Everyone and everything the record keeps about the worlds we broadcast from. The archive holds only what has aired and grows as the seasons do. Anything that would give a story away is folded shut; open it if you have caught up.
Aetherships
A gaslamp-fantasy sky where flight itself runs on a finite fuel — raw aether-crystal, formed only where lightning strikes cloud for centuries. Eight standing fleets contest the same shrinking sky under an uneasy peace-through-exhaustion, none able to defeat all the others. Eight Factions. One Sky. No Quarter. Read more
Caelum Reach
Caelum Reach sits on a wide river bend — the Acheron Cut, locals call it, though the name predates living memory — in a world that has just discovered electricity and hasn't decided what to do about it yet. The city proper sprawls across both banks, connected by three iron bridges and one wooden one that nobody trusts. Coal smoke and river fog are permanent features of the skyline. The architecture is dense, ornate, and slightly wrong — built over centuries by hands that weren't entirely mortal, with columns that go a touch too tall and archways that curve at angles that make surveyors uncomfortable. It looks like Chicago if Chicago had been designed by people who remembered building temples. It runs on coal, electric cable lines, animal labor, and increasingly on magical infrastructure that nobody has formally named yet. Read more
Episode guideChronicleGlossaryPlaces
People
Places
- The Olympian
- The Precinct
- The Bacchanal
- The Waypoint Building
- Hermes Consolidated Shipping
- The Foundry Grid
- Pluto & Associates
- The Lower City
- The Acheron Cut
- The Bluff Aerodock
- The Harrow farmstead
- Bell Junction Post Office
- The Deakin grain elevator
- The freight road
- The Company district office on Copper Lane
- Sheriff Pike's office at Ardenne
- The Ardenne quarry camp
- Kestrel Halt
Seasons
The Measure
A temperate river country of orchard terraces, canal towns and one grey university city, at roughly the technological moment of gaslight, ledgers, hand-set type and the first passenger railways. Magic here is ancient, ubiquitous and utterly municipal: it keeps a bridge sound, holds frost off an orchard for the nine nights that matter, mends a seam in a canal wall, draws damp out of plaster, quiets a fever. It is a trade, with a guild, a fee schedule and a complaints procedure. Its one absolute constraint governs everything else in this world: no one has ever worked magic alone. Every working requires two practitioners moving in exact reciprocal synchrony, hand to hand, breath matched, each partner's motion completing the other's — a consonance, which looks to any observer like a slow and very serious dance, because that is what it is. Consonance leaves a residue. Work enough measures with the same partner and the pairing begins to hold on its own: first stray sensation, then each other's moods arriving ahead of your own thought, and finally the long consonance, in which two people can no longer reliably tell which of them is feeling a thing. So the guild enforces the Rotation — no practitioner may stand in consonance with the same partner for longer than one working season of thirteen weeks. It is the first rule in the articles and the only one nobody argues about. It is also the reason nearly everyone in this profession is lonely in a very particular way: they spend their working lives in the most intimate act available to human beings, on a schedule, with someone they are required to leave. Read more
Episode guideChronicleGlossaryPlaces