Contents ​

Player-facing chapters describe the world as its inhabitants know it. Chapters marked for the Dungeon Master appear only in the DM edition of this book.

1. The Shape of the World ​

The world is a room. Everyone who lives in it knows this, even those who have never seen its edges: the world ends at the Walls, four ranges of sheer white stone that face one another across hundreds of miles and rise so high that their tops vanish above the weather. No one has crossed them. The oldest histories say no one ever built them, either: a wizard miscast a spell of shelter a thousand years ago, the wild magic surged, and the mansion he meant to raise for a single night became a demiplane that has been growing ever since.

1.1 The Walls ​

Each Wall leans against a different elemental plane, and each border country takes its character from its neighbor. Ash storms blow in from the Hearthwall; the sea country beneath the Weepingwall never dries; the Galewall's foothills are scoured by perpetual wind; and the roots of the Gravenwall are mined by folk who trade with creatures of living stone.

The border countries are wider than the old surveys say they should be. Borderfolk state this as plain fact, pointing to farms three generations old that stand a day's walk farther from the Wall than their deeds describe, and everyone else takes it for borderfolk exaggeration.

1.2 The Folly ​

The largest city in the world takes its name from the mountain that overlooks it. The Folly's upper slopes still show courses of masonry, window rows the size of canyons, and a portico no road reaches. Scholars say the name remembers the Founder's folly, the miscast that made the world; townsfolk say it names what you would be committing if you tried to climb it.

Near the ground the Folly stops pretending to be a mountain at all. Its lowest reaches are a manor's first storey cut to the scale of cliffs: porches deep enough to shelter villages, window bays glazed in panes the size of millponds, service doors that whole streets now run through, and the Folly Gates themselves: two leaves of grey timber taller than the weather, bound in black iron and studded with rivets the size of houses, their carved panels large enough to farm. Flanking the Gates on plinths sit the Griffons, a pair of stone gate-beasts of the kind any manor might set at its gateposts, each the size of a hill fort. Everyone agrees the Griffons are stone. The leaves stand ajar exactly as they stood at the Founding: the gap between them is a tall wedge of dark, wide enough at the threshold to drive a wagon through, thinning to a hairline far overhead. It has never been seen to widen or to close.

The Gates are only the grandest of many. The mountain's base is pierced by dozens of doors at the house's own scale: service doors, garden doors, doors whose purpose nobody can guess. The busiest by far is the Wicket, the door beside the Gates' stair: a mere cathedral of an archway, dwarfed by its neighbor, through which nearly all of the mountain's lawful traffic passes. Above the Wicket's arch a sculpted face looks down at everyone who enters. The city calls it the Porter. No one has ever seen it move, and no two engravings agree on its expression.

Humbler still are the cut gates: passages carved into the living stone by miners, guilds, and impatient neighborhoods over the centuries. The cut gates never last. A passage cut in a grandmother's day is a crawlspace in her grandchild's, and a shut seam in the stone a lifetime after that; the cutting trades keep count, and keep cutting. Only the doors the house made keep their size.

The ground level is the richest larder in the world: in many of its halls the old magic still keeps house, and sideboards that were laid for guests a thousand years dead are laid again by morning. Bread that is always warm, casks that never run dry, ballrooms where the instruments strike up when anyone crosses the threshold. Provisioners' companies run scheduled routes to the reliable rooms, and a pantry-run is respectable work, as dangerous trades go, because the ground floor mostly tolerates courteous guests. The upper floors are another matter. The stairs climb into country no map holds, and the treasure there is real: luggage a thousand years unclaimed, plate laid for banquets never held, gifts still wrapped for hosts who never came down. So are the housekeepers. The wild surge that made the world did not spare the servants caught above the first landing, and what walks the high corridors now wears their livery without their patience, alongside worse things that have moved in over the centuries and consider themselves tenants. Expedition companies that work the upper floors post their wills before they climb. Most come back rich, or not at all; in Folly they say the same thing either way: the Folly keeps its guests.

Folly the city grew from the mountain's gatehouse and never stopped growing; its districts, government, and defenses are described in chapter 3. Every people of the Manse keeps a quarter there, and the institutions that claim to remember the Founding keep their halls there. It is called the City of Lamps, and has earned the name: Folly spreads across the mountain's waterward flank, and through the ember half of the year the Folly's shadow crosses the city once a day at midday. Bells ring the Noon Dark in, the lamps come up for half an hour of borrowed dusk while the fields beyond the gates stay bright, and bells ring it out again (see the Mountain Clock).

The summit ends in a glazed turret the old surveys call the Lantern. Some nights, though no calendar predicts them, a light shows there. In Folly they toast it when it appears. No one climbs to ask.

1.3 The Peoples ​

Four broad lineages share the world. The Housebound descend from the adventurers trapped at the Founding. The Drawn arrived over the centuries, plane-walkers pulled off course by the Manse's wild magic. The Borderfolk migrated in from the elemental planes beyond the Walls. And the Staff evolved from the magical servants who once tended the mansion: peoples of animate porcelain, linen, brass, and candleflame who no longer answer to anyone.

2. The Sky and the Year ​

The sky of the Manse keeps perfect books. The sun rises where it has always risen, the year runs to the day, and nothing in the heavens has ever been observed to drift, hurry, or fall behind. Scholars find this more unsettling than reassuring.

2.1 The Sun's Road ​

Every morning the sun rises over the Galewall and every evening it sets behind the Gravenwall. Where it goes in between those two moments is plain to anyone who looks up; where it goes afterward is not, and the question is considered either childish or blasphemous depending on whom you ask. It is simply there again the next morning, above the Galewall, as it has been every morning for a thousand years.

The sun's road is not fixed. Over the course of a year its arc swings like a slow pendulum: through the warm months it leans toward the Hearthwall, and at High Hearth, the summer sun-stand, it passes closest to the fire; through the cold months it leans toward the Weepingwall, and at Still Water it walks the far edge of the sky above the sea country. Winter days are no shorter than summer ones, only farther away. The winter sun is pale, distant, and gives a thin, slanted light that the border folk call lamplight weather.

2.2 The Night Skies ​

Night in the Manse is never wholly dark, and it has two colors. Above the Hearthwall the sky glows red and orange, like banked coals seen through smoke; the glow brightens and dims with the ash storms but never goes out. Above the Weepingwall the sky answers in blue and green, the shifting, layered light of a sun seen from under deep water. Between the two glows the high sky is black.

No traveler in the Manse is ever lost at night. Face the embers, and the drowned light is at your back; morning will rise on your right hand, and the sun will set on your left.

2.3 The Compass ​

The Manse has no north. Directions are taken from the four Walls, and common speech uses them two ways:

• Traveling, one goes fireward, waterward, airward, or earthward: "three days' ride fireward of Folly," "the moss grows on the waterward side of every tree."
• Naming, the bare element serves as the direction itself, the way a road or a gate carries it: the Fire Road leaves Folly by the Fire Gate, the water quarter floods in spring, and the ember half of the year is hot.

Mapmakers draw fire at the top of the sheet: the ember glow, they say, is the brightest beacon of the night sky and the natural place to hang a map from, while the drowned glow is beautiful but inconstant.

2.4 The Mountain Clock ​

The Folly is the largest sundial ever built, though nobody built it. Its shadow falls earthward at dawn, wheels across the country as the day turns, and points airward by dusk; every town and field within sight of the mountain tells time by when the shadow arrives. "The shadow's on the orchards" is as exact a statement as any clock could make, and border-country almanacs print the shadow's calendar a year ahead.

The noon shadow is the seasonal hand. Through the ember half of the year the leaning sun throws it waterward across the city of Folly; this is the Noon Dark, longest at High Hearth. Through the drowned half it swings fireward instead, and the villages on the mountain's other flank get their own brief winter dusks. On the two hinge days of the year the sun crosses directly overhead, the shadow shrinks to the mountain's roots, and Folly keeps its lamps cold at midday.

2.5 The Year ​

The year is the sun's full pendulum swing: 364 days, exactly, every year, with no leap days and no drift. It divides into an ember half and a drowned half, hinged on four days that belong to no month and no week:

• The Kindling: the sun crosses the centerline of the sky heading fireward. The year begins; in Folly they say the year is lit.
• High Hearth: the summer sun-stand, when the sun's road passes nearest the Hearthwall. The longest, hottest light of the year, and the longest Noon Dark in the city.
• The Quenching: the sun crosses back. Harvest fairs, debts settled, fires raked out and relaid.
• Still Water: the winter sun-stand, when the sun walks the far edge of the sky above the sea country. The palest light of the year.

2.6 Months and Weeks ​

Each half of the year holds six months of thirty days. The months keep the names of the old household year, the mansion's own calendar of chores kept alive by the Staff long after the house outgrew them, and nobody has ever managed to rename them.

The week is six days, five weeks to the month, and it too is the ghost of a service rota:

Washday, Bakeday, Brightday (when the brass and silver were polished), Gardenday, Doorday (markets, callers, and errands; the day the door was answered), and Stillday, when the house lay still. Stillday is the common day of rest; the hinge days stand outside the week entirely, and no honest work is owed on them.

Dates are written plainly: 14 Guesting, Doorday, 29 Hush. Years are counted from the Founding, though the oldest institutions disagree with one another by a few decades about what the count has reached, and each keeps its own books.

3. Folly, the Free City ​

Folly is the largest city in the world and the only one most of the world has heard of. It spreads across the Folly's waterward flank from the gate square down to the plain, ringed by a wall of its own that looks, beside the architecture it lives against, like a garden border. Both ends of the wall are mortared straight into the Folly's stone, so that mountain and wall together close the circle. The wall is low, stout, and pierced by four gates named for the roads they serve: the Fire Gate, the Water Gate, the Air Gate, and the Earth Gate. No siege has ever tested it, nor was it built against armies; a city that lives beside doors nobody can close sleeps better behind one of its own. How many people sleep behind it is a matter the Pantry's hearth-count and the institutions' censuses dispute, like every count in the Manse, but nobody disputes that Folly holds more souls than the border countries' towns put together.

3.1 The Guest Right ​

Folly calls itself a Free City, and has never needed to argue the point with an army. Its freedom rests on the Guest Right, the oldest doctrine of law in the world: every soul within the Walls is a guest of the same absent Host, and no guest may set themselves above another under their host's roof. A crown, the city's judges reason, is exactly that. So Folly has no lord and never has had one. Its offices are household offices, held in the Host's absence and answerable to the house's peace, and Follyfolk put the constitution more plainly than any judge: nobody rules Folly. Folly is kept.

The border countries' lawyers call the Guest Right a fable dressed as a statute. Perhaps it is; no one has tested it. No army has ever marched on the city, and Follyfolk will tell you why in a proverb: you do not storm a house by way of its gate lodge while the owner is upstairs.

3.2 The Table ​

The city is governed by the Table, which sits in Trestle Hall in the Parterre: a seat for each of the seven districts, a seat for each of the great companies (the Provisioners, the cutting trades, and the registered expedition companies), and a seat for each of the four peoples. At the head of the Table stands one chair more, kept empty for the Host. Every sitting is minuted as opening with the Host's apologies for absence, and by long custom nothing may be voted while anyone stands behind the empty chair, a rule invoked more than once to famous effect.

The Table chooses the Housekeeper of Folly, the city's first officer, who serves until the Table chooses again. The Housekeeper presides at Trestle Hall, keeps the keys of the four wall gates, commands the watches, and speaks for the city to the institutions and the border countries. The office has been held by members of every people; Staff candidates are traditionally the hardest to unseat, on the argument that keeping house is what they are for.

The city's purse is the Pantry, under the Pantler, which collects the board from the Grounds, the wagon-penny at the wall gates, the provisioners' charter-rents, and the climb-tithe at its counter in the Gateyards. The Pantry's ledgers run back unbroken further than the institutions' own histories, which is a sore point.

Justice is done at the Doorcourt, held in the old gate lodge, the city's first building, before judges called Ushers. The Doorcourt does not hang. Its gravest sentence is to be shown out: struck from the hearth-count and escorted past the last lamp. Follyfolk consider this worse than hanging. The roads away from Folly are long, and the lamps do not follow them far.

3.3 The Districts ​

The city stands on the guest house's gardens, and the garden is still legible under the streets. Each district inherits a feature of the old grounds, and the older the district, the more stubbornly its streets keep the planting plan.

• The Gateyards. The oldest district, grown from the gate market that still trades against the Wicket's jambs. Outfitters, provisioners' halls, the Pantry's assay counter, the hiring steps where expedition companies post their bills, and the barracks of the Doorwatch. Ground here is priced by the yard and let by the width of a shopfront.
• The Parterre. The formal terraces above the gate square, where the streets run straight and cross at right angles because the flowerbeds did. Trestle Hall, the counting houses, the halls of the institutions that claim to remember the Founding, and the oldest Housebound families.
• The Fountain Court. The low waterward district, built around fountains the house still feeds. The water is clean, constant, and slightly too cold; canals carry it between the laundries, the dyers, and the fish markets, and every spring the district floods to its doorsteps and holds regattas about it. Borderfolk of the sea country keep their quarter here. Outside the Water Gate lies the Basin, the guest house's ornamental water grown into a small inland sea: the city's docks line its shore beneath the wall, its ferries serve the Grounds' waterward villages, and its catch fills the district's fish markets.
• The Orchard. Walled closes where the guest house's fruit trees still stand and still bear, some of them out of season and one or two out of reason. The city's food markets cluster here, and the Fruiting fair fills the district for a week each year.
• The Maze. The district that inherited the hedge maze, and the plan shows it: the streets are narrow, doubled, and unhelpfully alike, and addresses are given as recited turnings rather than names. Rents are low, the district asks few questions, and the Lampwatch walks it in pairs. Maze-born children learn left and right long before fireward and waterward.
• The Offices. The Staff quarter, named the way a great house names its service rooms. The peoples of porcelain, linen, brass, and candleflame keep the finest workshops in the world here, and keep the old household calendar most strictly: in the Offices, Brightday still smells of polish.
• The Lawns. The commons at the city's airward edge, sloping out toward the Grounds: livestock fairs, drying grounds, the Muster's review field, and the tents of the newly arrived. The city has always let newcomers camp on the Lawns, mostly because every attempt to stop them has cost more than it saved.

The four peoples keep quarters rather than enclosures: neighborhoods within districts, marked by cookery and calendar more than by gates. Only the Offices comes close to belonging to one people outright.

3.4 The Grounds and the Board ​

The Free City's writ does not end at its wall. Around Folly lies the Grounds: the farms, orchards, mills, and quarries of the plain, bound to the city by ledger, road, and lamplight. The Pantry sets lamp-posts along the great roads, and the rule of thumb is exact enough to serve as law: the Grounds go where the lamps go. At present the lamped miles run about three days' travel down each road, a little farther every generation, because the Pantry adds a lamp at the end of a road when the traffic justifies it and has never once taken one down.

Four times a year, in the week after each hinge day, the Grounds pay the board: an assessment in coin or kind, set village by village in the Pantry's ledgers and collected by riding Reeves. In return the city owes the Grounds its lamps and their oil, wardens on the roads, standing in its markets, the Doorcourt's justice, and room behind the wall at need. The villages keep their own headmen and their own small courts; the Reeve's saddlebag carries the ledger, not the law.

3.5 The Lamps, the Doors, and the Muster ​

The city keeps its peace with three bodies, in rising order of steel.

The Lampwatch is the city's constabulary and its lamplighters in a single service, and Follyfolk hold that those are one job: light and order arrive together. The Watch walks every district by rounds with hooked poles and short cudgels, rings the Noon Dark in and out, and calls the hour in the Maze, where visitors cannot otherwise tell.

The Doorwatch holds the Gateyards. Its companies are paid from the climb-tithe and recruited from expedition veterans, and their work faces the mountain rather than the city: registering climbs at the Pantry's counter, keeping the Wicket queue orderly and the lesser doors watched, and manning the door-bells that hang in the Gateyards' towers. No door-bell has rung in earnest in living memory. The older ringings are matters for ballads, and the ballads disagree.

The Muster is everyone else. Every householder of city or Grounds owes six drill days a year, kept by district rota so that no trade stands idle at once, with pikes and crossbows racked in the district halls. Once a year, in the week after the Quenching, the whole Muster stands together on the Lawns for review, and the Table names a Marshal for the day; the office has been filled, as far as memory runs, for no other purpose. Folly has never stood a siege. The Muster credits the drill, and everyone else credits the neighbors' good sense.

3.6 The Coin of the House ​

Folly strikes its own coin. The Pantry's mint stands behind the assay counter in the Gateyards, and its metal comes down the mountain: the candlesticks, salvers, and table plate of banquets never held, carried out through the Wicket, weighed, tithed, melted, and struck. The city has no mines and has never missed them. Ask in Folly where the coin in your pocket spent the century before last, and you will be told, cheerfully, upstairs.

The lamp is the working coin of the city. Wages, lodging, and gear are quoted in lamps, and a laborer's day is two of them. The stub is street money, token coinage black with wear: it spends at face in the city and the Grounds, and at half or nothing in the border countries. Griffons are merchants' money, bitten and weighed before they are taken. The gate is contract money, a broad coin for ships, shopfronts, and dowries; most gates exist only as lines in a counting-house ledger. The wagon-penny at the wall gates is one lamp on a laden wagon. The name outlived the coin it was named for, and the Pantry lets it stand.

Every Pantry coin bears the same reverse: the four great roads running from the mountain at the center off the edge of the coin, crossing a ring of small raised dots set just inside the rim, the lamps of the Grounds. The ring is what stops the clipper. Shears cannot shave silver from the rim without eating the lamps, no strike but the mint's can put a lamp back, and the counter refuses any coin missing part of its ring. Sparks and halves are made by cutting a stub along its roads, the one lawful way to cut a coin: each piece keeps its own stretch of the ring, and its straight edges follow the roads for anyone to see. The scale has the final word all the same. Border-country coin is changed at the counter for a fee of one part in forty. Old money rides down with the plate too: purses of guests a thousand years gone, struck with the faces of countries that do not exist, or never existed here. The counter takes it at weight, and collectors in the Parterre pay better for the strangest of it.

3.7 The Mountain Trade ​

Folly's law does not call it treasure-hunting. Goods above the first landing are the estates of guests presumed departed, and a registered expedition company climbs as their administrator: the climb-tithe is the estate's duty to the house's keeping, and finder's title in the remainder is the administrator's fee. Border-country lawyers call this the most magnificent legal fiction in the world. The Ushers reply that no other law would know what to call the contents of the mountain, and that in a thousand years no heir has come forward.

Below the first landing the law is different, because the house is different: the ground floor is still kept. Its sideboards are laid and laid again, and what they hold is hospitality, not any guest's estate; nothing on that floor is anyone's to salvage, and stripping its standing furnishings is theft in the Doorcourt's plainest sense of the word. The carrying-out of provisions belongs to one body alone: the Provisioners, eldest of the great companies, whose charter from the Table is a license to fetch and never to take. Their member companies work the reliable rooms on posted schedules and sell what comes down through the guild's barrows and cellars: handcarts wheeled out to a pitch in every market by morning, and taprooms where the house's wine and ale are drunk the same day they are drawn. Their yearly charter-rent to the Pantry stands in place of any tithe. The monopoly carries duties: fixed prices, the day's-end dole of whatever will not keep, and good conduct in the rooms, which the company enforces on its own crews more zealously than the Ushers ever could, since its whole trade depends on rooms that go on tolerating courteous guests. Past the Wicket, provisions move under the Provisioners' badge or not at all; foraging without it is a Doorwatch matter, and the queue's long memory does most of the watching. Registered climbs eat at the house's tables on their way to the stairs, an old custom the Provisioners have tried and failed to end, but a climber's pack is declared coming down like everything else.

A registered climb is therefore exactly what the word says: a passage past the first landing. The procedure is simpler than the doctrine, and every company learns it before its first climb:

1. Register the climb. Before going up, a company files its names, wills, and articles at the Pantry's counter. Registration costs a lamp a head and makes the climb lawful.
2. Declare on return. Everything brought down the Wicket is declared at the same counter and weighed.
3. Pay the tithe. The Pantry takes one part in ten of what came from past the first landing, in coin or in kind. The climb-tithe pays the Doorwatch.
4. Take title. What clears the tithe belongs to the company, and the Doorcourt will enforce that title against anyone.

Treasure slipped past the Porter saves the tenth and loses the rest: no title, no standing at the Doorcourt, and fences' prices in the Maze, a third under market on a good day. A company caught smuggling once is struck from the register. Caught enough, its officers are shown out.

The counter pays struck-weight for plain gold and silver, face value for old coin that rings sound, and fair market for goods the Pantry can sell on. Named and curious pieces go to open bidding on the hiring steps, where the institutions do most of the buying. One rule is older than any Pantler who has enforced it: nothing bearing the house's own mark is melted. Marked plate is bought at full weight and warehoused, and the rule is nowhere defended and nowhere broken.

The trade sorts itself by floor. Pantry-runs to the reliable ground-floor rooms are wage work: a run porter draws 3 to 5 lamps a day, a miner's wage for a miner's reasons. The upper floors pay in shares or nothing. The articles nailed up on the hiring steps are near enough uniform that the Doorcourt treats them as custom: a full share to every sworn climber, a half-share to hired porters who pass the first landing, and the company's third off the top for outfitting, widows, and wills. A good pantry-run makes a living. A good climb makes a company. The proverb covers the rest.

3.8 The Larder and the Ledger ​

The mountain is the richest larder in the world, and Folly eats from it, under one correction that the Grounds' whole trade stands on: house food does not keep. What the house lays, it lays for the day. Bread warm from a sideboard is sawdust by the next morning, wine drawn from the undying casks turns before the next noon, and no art of the provisioners has ever preserved either. So the mountain feeds Folly its breakfast from the Provisioners' barrows, and the Grounds feed it everything that lasts: flour, salt meat, cheese, preserves, and every cask that must see out a winter. The two trades meet in the Orchard's markets and have never quite forgiven each other.

For a traveler with a purse, the rules are short:

The street reckons in stubs and sparks, the trades in lamps, and the Parterre in griffons and gates. Debts inside the city run from hinge day to hinge day, and the week after the Quenching is the great settling, when the board comes in, accounts are ruled off, and the counting houses do not close with the markets. Those houses will draw a letter of credit, good in any border-country town that keeps a correspondent, for one part in fifty plus the cost of proving the seal. In the Grounds and on the roads, carry coin. The Pantry itself neither lends nor borrows. It has not needed to since its ledgers began, a fact the counting houses prefer not to examine.

4. The Powers of the Manse ​

Folly is the largest city in the world, but the world is wide, and most of it has never heard the Noon Dark bells. The household manners that govern the city thin with every mile of road: three days out, the lamps end and the Grounds with them; a week out, "the house" is something merchants swear by rather than live in; a month out there are whole nations with their own tongues, their own gods, and their own opinion of who the Manse belongs to. A thousand years of Housebound spreading down the roads, Drawn arriving from nowhere with their arts and their grudges, and Borderfolk coming in from beyond the Walls have raised powers that owe Folly nothing, and this chapter surveys the great ones as the roads know them.

4.1 Vane ​

Weeks earthward of Folly, in the quarry country that rises toward the roots of the Gravenwall, lies the Kingdom of Vane: the proudest nation in the world, and the only one whose name is a legal claim. Vane is ruled by an aristocracy called the Blood, whose families keep genealogies a thousand years deep tracing their descent from the Founder and the first Guests, and whose doctrine is simple: the Manse is an inheritance, the Blood are the heirs, and the Folly is rightfully theirs. The realm styles itself a kingdom and has no king. The throne stands vacant until the line is restored to its inheritance, and a Regency of the Blood has governed in its place for nine centuries.

The people of Vane call themselves Vanic. The rest of the world says Vanish, an old insult the court has never managed to correct.

4.1.1 The Withdrawal ​

Early in Folly's history, the families who pressed their claim to own the mountain lost the argument, and what happened next depends on which city's histories you read. In Folly's, the Doorcourt passed the greatest sentence it has ever passed, and the claimant families were shown out. In Vane's, there was no sentence to pass, because free heirs cannot be expelled from their own estate: they withdrew, in protest, refusing to live as guests in their own house. The two tellings have never been reconciled.

What is not disputed is what they did next. The exiles marched earthward for weeks, chose ground in the quarry country, and began to build, on the principle that has been the national character ever since: what you build with your own hands is unarguably yours. No found walls, no inherited magic, no sideboards that lay themselves. They quarried their own stone and raised their own city.

4.1.2 The Ring and the Name ​

The realm's founding relic is a signet ring: gold, heavy, indisputably from the first floor of the mountain, its device worn past reading. The name does not come from the device. It comes from the wax. The Blood holds a handful of documents from the world's first century sealed with that ring, and around the seal's rim the impressions carry letters: VANE, clear and clean, with broken edges on either side. Court doctrine holds that the breaks are decorative border and the name is complete. Scholars abroad note that a broken edge can also be the middle of a longer word. Asking what the missing letters might have been is called reading the border, and in Vane it is treated as blasphemy.

The worn device compounds the matter. The College of Rolls blazons it as an eagle displayed, wings elevated, and the eagle stands on every banner, coin, and gatepost in the realm. The oldest wax impressions show a bird with a plainer silhouette, standing on a pivot, and the mansion's rooftops carry weathercocks. Rival courts ask cock or eagle? of any grandeur suspected of common origins. In Vane the phrase is grounds for a duel.

4.1.3 Dravenna ​

The capital's name is not common speech. The Blood claims to preserve the Founder's own tongue, a high speech taught only to the Rolls and the great families, in which the spell of shelter itself is said to have been cast, and the city is named in it: Dravenna, which the court renders as the carved seat.

Dravenna is everything Folly is not: planned, axial, built to human scale and proud of it, gray granite and famous glass, a masons' city where the building trades stand as a second aristocracy and a cathedral-builder's patience is the national virtue. Enchantment in construction is low work, faintly shameful; not one conjured stone is both the city's boast and its building code. Vane keeps its own calendar, dating documents from the laying of Dravenna's First Stone rather than from the Founding.

At the center stands Vanehall, the seat of the line: the finest handmade building in the world, and deliberately unfinished. One wing has stood open to the sky for nine hundred years, scaffolded, worked, never closed, because Vanehall is doctrinally a residence in exile, and finishing it would concede permanence. The Unfinished Wing is the national symbol, the thing Vanish soldiers swear by, and the source of an idiom the whole Manse uses for any endless project: waiting for the roof.

4.1.4 The Blood and the Rolls ​

Rank in Vane runs by proximity of descent from the Founder and the first Guests, computed in degrees by the College of Rolls, the herald-genealogists who are the realm's true power. A family's standing can be revised upward or downward by a genealogical finding, which makes pedigree research a form of warfare and marriage a merger of descent-claims. The College's archivists are courted, bribed, and sometimes killed for what they keep.

The legal doctrine beneath everything is the Entail: the Manse cannot be sold, granted, or given, only inherited, and the heirs are the Blood. From the Entail follows the realm's most provocative institution. The Rolls issue titles to the inheritance itself: paper deeds to parts of the mountain, and a Vanish magnate's proudest possession may be his family's deed to the East Galleries or the Third Landing Stair. Folly's courts give these deeds no standing. But a deed wants an inventory, so Vanish lords sponsor expeditions up the Folly to survey their holdings: registered at the Wicket like anyone, tithed like anyone (paid under protest, in a ritual formula, every time), and tasked with mapping, marking, and cataloguing the estate. The pay is good, the instructions are precise, and the work is deeply political.

4.1.5 Vane and the Mountain ​

Vane maintains no embassy in Folly, since an embassy would recognize the government it disputes. It maintains instead the Bailiff of Folly, a resident officer who once a year, in full formality, serves the city a writ of ejectment on behalf of the rightful heirs. The Ushers receive the writ, thank the Bailiff, and decline it. The exchange has run unbroken for centuries, and every writ is filed in both cities' archives.

Vanish nobles come of age by treading the hall: entering the Wicket, walking as far as the first landing, laying a hand on the stone, and coming out. The Porter watches them exactly the way it watches everyone. In nine hundred years the house has never once treated the Blood differently from any other guest, a fact Vane's doctrine has no answer for; the linen does not bow is the Vanish proverb about it.

For the rest, Vane trades stone, ore, and engineering with the delvers' compact, which famously does not care who owns the surface; marries into the middle kingdoms for allies; hires khanate outriders for its caravans; and funds more registered climbs of the Folly than any other single patron. Vanish travelers in Folly refuse house food and buy only from the Grounds' markets; at home the question never arises, since nothing from the house's tables lasts long enough to travel.

4.2 The Powers Beyond ​

The rest of the map, as Folly's counting houses reckon it. The names below are the roads' names, coined by carters and clerks; each of these powers calls itself something else in its own speech, and most of them are owed a fuller account than this survey gives.

• The middle kingdoms. Two or three feudal realms in the deep interior between the great roads: barons, tithes, tourneys, shrines, and border squabbles conducted by the rules. The Folly is a distant rumor there, and the strangeness of the world arrives rarely and is remembered for generations. Most of the Manse's ordinary people live in them.
• The delvers' compact. The mining nation in the roots of the Gravenwall: human quarry-towns and the steadings of the living stone folk bound in one treaty, everything below an agreed depth negotiated by the yard. They sell stone, ore, and engineering to anyone, and take no side in the surface powers' disputes. Of late they have stopped selling depth-maps, and will not say why.
• The vigil wood. The world's great forest, held by a fair, long-lived Drawn people who arrived centuries ago fleeing something across the planes and have organized their whole culture as a watch against its arrival. They kill trespassers by protocol rather than malice, their diplomats always sit facing the door, and lately their border beacons burn more often.
• The grass khanates. Horse nomads on the open miles between the roads, who guard the caravan trade for a price and raid it when the price is refused. Their faith is the open sky, and they read the two night glows as the campfires of the ancestors. For the first time in living memory, one khan is uniting the banners.
• The jarldoms of the drowned coast. The sea country's raider-traders, descended from stranded fleets and the water Borderfolk together: raiding in the drowned half and trading in the ember half. Their dead are set adrift toward the great whirlpool their faith holds to be the door to the next world. Sometimes a funeral ship comes back.
• The uninvited kingdom. Four centuries ago a single vast mis-teleport delivered an entire migrating people, mid-exodus, onto open grassland claimed by nobody in particular. They never asked to come, were never asked to stay, and are now a settled goblin realm, legitimate by every rule the settled powers use, and the only nation that keeps a standing army, though it has never yet marched anywhere.
• The stranded city. The city-state at the great arrival-ground where the Manse's wild magic drops most of what it catches, ruled by a magocracy of wizards who all got here by accident. Its founding industry is departure: maps, rituals, and expeditions toward the Walls, none of which has ever succeeded. Everything new, dangerous, and unpriced enters the world through its markets.
• The Church of the Far Gods. The largest faith in the Manse, carried in whole by the Drawn: a missionary church preaching gods who did not make this world and have never been seen from inside it. Its teaching is that the gods' reach crosses even the Walls, and its proof is that prayers here are answered. The church discourages questions about what is on the other end of a prayer.