The god of people who belong to two peoples at once, a Resonant of Imago risen in the Headwater foothills; frontier Dwarves call the god Durrask and the Goblins of the mixed crossings Ziv, and young people of mixed households burn masks for Abrel. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

One of the nine longest divisions of Caeldon’s history, from the Foundations to the Medieval Present; ages are periods, not categories, and they overlap. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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.

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.

One of the six Wrought design lineages. See The Bridge Peoples.

The layer of belief every people shares beneath its gods: seasonal rites, planting and harvest observance, fire-lighting customs, oath forms, burial practice, and the taboos whose breaking counts as sacrilege. See The Ten Primes.

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.

The god of the scribes and record-houses of the Human corridor, a Resonant of Memoria who is always losing records to fire and seizure. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The sheltered receiving sound in the outer approaches, older than the Soundchain corridor, where the Windscar Pacts first learned that reaching a coast is not the same as being let in. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

The first great Orc-Gnome clash at one place, c. 141,000-c. 137,000 BR, when storm-driven Windscar parties starved on the shore of the Answering Sound and war-leaders tried the inner channels by force. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The feud of c. 126,000-c. 122,000 BR in which the small harbours and Windscar crews banded together against the Answerward pilots, who had begun withholding pilots to rule the coast. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The order of Gnome pilots, raised c. 135,000-c. 129,000 BR, that carried the coast’s word to arriving parties, until it began to use its pilots as a weapon and the Gnomes had to fight it back. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

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.

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.

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.

The moment a Wood Elf grove counts someone grown, when its elders and ritual keepers say aloud together that the person has arrived. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The broad, flexible ancestry of the peoples who arose closer to the survivable middle of the world: Humans, Halflings, Orcs, Gnomes, and the water peoples. See Humans.

The Kavari councils of the river banks, whose elders settle quarrels over access, repair, and shelter, and judge any use of the river by whether it leaves the water alive. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The first Kavari civilization, c. 190,000-c. 160,000 BR, which nobody founded: the bank councils, pool-kin circles, and nursery keepers of many linked tributaries simply began to stand together. See Peoples of the Water.

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.

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.

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.

The spread of the Dark Elf memory of abandonment through the wider Elven world, c. 318,000-c. 305,000 BR. See The Threads of History.

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 Thaluren of the Blightward Keepers, who keep faith with damaged sacred water. See Peoples of the Water.

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

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.

The Troll answers to the questions of a people that cannot easily be killed: who may be struck, which wounds should close, what a scar records; to Trolls wounds and scars are sacred record. See The Bridge Peoples.

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.

The membrane that separates the ordered cosmos from the Nothing outside it, held by the combined pressure of the Primes. See The Veil and the Outside.

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.

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 Troll families of the Crossing-Oath Houses that keep named crossings for generations, and read a Troll’s scars like the history of a crossing. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

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.

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 Hearth-Weight houses that keep the count of work owed and work honoured. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The spread of the Stonewake memory of necessary closure through the Dwarven holds, in the same span as the Bitter Root Histories. See The Threads of History.

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.

The Hearth-Weight elders who stand by whenever a band takes up dangerous labour. See The Bridge Peoples.

What a breach left open by a Beyonder can become: local reality unravelling into the Nothing. See The Veil and the Outside.

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.

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.

The span, c. 18,000-c. 8,000 BR, in which Ogre camps that came for seasonal work on the corridor roads were held there by debt and controlled food. See The Bridge Peoples.

The Kavari keepers of flowing water, who know that a river cannot be frozen into fixed borders. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

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.

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 Halfling households that release a fold’s water to the terraces in turn and clear the channels before the wet season. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

One of the six Wrought design lineages. See The Bridge Peoples.

The span, c. 178,000-c. 162,000 BR, in which egg blight in the Thaluren’s oldest sacred water forced the Returning Concord to close it to ordinary return. See The Threads of History.

The Thaluren circles that say aloud who descends from whom and who has been adopted, and name before each run who is going and as whose kin. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

The scholars' name for the hearth working of Crucible Magic that reddens last night’s coals as if someone had blown on them. See The Schools of Magic.

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 first Human civilization, founded c. 40,000-c. 20,000 BR: basin lordships, marcher strongholds, and exchange roads bound by kin, oath, and the strength of their lords rather than by any crown; most cradle-web Humans live, trade, and swear their oaths within it. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The name for the whole Human rise of c. 24,000-c. 2,000 BR, when the young, fast Humans first made themselves felt across the cradle-web. See How the Present Was Made.

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

The span, c. 190,000-c. 160,000 BR, in which the Kavari bank councils, pool-kin, and nursery keepers of linked tributaries came to act as one, before the Thaluren ascents arrived. See The Threads of History.

The seventh age, c. 40,000-c. 2,000 BR, in which the young Humans came into their own, fast and hungry, and swallowed, borrowed, or bent nearly every older order they touched. See How the Present Was Made.

The wind at the backs of the Edgeway Kindreds on their circuits, a Resonant of Zephyr who cannot stop moving. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

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.

The answer to a dangerous Resonant Zone that spends an opposing Harmonic against it, as the stillness of the Frozen Moment is set against a zone of the Crucible. See The Resonant Zones.

The rivalry of pride between the Crownbough houses and the great Ironspine holds, c. 375,000-c. 355,000 BR, fought with insults, raids, and ambush on the slopes between them. See The Threads of History.

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.

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 High Elf embassies to the rising Human lords, c. 16,000-c. 8,000 BR, which began a long rivalry of gifts, insults, duels, and imitation. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Not a substance or a school but a judgement of use: magic whose cost falls on those who did not agree to pay it. Whoever holds the place forbids it, and most peoples sort its acts as restricted, conditional, prohibited, or atrocity-class; atrocity-class casters are hunted and killed where they can be caught. See How Magic Works.

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 third age, c. 380,000-c. 300,000 BR, of the Roothollow Rupture, the sealing of the deep world, and the Elf-Dwarf enmity. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The span, c. 365,000-c. 350,000 BR, in which the deep holds below the Ironspine became a branch of their own and made the right to seal a door their defining custom. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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.

The five Anchors shaped by absence: the Scourge, the Ashen Wastes, the Parched, the Frost-Bound, and the Silence. See The Planes.

The pattern by which each Deficit Plane pairs across the Material Plane with a Surplus Plane that holds the same concept in saturated form. See The Planes.

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.

Casting supported or empowered by a power beyond the caster: a Prime’s current reached through alignment, a Resonant willing to supply power, or, rarely, a Steward acting within its office. See How Magic Works.

The compound school of Verba with Imago and Lux, on the brutal premise that language, image, and pressure can define behaviour. See The Schools of Magic.

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

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.

A cove of the outer Tidelace Coasts where a crew sang a storm-working out of key; at slack water the shore is heard from beneath. One of the six known off-key places. See The Dissonance.

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.

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

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.

The name frontier Dwarves give Abrel the Changeling. See Stewards and Resonants.

The growth, c. 405,000-c. 330,000 BR, of some centres below the Ironspine into the heavier holds on which the deep world depended. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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.

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 face of the Unformed that takes away definition: a smudge where the eye will not focus and a name sounds like a foreign word. See What Waits Outside.

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 remote and desolate places of the Material Plane that lie closest to the Boundary. See The Veil and the Outside.

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 vanished elder civilizations, Upland Colossal, Ash-Furnace, Archive-Law, and Sepulchre-Kin, and the fourth age, c. 300,000-c. 120,000 BR, named for them, in which the first Humans emerged and the younger peoples found their feet by serving the elder worlds, surviving them, or picking over what they left. See Worlds That Came Before.

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).

The long quarrel, c. 26,000-c. 10,000 BR, of Human clearing, road-cutting, and water use against the Wood Elves' care for the living forest. See The Threads of History.

The verge wars of the Rootcrown Elves and the Ironspine Dwarves, c. 410,000-c. 385,000 BR, fought with raid, ambush, fouled water, and felled groves over springs, slopes, and sacred ground. See The Forest Heartlands (MED).

The division of the Elves into their branches, c. 450,000-c. 318,000 BR. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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.

The taking of the Goblin seam-warrens by early Dwarven holdmaking, c. 465,000-c. 420,000 BR, which walled and smoked the Goblins out of the ground they held. See The Bridge Peoples.

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 first lasting Thaluren-Gnome custom at mixed estuaries, c. 144,000-c. 138,000 BR, won at the Split Reed Mouth after years of cut marker-lines, drowned pilots, and Thaluren war-bands in the reeds: soundings and spawning runs share the mouth, with guarded approach and protected return-water. See Peoples of the Water.

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.

A distorted healing pattern in which lifeforce repair overcorrects, closing wounds too strongly and preserving harm in altered form; it became heritable in the Trolls. See How Magic Works.

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.

The fifth age, c. 160,000-c. 98,000 BR, in which the young far-side peoples fought over wells, passes, harbours, and spawning water through a long chain of feuds, raids, and wars, and the terms the stronger side dictated became the custom of the far side. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

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.

The primal terror at the knowledge that existence is finite, that it has an edge, and that the edge is held by nothing that can care whether it holds. See The Veil and the Outside.

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 great feast of the Halfling folds, kept for Tamsel at the changing of the seasons; if it is held with true joy, the harvest will be good. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

One of the six Wrought design lineages. See The Bridge Peoples.

The forming of the first lasting bodies in the new Material Plane, c. 12,000,000-c. 2,500,000 BR. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The first meetings of High Elves and Dwarves, c. 375,000-c. 360,000 BR. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The becoming of the Dwarves under the mountains, c. 475,000-c. 425,000 BR. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The disciplining of an old inheritance in the forest into a durable people, the Elves, c. 500,000-c. 450,000 BR. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The moment, c. 12,000,000 BR, when balance in the core became durable enough that it was a true Material Plane, with spatial law holding everywhere and cause and persistence holding at large scale. See The Planes.

The rise of Humans, c. 300,000-c. 220,000 BR, in the mixed country where the Confluence Basins meet the Headwater foothills. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The faded Resonant of Imago born of the first Human self-awareness during the First Human Emergence, whose voice said only "Look." See Humans.

The span, c. 700,000-c. 500,000 BR, in which lines of living things began to carry adaptation forward through inheritance. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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 span, c. 2,500,000-c. 500,000 BR, in which Caeldon’s great contrasts became permanent: canopy, mountain mass, and the lower country of gathering waters. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The first meeting of Elves and Dwarves as stable neighbours, c. 445,000-c. 425,000 BR. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The first meetings of the deep Elves and the Dwarves across the Roothollow-Stonewake threshold, c. 340,000-c. 335,000 BR. See The Threads of History.

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.

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.

The Halfling civilization of the Leeward Folds, c. 170,000-c. 152,000 BR, which began when the separate folds came to depend on one another: an order of terraces, cisterns, and bounded plenty. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

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.

The compound school of Ignis with Terra and Verba, which holds that matter can be taught. See The Schools of Magic.

One of the six Wrought design lineages; with the Mineframe line it holds most of the Wrought of the Ironspine. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

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

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.

The consolidation of the basin world into the first Human civilization, c. 40,000-c. 20,000 BR. See The Threads of History.

The gathering of Reedfolk reed settlements, crossing shrines, and flood-remembering house lines into one order, c. 210,000-c. 182,000 BR. See The Threads of History.

The face of the Unformed with too much definition rather than too little, showing every version of a person at once; it cannot split someone who chooses one self. See What Waits Outside.

The compound school of Aqua, Terra, and Aion with Umbra in support, which treats cold as discipline made visible. See The Schools of Magic.

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.

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.

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.

The last layer of the Serathic Oath of Layers: the day a person takes on the heaviest duties of town, oath, and line in their own right; in practice the rank of the rich houses. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

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

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.

The slow gathering of Human bands across the basin valleys, c. 120,000-c. 50,000 BR, until the basin and foothill people saw themselves as one varied world. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The Gnome civilization of the Tidelace Coasts, formed c. 165,000-c. 146,000 BR, an order of signals, soundings, and measured entry. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The bargain of c. 153,000-c. 148,000 BR that ended the standoff at the Gravelbraid Nurseries, where Kavari keepers held a redirected Thaluren run out of their nursery-water with barriers, bodies, and blood; it named the Twofold Waters, mostly on Kavari terms. See Peoples of the Water.

The shallow middle-river braids of gravel channels, rootbank pools, and cold spring inlets where Kavari households raise their young. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

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.

The darker scholarly view that the Nothing is predatory, consuming cosmologies that weaken or fail, that the Boundary is the cosmos defending itself, and that the Primes are its defences. See The Veil and the Outside.

The long early strain in which the first field of reality was sharpened towards extremes it could not hold together. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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.

The differentiation of the Seed into the ten Primes, one after another, as the universe expanded. See The Ten Primes.

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.

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 faded Ogre god of the chain-camps, a Resonant of Zephyr born of the camps' prayers not for a better master but for a way out. See The Bridge Peoples.

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.

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 long span, c. 2,000 BR-c. 500 CR, in which old contacts, corridor customs, and inherited quarrels became the ordinary ground of medieval life. See The Ages of Caeldon.

The ten schools of magic rooted each in one Harmonic, with one dominant Prime: Crucible, Surging, Backbone, Gale, Dream, Record, Path, Binding, Trace, and Frozen Moment Magic. See The Schools of Magic.

The ten planes made not of matter but of law, each a Prime’s current given structure, from the Crucible of fire to the Frozen Moment of time; every one of them is both a place and a principle. See The Planes.

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.

The span, c. 28,000-c. 14,000 BR, that made Humans and Dwarves each other’s engine of growth, metal and craft going down and grain coming up. See The Threads of History.

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.

The feud of c. 24,000-c. 23,000 BR in which Dwarven elders refused oath-right to a trusted Human foster child, and both sides believed they were in the right. See How the Present Was Made.

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 named compound tradition of adaptive flow guided by shape, which closes wounds and restores form; the most widespread compound tradition in the healing arts. See How Magic Works.

The Hearth-Weight keepers who see that food, rest, care for the hurt, and protection for a band’s children are paid, not begged; when a band is cheated, someone at the fire says only "send the hearth-keeper". See The Bridge Peoples.

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 first great Dark Elf-Dwarf war, c. 320,000-c. 314,000 BR, fought for the Rootstone Heartwell, whose grudges every later meeting of the two peoples inherits. See The Threads of History.

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 faded Reedfolk god, a Resonant of Imago, of the Floodkeeper houses that would not be made servants of the Human river powers. See Peoples of the Water.

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.

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 route side of the Windscar Pacts, hardened c. 121,000-c. 112,000 BR: route moots, cairn-line wardens, warning runners, and escort captains, who pay war-bands and bounty-takers by the head for the outlaws that raid their roads. See The Windscar (MED).

The medieval word for a Goblin of an Iron Compact, and nothing more: not a separate species. See The Bridge Peoples.

The span, c. 465,000-c. 445,000 BR, in which the earliest Dwarves of the Ironspine became a hold people, for whom enduring means sound halls, safe passages, and memory cut in stone. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

The walled-up bell hall of an empty Ironspine hold, where a bell was cast wrong to call the dead back; on certain nights the stone hums. One of the six known off-key places. See The Dissonance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The starving Ogre bands of the Long Hunger that raided their neighbours' camps and left their own old in the snow, turning the strength that held them together into a weapon. See The Bridge Peoples.

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.

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.

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.

The failure of the overstrained early cosmos, c. 33,600,000,000 BR, in which it broke inward, the extremes split away as separate planes, and a balanced core remained; the Unformed gave it its last push. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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.

The first great Goblin civilization, which took its present shape c. 20,000-c. 9,000 BR: armed Goblin companies that hold a road, a fort’s watch, or a ruin for a lord who would pay more to drive them out than to keep them, under a warrant he can tear up whenever it suits him. See The Bridge Peoples.

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 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).

The god of oaths, sworn testimony, and sealed bargains in the oath-houses and moot-halls of the Human corridor, a Resonant of Verba by whom oath-breakers are cursed. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

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.

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 Verba who gives a true vow its force, tells a sworn word from an empty one, and can release an oath that has become impossible to keep. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Ignis who guards the truth that some forms must break for renewal to be possible, and sees that every ending comes when it should, against preservation turned to cowardice and burning for its own sake. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Umbra who is not death but the road out of life, seeing that the dead may depart and keeping the living from being dragged across too soon. See The Veil and the Outside.

The Steward of Memoria who preserves the histories whose erasure would wound the cosmos itself: first covenants, species traumas, the records of catastrophes. See Stewards and Resonants.

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

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 say a group holds in works it has returned to for generations, honoured by the others along the circuits and laughed at by lords. See The Threads of History.

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.

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.

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 keeper remembered as having led the archive-cities in declaring their rolls complete, who came to believe the record was the only part of the world that could be made perfect. See Worlds That Came Before.

The first named quarrel under the Gravel Oath, c. 147,000-c. 146,000 BR, when a Thaluren run arrived late with a real emergency at a braid a Bankright council had already closed; the Kavari councils who held the water settled it on their own terms. See Peoples of the Water.

The terms of the Serathic river guarantees that say who may draw water and fish where, who holds each crossing, and what those who live along the Serath owe the towns that hold it; Serovan is said to have dictated it to the first guarantors. See The Basins and the Marches (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 cistern halls, terrace watchers, orchard tally houses, and reserve counters of the Foldward Commons, hardened c. 146,000-c. 139,000 BR after the first great quarrel over honest measure, which make every count open to a neighbour’s challenge. See The Leeward Folds.

The far-side terms, c. 146,000-c. 140,000 BR, by which Halflings and Gnomes learned to make sense of each other’s very different kinds of care. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The oath, c. 136,000-c. 134,000 BR, that carried the end of the Counted Lee Timing Feud to every landing where fold loads meet harbour boats: when the harbour changes the day, it says so, the loss is shown to both sides, and someone pays. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The first lasting meeting ground of Halflings and Orcs, c. 160,000-c. 145,000 BR: escorted parties are owed an answer at fold markets and cistern halls, because the Pacts could close the Lee Road, but reception is not entry, and the folds stay shut behind them. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

Channels along which the ambient force of magic lies nearer the surface, easier to reach, shape, and draw on; a ley line does not create magic, and lines and their nodes can move. See How Magic Works.

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.

The compound school of Lux with Imago and Verba, which treats perception as something that can be composed. See The Schools of Magic.

A formal rite of sanctioned symbols, words, offices, or shared assent, with or without a god’s support. See How Magic Works.

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 span, c. 195,000-c. 160,000 BR, in which the failing high country stopped feeding large bodies, hunger-bands of Ogres turned their strength on others, and the camps that held bound strength to care as hearth-weight. See The Bridge Peoples.

The span from the Inward Sundering to the First Equilibrium, in which pockets of stability formed in the balanced core, failed, and formed again. See The Planes.

A stair of living root in an Elderweald hill, grown by a Wood Elf working that went wrong, which goes down further than the hill is tall. One of the six known off-key places. See The Dissonance.

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

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.

The span, c. 30,000-c. 8,000 BR, in which the Human river powers swallowed the Reedfolk water orders of the lower rivers and turned their command of the water into service, while still depending on what they knew. See Peoples of the Water.

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).

The span, c. 26,000-c. 16,000 BR, in which oaths of safe passage, guarded crossings, and shared duty along the crowded lower river hardened into the river towns' first lasting pact, tying the right to take dues to keeping the river safe. 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.

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.

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).

A lasting change to a body’s lifeforce caused not by ordinary inheritance but by long residence in strong ley country, repeated overcasting, unstable mixed energies, altered lines, or dark practice. See How Magic Works.

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.

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.

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.

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

The clash of Orc escorts and Halfling counters at the Measure Cistern, c. 147,000-c. 143,000 BR, in which armed Windscar escorts camped outside the cistern until sworn terms ended the fighting, and the cistern halls first gave their four answers: receive, delay, send on, or sustain for a while. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The Halfling quarrel of c. 154,000-c. 148,000 BR in which good harvests and outside traffic pulled the folds two ways, and the Commons learned to tell honest reserve from hoarding, and welcome they could afford from welcome given for show. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

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 era this edition describes, set around 1,350 CR. See A World in Two Halves.

The ninth age, c. 500-c. 1500 CR, which the Settlement shades into without a border. See How the Present Was Made.

The Prime of memory, history, and narrative, the principle that the past does not vanish; its Harmonic is the Eternal Record. See The Ten Primes.

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.

What every redirected Thaluren return owes the poisoned source water it left, the price of accepting any other water at all; it is why pilgrims still climb to the Naming Reach to name the old water aloud. See Peoples of the Water.

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.

One of the six Wrought design lineages; with the Forgeframe line it holds most of the Wrought of the Ironspine. See Stone and the Deep (MED).

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

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.

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

See Haurûm the Mountain-Father.

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

Rare exceptional gifts that appear in otherwise ordinary members of any people: uncanny luck, kinship with beasts, a sense for dreams or for death, an ear that hears truth, a feel for the way through. See How Magic Works.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The guild tradition where smith-mages learn Crucible and Forge Magic through metal, and smithcraft and magic are inseparable. See The Schools of Magic.

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.

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.

The Rimward stronghold and cistern at the foot of the busiest ramp down the Shearline, where the wells and the escorted roads must answer to one another, and the test of every Pact oath since the Rimward Passage War. See The Windscar (MED).

See The Serathic Oath of Layers.

The named compound tradition that joins retention and formal naming to fix a commitment into lasting record, at home with scribes, priests, and scholars. See How Magic Works.

The later of the two Headwater Rites, which brings the right to swear, inherit, and bind in one’s own name. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The god of chosen forgetting among the survivors of the furnace world’s fall, a Resonant of Memoria who took the memory of the overburn away, and with it the lesson. See Worlds That Came Before.

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.

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.

The Thaluren civilization within and around the Returning Concord, risen from redirected return, which holds that a rightful return may move to other waters if it carries memory-debt towards the poisoned source. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

See The Many-Named.

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.

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 severe, blind god of the Serathic towns, a Resonant of Lux born of grievance over dues taken and upkeep never done, who drags hidden wrongs into the light; the Ashen Lantern is called his eye. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

Faint traces of the Sepulchre-Kin mingled into later peoples. See Worlds That Came Before.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What comes through where another plane presses on the Material Plane: a sudden frost in high summer, a burst of fire nobody lit, a creature that belongs to no country of this world. See The Planes.

The Kavari households that remember which waters owe what. See Peoples of the Water.

The ten classes of magical energy, one for each Prime, that underlie all magic; scholars hold that a spell which cannot be traced to one or more of them does not belong to this world’s magic. See How Magic Works.

The ten foundational forces of the cosmos, which differentiated one after another from a single Original Potential; they are forces, not persons, and their currents run through everything. See The Ten Primes.

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

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.

The first layer of the Serathic Oath of Layers, given to everyone a river town takes in: food in a famine, a place behind the walls, and a house that will avenge them. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The Held Covenant’s central rite, a grave ordeal before the hold in which a person proves they still belong to it. See Faith in Practice.

The warping of land and minds by prolonged exposure to one Harmonic or one extreme plane, near a zone of the Crucible or a thin spot to the Scourge. See The Planes.

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.

The god of the Gnome harbours, a Resonant of Aion who stretches a closing tide-window by a breath; he is fading, because a harbour that can name who bears a lost moment, and make them pay, no longer needs to beg a god for one. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

A dead Halfling hamlet of the Leeward Folds, emptied in one winter, whose orchard fruits in the wrong season and whose counts never come out right. One of the six known off-key places. See The Dissonance.

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.

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.

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).

The Orc rite at the treaty-grounds in which the dead are named aloud with the crossings they held, as Ushkar’s rite requires. See A Year in the Medieval Era.

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.

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.

The Thaluren gatherings, once called only in disaster, that decide whether a blocked or blighted run may climb other waters without losing its right. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

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 principle that binds the tiers of the cosmos together: much that seems ordinary is a Harmonic touching an Anchor, as dreams are the Dreaming Veil resonating with the Material Plane and lightning the Crucible resonating with the air. See The Planes.

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.

Places where a Harmonic presses through into an Anchor and overwrites its law for a while, for an hour or for an age. See The Resonant Zones.

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.

The rebuilding of a workable continuity out of surviving Echoes and trustworthy Record; whether the one who returns is the one who died, families and faiths answer by belief. See What Makes a People.

The first named Thaluren civilization, which binds sea settlements, estuary thresholds, and upriver spawning sanctuaries into one world of return; it is not a sea kingdom. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

Water that is part of a Thaluren run’s rightful return; under the Twofold Waters a channel may be return-water to the Thaluren and dwelling-water to the Kavari at once. See Peoples of the Water.

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 early Windscar war of c. 135,000-c. 128,000 BR in which Rimward strongholds shut their wells and High Scar escort-bands took water by force, until the Pacts swore new terms over the dead that told reserve-right from treaty-right. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The well-holding side of the Windscar Pacts, hardened c. 124,000-c. 116,000 BR after the Rimward Passage War: well-keepers, cistern guardians, reserve moots, and answer bearers. See The Windscar (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.

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 hardening of the first Elves into the first Wood Elf way of life, c. 490,000-c. 470,000 BR. See The Ages of Caeldon.

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.

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.

The Thaluren keepers who say whose ascent is rightful, remember who returned rightly and when, and speak in quarrels over who may climb which water. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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

The Thaluren keepers who carry the voice of the sea settlements, where most Thaluren live, into sanctuary quarrels, and hold sea life to the old spawning rules. See The Civilizations of the Medieval Era.

A lesser but survivable spawning water farther along the Thaluren return, which took in redirected clutches after the oldest confluence was poisoned, and the first alternate water accepted, on sufferance. See The Tidebound Reaches and the Unrun Sea.

The first great Thaluren feud over a redirected run, c. 160,000-c. 156,000 BR, fought over whether the Second Channel could be used before the old water had been answered; it ended in a bargain neither side could break. See Peoples of the Water.

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

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 Human civilization within the Confluence Marches of the walled towns of the Lower Serath, founded c. 22,000-c. 16,000 BR and bound by sworn guarantees and the great river houses rather than by a crown. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

The oath the great Serathic river houses forced on a feuding river town, c. 19,000-c. 18,000 BR, with their boats drawn up behind them: three thresholds of belonging, Protection, Stewardship, and the full oath, kept by the houses' boats and spears. 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).

A Resonant of Verba that older Kobold lines feared as a punisher of noise in the tunnels, which faded once shared sound codes made silence a skill. See Faith in Practice.

The eighth age, c. 2,000 BR-c. 500 CR, in which the lordships, holds, leagues, and temples of the medieval world dug in, most of them won by the sword, and the Wrought awoke. See How the Present Was Made.

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.

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.

The face of the Unformed that is the refusal to set, under which stone never settles and remembered facts change each time they are recalled; commitment made in front of others answers it. See What Waits Outside.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The face of the Unformed that is motion without return, a flow that never comes back; it cannot hold anyone who keeps returning. See What Waits Outside.

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.

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

The terms the Soundchain harbours and the Windscar Pacts struck after the selective-closure fighting, c. 104,000-c. 102,000 BR: the harbours may still shut parts of the corridor, but must name what they shut, say where, and answer for all of it at once. See The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads.

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 early Gnome feud at the Sounding Gate, c. 155,000-c. 149,000 BR, which cost ships and crews before the strongest League houses forced terms that tell honest exactness from pride in procedure. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

A plain window of time, such as c. 26,000-c. 16,000 BR, saying when something happened and how loosely that is known, not that it began or ended cleanly at either edge. See How to Read This Book.

The scholars' name for the hearth working of Crucible Magic by which a fingertip laid on a wick makes it take. See The Schools of Magic.

A broad kind of people sharing an inheritable continuity, whether biological, metaphysical, or constructed; in ordinary speech the word is people. See What Makes a People.

Method-driven casting by trained technique, fuelled from personal, environmental, stored, or other non-patron sources. See How Magic Works.

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 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.

The stone Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden carries on his back, on which every name that kept faith with him is cut. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The Steward of Terra who guards support that life can actually bear, and the release that keeps support from hardening into a trap. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Terra who keeps walls, borders, and thresholds that protect form without becoming prisons; it is one of the Wardens of the Boundary. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Imago who keeps a being itself through grief, injury, growth, and change. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Terra whose office was load-bearing support itself, and who fell in the Uneven Settling because it could not accept that anything might need to collapse; it is now the Cast-Out of Unyielding Burden. See Stewards and Resonants.

The one Steward of Zephyr known to the theologians, defending the principle that what lives may leave what cages it. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Ignis who burns disease without hating the sick and corruption without glorifying ruin. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Imago who keeps true becoming meaningful and whole rather than forced, fragmented, or monstrous. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Aqua who keeps flow life-giving rather than devouring, against hoarding, stagnation, and growth turned parasitic. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Lux who keeps more than one real road open, against false destiny and imposed inevitability. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Verba who keeps beings and categories distinct enough to be spoken. See Stewards and Resonants.

The stories every people tells of the rare beings who appear when an oath binds past breaking, when a death is dangerous, or when a law is fraying. See Faith in Practice.

The offices of the Primes, each holding one threshold that reality cannot afford to lose; a Steward is always of a Prime, and mortals know them as saints, heralds, judges, watchers, or gate-keepers. See Stewards and Resonants.

The second layer of the Serathic Oath of Layers: the right to hold property, debts, or goods in trust under an elder’s eye or within limits, without yet the full authority of a grown heir. See The Basins and the Marches (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 named compound tradition that reinforces structure with time: walls that resist ageing, anchors that hold across generations, tombs that do not settle. See How Magic Works.

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).

The Dwarven branch of the deep holds, formed in the Deepening of Stonewake, whose civilization is the Stonewake Compact. See The Elder Peoples.

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.

Magical energy held in a medium for later use, from crystalline matrices and inscribed metal lattices to living reservoirs, vials, and untreated wood, cloth, and bone; practitioners grade a store as Fresh, Aged, Unstable, or Spoiled. See How Magic Works.

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.

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.

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.

The named compound tradition that pairs fire and wind in mutual support, the forge-work of smithing peoples and weather-workers alike. See How Magic Works.

Metal forged in the Storm Heart, which holds and gives back charge. See The Resonant Zones.

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.

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

The five Anchors shaped by excess: the Verdant Expanse, the Gilded Cage, the Radiance, the Weave, and the Apex. See The Planes.

The span, c. 230,000-c. 190,000 BR, in which Troll lines holding the crossings of the colossal roads were given lasting charges by the road-builders and swore the first bridge-oaths, which they kept after that world went silent. See The Bridge Peoples.

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.

The oldest road of the Broken Marches, on a grade too broad and too even for anyone now alive to have laid. See Roads, Rivers, and Crossings.

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 Goblin god of a history no lord would write down, a Resonant of Verba grown verse by verse from the struck warrants and lost seams Goblins kept in song. See The Gods of the Medieval Era (MED).

The most sacred rite of Memoria: a gathering to share the stories of the dead so that their memory lives on. See The Ten Primes.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 custom, c. 137,000-c. 135,000 BR, that the great harbours carried along the coast after the Answering Sound: a harbour that makes a party wait must say why, for how long, and whether the answer is really no. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The Gnome orders, c. 148,000-c. 132,000 BR, that grew out of the Sounding Gate Quarrel inside the Gaugeward Leagues and carried its terms into marker rounds and open benches across the coast. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

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.

The far-side terms, c. 148,000-c. 138,000 BR, reached after escort-bands raided the outlying sounding houses and harbour crews burned the Orcs' boats, that told reception at the outer shore from entry to the inner harbour. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

A harbour hospice of the Tidelace Coasts kept under the name of Maris of the Tides, famous for healing arts and the magic of surviving the sea. See Magic in Ordinary Life.

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.

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.

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

Casting that relies on the caster’s own training, method, surroundings, stored charge, and bodily channel. See How Magic Works.

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.

An abandoned Confluence Basins mill that ground on an off-key working for a generation; its wheel turns in a dry race, and every door opens on the grinding floor. One of the six known off-key places. See The Dissonance.

The last of the great far-side terms, c. 100,000-c. 98,000 BR, an Orc-Gnome accord that reopened chosen kinds of Soundchain traffic at Turnwater one cargo and one season at a time, under old grudges and new wreckers. See The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore.

The rule of the Gravel Oath Accord that a channel may be return-water to one people and dwelling-water to another at the same time, and belongs first to those who already raise their young in it. See Peoples of the Water.

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.

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.

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.

The best-known Edgeway gathering-market, held in the vaulted cellars of a ruined storework in the Broken Marches. See Roads, Rivers, and Crossings.

The first named Kobold civilization, grown from older underhouse lines and from the vent-kin who survived the ash-furnace world, whose strength is the collective refusal. See The Bridge Peoples.

The long instability of the young Material Plane, when the world could not be held evenly; the Steward of Foundations fell during it. See Stewards and Resonants.

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.

The span, c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR, in which the archive-law world struck the Goblin warrens it had once entered as peoples from its rolls, and drove them from their gaps, as its classifications hardened. See The Bridge Peoples.

The guild brotherhoods, temple circles, and local fellowships, named so by the Wrought, who destroyed awakened Wrought or forced them back to tool status in the sincere belief that selfhood cannot be made. See How the Present Was Made.

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.

A grass bowl of the High Scars where a slaughtered band’s names were never recited; its grass grows in spirals under a second, lower wind. One of the six known off-key places. See The Dissonance.

The elder world of the high ridge country, c. 260,000-c. 195,000 BR, of ridge roads, storm terraces, and weather shrines built on a scale no living builder can match; it withdrew, and the Giants are its remainder. See Worlds That Came Before.

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.

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.

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.

The span, c. 250,000-c. 168,000 BR, in which hereditary Kobold vent-houses kept the vents and heat-ways of the Ash-Furnace world breathing, lived through its burning, and were bound into deep-world service afterwards. See The Threads of History.

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.

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.

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.

How much usable vitality a particular person has to spend right now, drained by injury, disease, overcasting, starvation, and above all by repeated healing work. See How Magic Works.

The face of the Unformed that unpicks the seams of reality, so that edges fray and a story’s beginning no longer leads to its middle. See What Waits Outside.

The span, c. 175,000-c. 140,000 BR, in which survivor lines began walking the abandoned roads in seasonal circuits and became the Salvage Peoples. See The Threads of History.

The Steward of Memoria who lets the living set down what is too heavy without falsifying the past. See Stewards and Resonants.

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.

The Steward of Umbra who decides what of a loss should stay sharp and what may soften. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Lux who governs truth in right measure, so that revelation illuminates rather than blinds. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Steward of Aqua who keeps the difference between holy surrender and annihilating engulfment, so that what dissolves back into the greater cycle is not erased by it. See Stewards and Resonants.

The Stewards who keep watch at the edge of the cosmos, finding and sealing breaches before anything foreign can fully manifest; the Steward of Boundary is among them. See The Veil and the Outside.

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

One of the six Wrought design lineages; a commander’s claim to own a war-frame is one of the threshold quarrels between repair and control. See The Bridge Peoples.

The Human frontier claim that ruined and marginal ground belonged to no one, by which frontier lords declared Goblin-held ruins empty and took them with hired swords and burning brands. See The Bridge Peoples.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 thinning of the colossal world, c. 198,000-c. 160,000 BR, into scattered withdrawn Giant lines, leaving its colossal roads, terraces, and unanswered oaths behind. See The Bridge Peoples.

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.

The first of the two Headwater Rites: the young may carry messages, serve as caravan-hands and apprentices, and travel the roads under someone else’s word. See The Basins and the Marches (MED).

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.

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.

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

The name the Goblins of the mixed crossings give Abrel the Changeling. See Stewards and Resonants.