The approaches to the ten extreme Anchors, and the gates by which the Material Plane opens onto each, are described plane by plane in The Planes. Seen from inside the Veil, they fall into two families. Towards the planes of lack, the Veil takes. It is a storm of blades towards the Scourge, cold syrup towards the Ashen Wastes, burying sand towards the Parched, a field of glass towards the Frost-Bound, and a white noise like erasure towards the Silence, and each strips something from the mind: the knowledge of whom to trust, the reason for coming, memories dried to dust or frozen out of reach, and at the Silence the memory of ever having left home. Towards the planes of excess, the Veil does not take so much as overwhelm. Roots overgrow the past towards the Verdant Expanse; a maze that must be walked in a fixed order loops back on every wrong turn towards the Gilded Cage; a tunnel of light makes the traveller remember every shameful moment towards the Radiance; a vortex of voices dissolves the past into everyone else’s present towards the Weave; and towards the Apex the way is smooth as ice, and what slides away is the traveller’s own flaws, and sometimes their reasons for wanting to leave.

Towards the Crucible, the Veil is a storm of fire and lightning, and crossing it feels like being roasted alive; it burns away all but the most intense memories. Towards the Surging Deep it is a network of currents and channels, and crossing it is like swimming; what it takes is dilution, as the traveller begins to forget themselves in the flow. Towards the Iron Backbone it is a network of tunnels and shafts, a climb rather than a walk, and instead of forgetting, the traveller carries the weight of the past with them as a burden. Towards the Unbound Gale it is all currents and eddies, like flying, and it scatters, so that travellers forget where they came from or where they meant to go.

Towards the Dreaming Veil it is a mist of thoughts, and travellers drift through it; memories come out disjointed and symbolic. Towards the Eternal Record it is a corridor of endless doors, like wandering a library that never ends, and the danger is overload: a traveller may remember everything and forget who they are. Towards the Shifting Path it is a maze of corridors whose layout changes at every step, and travellers forget which way they came. Towards the Binding Song it is a web of threads and script, like reading a book backwards, and instead of forgetting, the Veil edits: a traveller may lose whatever parts of their own past contradict the story they now tell about themselves. Towards the Whispering Trace it is a mist of memories, and the past lies over the present like a second picture on the same glass. Towards the Frozen Moment it is a corridor of frozen time, like moving inside a glacier, and travellers may forget how to move or speak at all.

The Harmonics have their gates on the Material Plane too, wherever a place already resembles the concept behind it. Fire-Gates are volcanoes, forges, and places of great heat. Water-Gates are oceans, rivers, wells, and the places of baptism. Stone-Gates are mountains, quarries, and ancient ruins; Wind-Gates high peaks, open plains, and places of great height. The Sleep-Gates of the Dreaming Veil are beds, meditation chambers, and places of deep rest; the Library-Gates of the Eternal Record are ancient libraries, archives, and places of study. The Shifting Path opens at Crossroads, junctions and decision points and places of chance. The Binding Song’s Court-Gates are judgement halls, libraries, and the places where oaths are taken. The Whispering Trace has its Grave-Gates in cemeteries, on battlefields, and wherever death has come, and the Frozen Moment its Time-Gates in ancient ruins, among clocks, and in places of deep meditation.

Read side by side, the lists show something no single plane’s account does: one place can be a door with several sides. A battlefield is a War-Gate to the Scourge and a Grave-Gate to the Whispering Trace, and the shouted commands still in its air can wake the Grammar of War. An old library is a Library-Gate to the Eternal Record while it is read, and a Quiet Gate to the Silence once nobody reads in it any more. A judgement hall leans towards the Gilded Cage and towards the Binding Song at once. A meditation chamber stands near the Silence, the Dreaming Veil, and the Frozen Moment together. Which side a crossing finds is what the laws of intention and resonance govern, and the oldest advice about such places is the plainest: know which of its doors you mean to use before you go near it.

Even the Resonant Zones carry their own small Veils at their edges, each with its own texture and its own toll; how a zone forms and what lies inside each one is told in The Resonant Zones. At those edges the forgetting of the open Veil gives way to something narrower, a price in the zone’s own coin. Around the Crystal Spire the Veil is a lattice of vibrating strings, like stepping between the strings of a harp, and travellers hear their own thoughts from the past or the future. Around the Ghost Step it is a crowd of passing figures, like stepping onto a busy road where nobody is walking, and a traveller’s steps may fall into a dead traveller’s, until they remember the dead one’s road as their own. Around the Lost Archive it is a labyrinth of stacks that reshelve themselves behind the reader, and the more a traveller reads, the more of who they are is written over. Around the Name Bound it feels like walking through a contract, and travellers come out bound to promises they do not remember making; around the Silent Gale it is a wall of wind and silence, and they may forget the sound of their own voice, or the voices of the people they love. Around the Prophecy’s Edge it is a tunnel with one exit, and what the traveller loses is their own wishes, as the future they are walking towards fills their sight.

Set out together, the tolls have a grammar. The planes of lack take something away. The planes of excess bury what they do not take under too much of something else: growth, order, light, other minds, or perfection. The Harmonics do neither. They change memory into their own element, so that fire burns it down to its brightest moments, water dilutes it, stone turns it into a weight, wind scatters it, dream breaks it into symbols, the Record floods it, the Path loses the way back, the Song rewrites it, the Trace overlays it, and the Frozen Moment stops it. The zones, last, charge the price of their own single law. A traveller who knows where they are going therefore knows, in rough outline, what they are going to pay, and the second line of the crossing-words is less a warning than an instruction: know what you will pay. The Veil wears the face of wherever it leads.

The Veil-Walkers are humanoid, with skin that shimmers like oil on water and features that shift with the fog, so that nobody who has met one can say afterwards quite what its face was like. They wear cloaks that blend into whatever lies behind them. They do not age or die as mortals do. They live on the drift of the Veil itself, the same drift that swallows travellers, and its disorientation does not touch them. They know every path and every price.

They are the Veil’s guides and toll-keepers. They sell safe passage, and the fare is seldom coin: it is often a memory, a secret, or a service. They are cryptic, they bargain without warmth or malice, and they take no side in anything, neither in the quarrels of the planes nor in the troubles their passengers are running from. To them everyone else is a passenger, and passengers pay. A traveller who can trust one is told to follow it, and the condition is the hard part, because a Veil-Walker owes its passenger nothing beyond the bargain and says nothing it has not been paid to say. Shrine-keepers on Caeldon say never to bargain with one twice: the second fare is always the thing you love.

Where the Veil lies near the Material Plane, the Veil-Walkers can be met on it: at old shrines, on boundary roads, at oath places and suspect sanctuaries, at the sites of unusual transformation. There they are a puzzle for the settled peoples around them. Whether a shimmering figure at the edge of a shrine is a visitor, a people, a condition, or a sacred danger is not a question with a single answer in any town, and the questions they raise are always the same ones: what guidance is worth, who may take a toll, what is taboo to touch, and whether something has gone wrong with the place that lets them through.

The Lost are travellers who drifted too far and lost their purpose. They walk the same steps over and over in a waking stupor, unseeing, until at last their awareness thins into the fog itself and they become part of the Veil’s background murmur. Nobody knows how many of the voices in that murmur were once people. Travellers who have heard it describe it as the sound of a crowd far off, and some of them insist that they caught a name in it.

The Drifters are what hunt them. They have adapted to the Veil’s fluidity so completely that they can change their form, their size, and even their nature to move through its shifting corridors, and they prey on the Lost and on the unwary. Among them are the Fog-Stalkers, which blend into the mist and strike from it, and the Voice-Mimics, which call to travellers in the voices of the people they love, to lead them off their road. It is the Voice-Mimics the old crossing-words mean when they say not to follow a voice one loves.

Not everything in the Veil came there by choice. When a Steward falls, the current of its Prime sheds it as a river sheds what it cannot carry, and the fallen office is thrown out into the harshest reaches of the planes: the distorted margins of a Harmonic, an extreme Anchor, or the Veil itself. Some of the Cast-Outs, then, are prisoners of the space between places, and loathe it, and cannot leave. Who they are and what they offer is told in What Waits Outside. For a traveller it is enough to know that the fog holds older and stranger things than Drifters, and that some of them would very much like to be carried somewhere else.

The Veil is also a threshold for the dead. When a Pattern collapses in death, the Echoes it leaves are carried through the Veil, and the Veil can preserve them, delay them, scatter them, or refract them, according to the conditions of the way and the resonance of what they were reaching for. Where the Veil is thin or turbulent, great events leave more Echoes behind, and more of them come out distorted. A place where the Veil wears thin is a place where the dead are louder, and less true to who they were. What Pattern, Echo, and Record are, and what a death leaves, is set out in What Makes a People.

The passage itself is kept by a power. The Keeper of the Final Crossing, among the most sacred of Umbra’s Stewards, is not death but the rightful crossing out of life: it sees that the dead may depart and the living remain, and that the threshold between them is neither shattered nor cruelly sealed. It stands against necromancy that drags the dead back to labour and against barriers that trap the departed. It can open or steady the passage from a living Pattern into Echo and Record, bar whatever tries to cross the wrong way in either direction, and loosen the dead and the living from the knots that keep a death from finishing. Its nearness is felt in sickrooms where someone is dying, on battlefields after the noise has stopped, and in places where the dead hesitate. Mourners who know its ways speak the names of the dying clearly, because the threshold listens.

Most peoples of the cradle-web also honour a god who stands at that threshold: Ennor the Grave-Watcher, whom each people knows under its own name. He does not raise the dead and does not bring death. He guides. Where an Echo would otherwise drift and distort in the Veil, he opens a path through it and lights the way towards the Eternal Record with an iron lantern that gives no light anyone living can see by, and the Echo follows the light, drawn by the memory of its life. Many peoples set lights at graves or places of return in the nights after a death, each at its own season and in its own way, and say that a light set with true grief brings the Watcher to guide the one who has gone. In the oldest burial grounds there are paths that seem to lead nowhere, and the people who live near them call them the Watcher’s trails, still in use.

The work costs the guide. Ennor stands so close to the threshold that he is wearing thin on it: every Echo he keeps draws a little of his own Pattern after the dead. The other gods of Umbra who keep the line between the living and the dead pay their own price, for in holding that boundary they take into themselves part of the confusion and fear of those who cross it, and grow distant and strange with it. How each people mourns, and how its rites meet its neighbours' at a shared grave, is told among the faiths of each era.

A traveller should carry a focus anchor: something that holds the purpose clear, whether a map, a compass, or a saying repeated under the breath. They should not cross alone if they can help it, and they should go knowing that they will pay something; better, they should know roughly what, from the face of the Veil towards the place they mean to reach. They should know which door of a many-sided place they mean to use. If a Veil-Walker can be trusted, it is wise to follow one, and wiser still to settle the fare before the first step.

On the way, they should keep their purpose before them at every step, let no doubt in, and not linger. They should not follow a voice they love, however near it sounds. And they should remember their name. The Veil does not forgive vagueness. Magic that relies on the Veil is powerful and risky: a working meant to carry someone across a distance in a heartbeat may set them down in the wrong place, and an illusion is pointless in a country made of unmanifested possibility, where everything is already an illusion of a kind.

The Material Plane is the easiest place to begin, because the Veil is thinnest there and because it is the hub through which almost every crossing runs. Its thin places are many and ordinary: every battlefield, forge, library, and graveyard is a gate of some kind. Direct travel between two other planes, bypassing the Material Plane, is rare and dangerous, and needs a powerful artefact attuned to both, a natural thin spot where their borders meet, or the help of a being native to the Veil.

One crossing begins on the Material Plane and goes almost nowhere: close against the world, the Veil holds the world’s own reflection, out of tune and lower. That is the Dissonance, crossed under the same laws as any other journey, and almost never come back from (see The Dissonance).

Some of those borders are known. The Ashen Wastes and the Frost-Bound shade into each other along a gradient of cold. Between the Parched and the Scourge lies a violent, arid badland where the predators of both planes compete for what little there is. The Apex and the Gilded Cage meet along a gradient of order, rigid on one side and a fluid perfection on the other. Where a Harmonic borders a plane, the meeting places are stranger still: where the Crucible’s heat reaches into the Ashen Wastes it brings a rush of warmth and the danger of explosion, and where the Surging Deep breaks into the Parched the water vanishes within hours and leaves salt flats behind. Nobody crosses at such places by accident twice.

Most travellers use the Veil to reach a particular place and come back, and the coming back has its own hazards. Time may have run differently at home: a messenger can arrive in good time by the messenger’s own count and find the matter settled years before. The toll may not show at once; gaps in memory may come to light only when someone at home asks about a day the traveller no longer has. And something of the crossing tends to come back with the traveller, in the tolls of the planes they passed near: a suspicion of everyone, a habit of reciting one’s name, a weight of the past that will not set itself down. Few return without a new understanding of how fragile reality is.

The approach announces itself. Colours lose their strength. Sounds go muffled and thoughts sluggish. Then memories begin to go: a traveller may forget a purpose, then a name, then the very idea of a self. It is the Veil’s own toll carried to its end, no longer a price paid for a crossing but the whole of the traveller, taken a piece at a time.

Whoever crosses is not killed but unmade, erased backwards out of existence, so that nobody remembers them and no record of them remains. They do not die; they cease ever to have been. That is the meaning of every old warning about the edge of the world: no preparation saves anyone from the Nothing, and anyone who feels the fading begin, the colour going out of things and the sound out of the air, should turn back at once. The schools add two warnings of their own. Magic that tries to reach outside the universe fails, and a working that tries to make nothing fails, or recoils on its maker.

Watch is kept even so. The Wardens of the Boundary are Stewards who keep watch at the edge of the cosmos, the Steward of Boundary among them. They patrol the membrane, look for weak points, and seal breaches before anything foreign can come fully through. They reinforce the Boundary where it thins, and use the Resonance Principle itself to push a foreign reality back out into the Nothing. The combined force of the Primes resists any such intrusion simply by being what it is; the Wardens' part is to find the place where it is needed.

The Steward of Boundary shows how that work is done. It appears as a towering gate-shaped figure of granite and dark metal, with an opening where a torso should be, runes of truce and closure glowing across its frame, some worn deeper than others as if over-used; its speech sounds like bolts sliding into place. It keeps the rightful separation of things, the walls, borders, vessels, and thresholds that prevent dissolution, contamination, invasion, and the confusion of one kind of thing with another, and it opposes prisons disguised as protection. It can sanctify a limit so that crossing it requires a rightful condition, a permission, or a change in whoever crosses; it can close a dangerous breach, or open a boundary that has become unjustly absolute; and it can draw a precise line beyond which corruption, chaos, or hostile force may not pass. Near it, every line shows itself: one knows what is inside and what is outside, what is permitted and what forbidden, and the cost of crossing feels heavier. On the Material Plane its presence is felt at city gates, tomb-seals, contested borders, plague-lines held with spears, and wards, wherever entry must be judged. Its wounded state, and why its lines tend to harden into severity, belongs with the other Stewards in Stewards and Resonants.

Not every threat to the Boundary comes from outside it. The Boundary holds because inside and outside are distinct, lasting things, and the primordial Unformed, which dissolve definition itself, weaken it from within wherever that distinction blurs. They, too, belong to What Waits Outside.

That the Veil can be crossed, and what crossing costs, is known from the few who dare it at old shrines, boundary roads, and thin places, and from the tales they bring home. Every such place has its story: the pilgrim band that went in singing and came back one short, with no one able to say who was missing; the son who crossed to fetch a cure and walked out the next spring grey-haired; the shrine whose keepers ring a bell each dusk for the ones still walking. A crossing that comes back is remembered for a lifetime, and most people never try one. Their lore is practical and old. On the Space Between Places gathers it into its crossing-words, and every crossing people keeps some version of them. What the Veil is, a fog, a road of the dead, a country of spirits, the skin of the world, is disputed between faiths and schools under names that vary by people. Most peoples honour a god who guides the dead across it; very few have heard of the power that keeps the crossing whole.

No one has reached the Boundary and come back, so everything said of it is inference, the guesses of the highest circles of scholarship and the old warnings about the edge of the world. Most people know only the warnings: that the colour goes out of things there, and that whoever goes on is forgotten. The Nothing is what those warnings fear.

The bubble model and the Great Filter are the views of a few scholars, argued among them; most people have never heard either, and those who have cannot test them. That things come in from outside the world is believed far more widely than anything about where they come from. Each later era learns more of the Veil, and guesses more closely at the edge, and no era ever maps either to the end.