sea people of the Glassbelt Interior, a Resonant of Aqua whose stillness helped turn their sea to salt. See Stewards and Resonants (FND).

A zone that shows the life a person would have lived had they chosen differently. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Unwritten, a Beyonder from a cosmology with no memory, which does not kill but un-writes: colour, then detail, then meaning, then a person’s name and language. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The compound school of Imago with Aqua and Terra, which holds that most forms are negotiations, not absolutes. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

See Haurûm the Mountain-Father.

A workshop where ideas take bodily form, whose Muses encourage and tempt in equal measure. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Binding Song narrowed to names, where a being’s True Name floats above it and whoever holds a name can move its bearer like a puppet. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The face of the Unformed that takes away direction and the name of where one was going; it cannot carry off someone who names a destination and keeps walking towards it. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The compound school of Aqua, Terra, and Imago, which teaches that life is never solitary and that control is a dangerous word. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The compound school of Umbra with Memoria and Aion, from the claim that death changes a being but does not erase all its structure at once. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The zone where the nightmares of many minds run together and take flesh. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

What lies beyond the Boundary, outside the order of the cosmos; the highest scholarship disputes whether it is merely absent or, as the Great Filter holds, predatory. See The Veil and the Outside (FND).

The Star-Eater, a Beyonder from the Devouring Dark, which eats matter and energy and looks on this universe as a banquet. An example of what a Beyonder could be; none of its Incursions has reached Caeldon. See What Waits Outside (FND).

Beings of the Dissonance that are impossible things with a will: never the same shape twice, and set apart from a mere oddity by the fact that they notice. See The Dissonance (FND).

A load-bearing people, living where settled worlds need heavy work but will not let the workers belong; their custom is hearth-weight and their civilization the Hearth-Weight Compacts. See The Bridge Peoples.

The Unison, the most seductive of the Beyonders, because it offers belonging: the union of minds. An example of what a Beyonder could be; none of its Incursions has reached Caeldon. See What Waits Outside (FND).

See The Many-Named.

The Halfling bonds that tie neighbouring folds together. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The far-side people of harsh-land endurance, escorted roads, and sworn passage, neither twisted Humans nor mere raiders; their homeland is the Windscar Expanse and their civilization the Windscar Pacts. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

The High Elf faith of tending life towards its intended form, whose temples are temple-gardens and whose clergy are tenders; its most powerful and most contested patron is Saerith the Mirror-King. See Faith in Practice.

The Thaluren whose runs ride the Far Set, the outermost current road, on their long way home. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

The reality beyond the ordered cosmos, past the Boundary, from which the Beyonders come. See The Veil and the Outside (FND).

The god of the elder Ash-Furnace world, a Resonant of Ignis and the terrible face of fire, whose name is still forbidden near any furnace. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The colourless country between the Lower Serath and the Witnessfields, round the letterless walls of the archive river city that forgot its name, left by the Mnemosyne Null Incursion, c. 132,000-c. 130,000 BR. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The Deficit Plane without sustenance, where water and food are absent and every living thing must consume before it is consumed; its people are the Dust-Eaters, and those who stay too long fall to the Thirst-Madness. See The Planes (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Shifting Path, not the art of commanding fate but of reading the branching conditions of the possible and leaning on them. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The name every Orc escort gives the largest lee anchorage below the Gullstair, where held parties wait. See Roads, Rivers, and Crossings.

The scholars' word for what people call the self: a living, changing configuration of thought, feeling, moral reflex, bonds, and a cadence of resonance particular to one person. See What Makes a People (FND).

Mindless, golem-like Dwarven workframes built for the deep holds' most dangerous work, the ancestors of the Wrought. See The Bridge Peoples.

A rolling mist in which luck is the only law. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Shifting Path narrowed to one blinding point, where Seers speak only of what will happen and visitors act out their parts with their wills pressed almost flat. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

Beings of the Dissonance that feed where light, sound, and warmth go out, and leave dead spots behind; fire only feeds them. See The Dissonance (FND).

The Becoming, a Beyonder from the Protean Abyss that changes things without reason, direction, or end; it arrives as the Bloom, a writhing tower of flesh. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Surplus Plane where truth is absolute and privacy impossible; its people, the Illuminated, glow from within, and its Oracle Gates are places of judgement, confession, and mirrors. See The Planes (FND).

The Orc god of the scouring wind of the Windscar, a Resonant of Zephyr who breaks what has gone stale; his following is growing, and he grows more volatile with it. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The worst stretch of the Headwater road, a gorge so narrow that in a wet spring the river takes the road; a Troll house keeps it. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

A Troll woundline of the wet ravines, strong in the Briarreach. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The deep retention of coherent Echoes in the cosmos’s own memory, chiefly in the Eternal Record. See What Makes a People.

The Harmonic school of the Eternal Record, resting on the idea that nothing stable can be repaired, judged, or inherited without memory. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The under-mountain work of the Sepulchre-Kin, of name-vaults, burial chambers, and preservation cores, built to hold the dead until they settled into Record, which in the Unburial War preserved its own people to death. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

A secondary species of the wet threshold, at home where land and water never settle which is which, and no branch of Humans, Elves, or Dwarves; their strongest country is the lower Confluence Basins and the Lower Serath, and their order is the Floodkeeper Houses. See Peoples of the Water.

The greatest of the reed and fen reaches of the Confluence Basins, above the Lower Serath, and the main Reedfolk country inside the Basins; no sensible boat crosses it without a Reedfolk pilot. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The scholars' account of the person as a continuity of Pattern, Echo, and Record, true but known to few outside the highest scholarship; no being on Caeldon carries a detachable, immortal soul. See What Makes a People.

The gods mortals made without meaning to, condensed out of a Prime’s current by what they feared and loved; they can fade, sleep, or die when their worship goes. See Stewards and Resonants (FND).

The anchored half of the Windscar: closed basins whose rims carry the strongholds, defended wells, and rock-cut cisterns that let Orc life stay in one place. See The Windscar (MED).

The Orcs of the anchored basin side, who hold the wells and cisterns of the Rimward Basins. See The Windscar (MED).

The uppermost course of the Verge Stair, which High Elf roots have spread across until it lies half under root. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The oldest Elven civilization, the Wood Elves of the Elderweald, gathered c. 490,000-c. 460,000 BR: no capital and no seat that speaks for all, only sacred places, elders whom the groves heed, and a shared duty towards the living land. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The catastrophe of c. 335,000-c. 328,000 BR that drove the Dark Elves deeper and began the Elf-Dwarf enmity; at its heart was the Drowning Bloom. See The Threads of History (FND).

The root-caverns beside and beneath the forest, where the forest’s roots come down through the ceiling and grow into the stone; the country of the Dark Elves. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The face of the Unformed that is growth with no ground, which cuts the ties of home and kin; a stone laid on purpose or a hearth built and kept holds it back. See What Waits Outside (FND).

A deep water source, crossing of ways, structural anchor, and remnant of the old underworld at once, fought over in the Heartwell Struggles and claimed by oath ever since. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The rising and falling of sap in the living roots, which keeps the seasons of the Roothollows and sets most Gloamroot house business. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

The Cast-Out of Terra that was the Keeper of the Line, until it came to dread every yielding of rule and bound generations into one chain of flesh and will. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Beyonder of premature ending, from the Oxidized Wastes, under which steel, stone, and flesh fall apart before their time; it yields to preservation. An example of what a Beyonder could be; none of its Incursions has reached Caeldon. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The compound school of Aqua with Imago, Verba, and Ignis, built around exchange under pressure. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The High Elf god of the Crownbough Courts and of finished form, a Resonant of Imago born of the houses' pride and fear of being found less than they claimed; the most powerful and most contested patron of the Ordered Bough. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The narrow, silt-heavy river of the Briarreach whose cut carries the region’s one reliable through-route, its crossings kept by Troll houses. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

A people defined less by descent than by practice, risen from survivor lines who walked the abandoned colossal roads: travelling, reading structures, recovering material, and keeping broken works usable. Their first order is the Edgeway Kindreds. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The compound school of Lux with Verba, Aqua, and Terra, which treats magic as covenant made practical. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The Thaluren keepers of the spawning grounds, who judge whether a water is fouled or defiled and have the last word when the waters of the young are in danger. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The Deficit Plane without safety, a world of constant danger whose scarred people are the Scourge-Born; it is reached through War-Gates, and those who stay too long risk the Blood-Fury, a rage that turns them on friend and foe alike. See The Planes (FND).

The Held Covenant as Stonewake and the deep holds keep it: severe, slow to reopen what has been closed, leaning on the Measured Seal and the Last Chamber. See Faith in Practice.

The sealing, abandonment, and ritual barring of the ruined passages, c. 328,000-c. 318,000 BR. See The Threads of History (FND).

Another name for the Original Potential from which the Primes differentiated. See The Ten Primes (FND).

A remote mountain-basin people of the Elder Worlds, c. 160,000-c. 120,000 BR, whose civilization was built around death-work, burial depth, and the refusal of oblivion, and which fell in the Unburial War. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The great river into which the rivers of the Confluence Basins gather. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The god of the Serath, a Resonant of Aqua, more foreman than monarch, who stands first in the Sworn Accord beside Anvelle; his Festival of the First Flow opens the river’s year. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The Cast-Out of Umbra that was the Weaver of Songlines, until it resolved that no one should ever be alone, and offers the lonely a bond that will never leave. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The basin grain road from granary to granary and march-town to march-town along the valley rises above the flood line. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The greatest escarpment of the Windscar, the cliff-broken edge where the High Scars drop towards the basin rims. See The Windscar (MED).

The Harmonic of Lux: possibility, chance, and the future, where what the universe will become is still undecided; its Wayfinders guide the lost through its branches. See The Planes (FND).

The Deficit Plane without meaning, the cruellest of the five because what it takes is the self; its natives are the Hollows, and its Quiet Gates are libraries where nobody reads any more and places of deep meditation. See The Planes (FND).

The Quiet Plague, a Beyonder whose sign is what stops: birdsong, the wind in the grass, a traveller’s own footsteps; it breaks on loud, ragged noise. An example of what a Beyonder could be; none of its Incursions has reached Caeldon. See What Waits Outside (FND).

A round chamber of black stone found in ancient courthouses and at the sites of great trials and broken oaths, where words have weight and masked Judges weigh every one and never speak. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Gale’s paradox: a wind of hurricane force that makes no sound at all, held sacred by its Mute-Walkers. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Cast-Out of Verba that was the Liberator of Tongues, keeper of the cathartic cry, until it grew terrified of what speech does and decided to stop the voice. See What Waits Outside (FND).

A scattered archipelago of floating land, from rocky outcrops to great masses of earth, where the Sky-Walkers rest without ever letting go of their anchor. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

An imposed course: sustained resonant pressure from outside that bends a person, a group, an object, or a plane towards one end; its strength is its pressure, and the mounting cost of resisting it is its dissonance. A scholars' word; most people speak of fate or luck. See The Planes (FND).

The common name for a zone where the Whispering Trace has become a prison, holding Echoes on their chains. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The chain of roadsteads, lee sounds, transfer quays, and pilot stations along the Tidelace’s Windscar-facing edge, where escorted Orc parties are met, counted, and answered by Gnome station crews. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The best-known harbour entrance of the Tidelace, the marked mouth of a Gaugeward harbour with its sounding house, beacons, and Open Bench, held by the harbour families who decide who may pass it and when. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The mixed estuary on the coastward edge of the Tidebound Reaches where a Thaluren return river breaks into braided channels around reed-shelves; centre of the Estuary Terms. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The span, c. 16,000-c. 2,000 BR, in which Dwarven workframes left the holds along the Headwater roads and spread across the corridor world as labour that could not refuse. See The Bridge Peoples.

The basin tale, told more often where levies rise, of the year the people refused to rest the land and half the villages starved. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The White Noise, a Beyonder that buries every signal in hiss and flicker until the senses report what is not there; one clear, steady thought cuts through it. An example of what a Beyonder could be; none of its Incursions has reached Caeldon. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Orc tale told against the strongholds, of a camp that stayed at one well until the water soured, until the Storm-Caller tore the shelters down and drove it on. See The Windscar (MED).

The sealed archive-city of the Witnessfields nearest the corridor, where the closing words of the registers are cut into the gate. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The Dwarven civilization within the Ironspine Holds, founded c. 360,000-c. 348,000 BR: a deep-hold order of guarded ways, reservoirs, and archives, with the severest closure custom in the lower world, under which a shut door can save a hundred holds or bury the people behind it. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The deep central hold-cluster below the Ironspine, where more of the lower world’s routes and water converge than anywhere else, and where a sealed door is at once an oath, a prayer, and a border. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

A pocket where time has halted at one instant, centred on a Clock-Keeper, often the remnant of whoever made it. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

A perpetual lightning storm in which the order of things is turned over; its Storm-Walkers ride the lightning, and visitors who are struck and survive are drawn back until they become part of it. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The compound school of Ignis with Zephyr and Aqua: unstable convergence, great force from tensions held just long enough to break together. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The high country above the Ironspine holds, bare ridges and storm shelves where the Upland Colossal world left its terraces, ridge roads, and weather shrines; the colossal heartland still. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The mouths of root-grown stairways that once ran from the deep groves of the Elderweald down into the Roothollows, ending now in silt and bars. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The Harmonic of Aqua: water, flow, life, and adaptation, the circulation of the cosmos; its Tidesingers speak in song and see the universe as one system to be kept in balance. See The Planes (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Surging Deep, whose lesson is that life survives through movement. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The faith of the Human corridor world, the Confluence Marches and the Serathic League, which treats gods as the river towns treat strangers: a god is honoured in common once a town has sworn to it and entered it on the roster in its oath-house, and Anvelle and Serovan stand first. See Faith in Practice.

The Sepulchre-Kin preserved as damaged Echoes inside their dormant Record-engine, the last of the Tomb-Builder’s worshippers. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The god of the turning year in the Halfling folds, a Resonant of Aion who is young and green in spring and pale and frosted in winter; the Festival of the Turn is kept for Tamsel. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The clergy of the Ordered Bough, whose authority rests on patience and on what has visibly flourished under their care. See Faith in Practice.

The Prime of earth, structure, and permanence, the framework on which every other force builds and the first of the ten to wake; its Harmonic is the Iron Backbone. See The Ten Primes (FND).

An ancient oceanic people of the Tidebound Reaches, no branch of the Elves despite the misnomer "sea-elves"; they live at sea but are born upriver, and the return to spawn shapes all their custom and faith. See Peoples of the Water.

The Elven branch that hardened under the harsh woodland of the Briarreach towards caution, defensive adaptation, and strict boundary custom; their civilization is the Thornbound Circles. See The Elder Peoples (FND).

The Thorn Elf civilization of the Briarreach, founded c. 405,000-c. 392,000 BR, whose own gift is earned hospitality: a stranger is let in only by steps and under a sponsor. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The outermost chamber of a Gloamroot house, where the way enters, the route keepers lodge, and strangers are received. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The watch of a Gloamroot house, changing at fixed turns, in which someone of the house sits in the threshold chamber with a route keeper, and a house that refuses a stranger there lives with the refusal for generations. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

A pool that reflects not the present but time; its Echo-Divers live partly in the past and warn every visitor not to look too long. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The far-side water-world that binds sea and river into one: current roads, reef and kelp settlements, estuaries, and upriver spawning approaches; the homeland of the Thaluren. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

See The Tidelace Coasts.

The broken far-side coast of inlets, island chains, tidal straits, cliff harbours, and fog belts, where nobody enters the sea without reading it first, and some hamlets keep a wrecker’s lamp; the country of the Gnomes. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

A zone built on purpose: a vault of dilated time drawn from the Frozen Moment, guarded by the Bronze Sentries, in which what was sealed stays as dangerous as on the day it was sealed. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The lord’s keepers of the Greyford toll-gate, who take what the lord asks for each load and chalk a mark on the cart. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The god of the Sepulchre-Kin burial houses, a Resonant of Terra whose obsession with permanence drove the Unburial War; his true name is held inside their Record-engine. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The Harmonic school of the Whispering Trace, concerned with what remains after departure, damage, death, or loss. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

A people of wounded frontiers, whose bodies carry Failed Mending, found where land and works refuse to heal and holding the crossings no one else will keep; their civilization is the Crossing-Oath Houses, and their lines are called woundlines. See The Bridge Peoples.

A stone basin of unnaturally pure water that rejects falsehood and holds drowned liars as warnings, kept as a sacred trust by the Water-Robed. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

The Resonant of Aion born of Thaluren dread as egg blight entered the First Nesting Confluence; the stillness she gave held the clutches in a prison from which they could never hatch. See Peoples of the Water.

The Prime of shadow and the trace, the principle of what remains; its Harmonic is the Whispering Trace. See The Ten Primes (FND).

The Harmonic of Zephyr: air, motion, freedom, and thought, the breath of the universe and the carrier of ideas; its footless Wind-Walkers glide on its currents. See The Planes (FND).

The unrecorded fall of the Sepulchre-Kin, c. 110,000-c. 80,000 BR, in which their burial houses turned their power over the dead on one another. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The terraced receiving grounds at the foot of the Crownbough canopy where envoys and petitioners wait, often for a long time; few are taken higher. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The one undivided potential from before the Primes, still lying beneath all they defined and pressing towards the undoing of form; it feels no malice, its threat is a gradual loss of meaning, names, and edges, and the ten named Unformed are its faces. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The sixth age, c. 120,000-c. 40,000 BR, after writing ended in the cradle, when peoples kept their customs and genealogies in breath and its graves and hoards are still turned up by the plough. See The Ages of Caeldon (FND).

The open ocean seaward of every known far-side water, past the Far Set, the outer isles of the Tidelace, and the fog banks off the Soundchain Roads. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

The upper storey of the root-cavern world nearest the forest, drowned in the Roothollow Rupture and sealed ever since: a layer nobody enters. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The Orc god of lineage and the dead on the Windscar, a Resonant of Memoria who keeps the names of kindreds that held passage on the Stele of Names and strikes the names of those who broke it, leaving them outlaws of the open country. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND).

The god of the hidden in the Broken Marches, a Resonant of Umbra born of everyone who has had to live unseen in the ruin-belts; many fugitive Wrought prayed to him. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The fluid space between places that connects every plane, a fog whose face changes towards each plane it borders and which takes its price from travellers, most often in what they remember. See The Veil and the Outside (FND).

The people native to the Veil, humanoid, with skin that shimmers like oil on water and features that shift with the fog, so that nobody can say afterwards quite what a Veil-Walker’s face was like. See The Veil and the Outside (FND).

The Prime of language, order, and meaning, the force that turns noise into speech and sensation into a world of named things; its Harmonic is the Binding Song. See The Ten Primes (FND).

The Surplus Plane where life reproduces faster than anything can contain it; its people, the Verdant, have skin like bark, leaves, or moss, and its Seed-Gates are ancient forests and overgrown ruins. See The Planes (FND).

The stone stair of Dwarven building between the Ironspine and the Crownboughs that ends at a gate the High Elf courts grew; each side keeps its half, and exchange is done on the landing between. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The compound school that braids Aqua, Imago, and Memoria to restore a living body in flow, form, and pattern at once. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The cleared ground at the edge of the Briarreach where the Thornbound Circles receive traders and envoys, and where most trade happens and goes no further. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The rite of shadow and concealment the Hushvale survivors made c. 1,200 CR to hide their villages from the waking Record-engine, which closed the vale under fog. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The Steward of Aion who holds that some losses cannot be reclaimed without cost; those who come to it to undo a loss are told to bring an honest account of what they will pay. See Stewards and Resonants (FND).

The compound school of Terra with Verba and Lux: the school of saying no with structure. See The Schools of Magic (FND).

The faith of the Thaluren and the only organized religion on Caeldon with no god at its centre: its teaching is the rule of return and its pilgrimage the run itself. See Peoples of the Water.

A chain of colossal stacked-stone weather shrines on the Stormcrown’s highest ridges, facing the storms rather than any town. See Worlds That Came Before (FND).

The Surplus Plane where separation is impossible; its people, the Linked, carry the feeling of the collective, and beings wholly merged into its network form the Chorus. See The Planes (FND).

The Cast-Out of Lux that was the Keeper of the Shrine, until it wearied of doubt and set out to carve the faithful into figures of unthinking adoration. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The main crossing of the High Scars, a narrow storm-cut pass where the wind is strongest and the scree least stable. See The Windscar (MED).

The Harmonic of Umbra: death, reflection, and remnant, the space between the living and the gone; its Echo-Walkers help lost Echoes towards release or passage into the Record. See The Planes (FND).

A zone of the Unbound Gale in a high pass, a canyon, or a windy ruin, where the Wind-Listeners live by hearing and the voices of visitors whose bodies are gone have joined the wind. See The Resonant Zones (FND).

See The Windscar Expanse.

The far side’s exposed heart: dry uplands, escarpments, and interior basins, homeland of the Orcs, divided between the anchored Rimward Basins and the exposed High Scars. See The Windscar (MED).

The first named Orc civilization and the far side’s first inland founding, c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR: kindreds bound by treaty-grounds, escort oaths, and the blood owed for a broken passage, split between reserve-right on the rims and treaty-right on the roads. See The Windscar (MED).

The terraced upland east of the Lower Serath, the sealed homeland of the elder Archive-Law world: marker roads lined with inscribed stones and archive-cities whose gates have been shut for more than a hundred thousand years, where the Grey Clerks still stop passers. See Sealed and Silent Places (MED).

The first Elven branch, a grove-bound people of the Elderweald whose continuity is kept by growing within a living landscape, not by redesigning it; their civilization is the Rootcrown Concord. See The Elder Peoples (FND).

The burned and overgrown Headwater valley where the Qzoth Incursion, c. 4,000-c. 3,500 BR, was burned back; Kindless Broods still breed there, and broken ground wakes the Changing Fever. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The made people, youngest of Caeldon, who began when Dwarven predecessor-frames stopped being tools; their continuity passes through design and repair, and their civilization is the Mending Orders. See The Bridge Peoples.

The Hive-Mind, a Beyonder that offers union in the body instead of the mind. An example of what a Beyonder could be; none of its Incursions has reached Caeldon. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Unraveller, a Beyonder that dissolves the glue between things, so that a blade leaves its hilt mid-swing; it cannot cut a bond held hard. An example of what a Beyonder could be; none of its Incursions has reached Caeldon. See What Waits Outside (FND).

The Prime of air and motion, the last of the ten to wake; its Harmonic is the Unbound Gale. See The Ten Primes (FND).