Story Bible

World Open page

Velan is the land's name for now, as well as the code name. (Idea) It is farmland, highland and fen around a vast dry lakebed that was once the Mere, a lake so still it mirrored the sky without a ripple.

The Glass: why magic takes two hands

• (Idea) Magic lives in the Glass, the thin surface between the world and its reflection. Every still surface holds a little of it: water, polished stone, an eye.
• (Idea) A shape drawn on the Glass takes hold only when the world and its reflection agree on it. The Evane teach that one hand speaks for the world and the other for its reflection, so every spell needs both hands. That is Evane tradition, not law: Rook, a one-armed Facet, casts anyway (section 2).
• (Idea) In Evane teaching, the three drawing styles are three ways of asking the reflection:
  • Mirrored: the second hand draws exactly what a mirror would show. The world is asked to act within its own nature. This is why the Evane, who guard nature's rules, draw mirrored.
  • Parallel: both hands move the same way, which no mirror ever shows. The reflection is asked to move with the world: momentum, wind, travel.
  • Asymmetric: the hands draw different shapes. The reflection is told to become something the world is not. It is power without limits, and the hardest drawing there is.
• (Idea) The Glass rewards agreement: the closer the two strokes match in shape, size, pace and timing, the stronger the spell. No pair of hands is a perfect mirror, so no cast is perfect. This is the in-world reason for the scoring rule that 100% is unreachable.

Breath

• (Idea) A caster holds their breath while the Glass is open between their hands. Breath fogs a mirror: exhale mid-spell and the Glass clouds over and the spell fizzles.
• The breath window in the game is that held breath. Training deepens it (player level) and some gear helps hold it, as section 6 already says. (Idea) Example gear: still-water amulets, reed collars worn by Still Choir monks.
• (Idea) Tracing a found glyph needs no held breath, because the fragment's own Glass is already open. A student may trace slowly; casting the spell later must fit in one breath. (The learning code already skips the breath check while tracing.)

Glyphs: why no one invents a spell

• (Idea) Spells are found, not made. Glyphs form in the Glass the way frost forms on a window, and surface as fragments: etched shards, carved stones, marks in old ruins.
• (Idea) New glyphs keep surfacing, most often near cracks in the Glass. This is the in-world face of the Living Spell Library (section 6): new spells reach players through discovery.
• Knowing a shape is not knowing a spell. (Idea) A spell takes hold only after your own hands have traced its glyph enough times for your Glass to remember it. A shape copied from a book fizzles.

History

1. (Idea) The Still Age. Time out of mind, known only from legend. Lake-folk live around the Mere and cast small mirrored glyphs found on its shore. There are no sides.
2. (Idea) The Evening, about 5,000 years ago. Casters agree that only true reflections are safe and found the Evane, "those who keep things even". Five factions form around five rules of nature and have competed ever since.
3. (Idea) The Breaking, about 2,000 years ago. The Mere cracks from shore to shore in one night and drains. Its bed becomes the Shardfield: miles of standing mirror-glass, each shard reflecting a slightly different sky.
4. (Idea) The Facets. Casters who settle among the shards find that asymmetric glyphs surface there, and that they work. The Evane call them the Shattered and blame them for the Breaking.
5. (Idea) Now. Cracks in the Glass, called warps, are opening across Velan and leaking glints: creatures of loose reflection. Each side says the other's magic causes them.

Velan is thousands of years old, and most of its history survives as legend. Every side, faction and town tells its own version, and the versions disagree. (Idea) Some legends to seed:

• The First Pair. Two lake-folk, one on each shore, drew the first glyph between them across the water. The Evane say they were twins; the Facets say they were strangers.
• The Drowned Choir. A choir sang the Mere still and sank with it when it broke. On calm nights the Sallow still carries their hum. The Still Choir claims descent from them.
• The Hundred-Year Hour. The Keepers once held a single hour open for a century. Nobody agrees what they were hiding in it.
• The Girl with the Circle and the Square. The first asymmetric caster drew Facet Seal over her village on the night of the Breaking. The Facets say she saved it; the Evane say she caused it.
• The Endless Caravan. The first Waymakers swore to keep moving until the Mere was whole again. Their wagons are said to be moving still.

What really caused the Breaking is the Act 3 reveal (section 4): both sides caused it, and each tells only the half that blames the other.

The Two Sides Open page

Each side is right about one danger and blind to the harm its own answer does. Beliefs come from section 3; everything else in this table is a proposal.

Un-teaching: the Evane punish forbidden casters by sealing their hands' memory of a spell. It is the Facets' deepest grievance and the Evane's darkest habit. It is also a real, narrow mechanic:

• Only a Warden court can do it, and only after a crime: casting a forbidden spell on Evane people or inside an Evane town, and getting caught. Casting Facet spells in the wild never risks it.
• The court seals the one spell used in the crime. A sealed spell fizzles with "Your hands have forgotten …".
• Sealed is not erased. Retrace the glyph from the start to relearn it, or pay a Facet unbinder in Lanternfall to break the seal, which Evane NPCs will hear about.
• Repel can never be sealed: the door-mark is older than the Wardens, so no player is ever left without a spell.
• In code, sealing removes the spell from the known-spell list and records why.

(Idea) The name matters: calling them "Shattered" or "Facets" is a choice NPCs notice, and could feed the reputation system (section 7).

The five Evane factions

The first four come from section 3's examples. The Waymakers are the fifth, and Gale is theirs. Each faction owns exactly one drawing style.

• (Idea) Rivalry: the Wardens think they lead; the Tenders think nothing matters more than life; the Keepers think everyone else is in a hurry. The other four call Waymaker casting barely Evane, so most quarrels end up there.
• (Idea) The Still Choir talks in mirrored hand-signs, the same gestures as mirrored casting. It is the one faction that quietly trades letters with the Facets.

Facet culture

• (Idea) A Facet's standing comes from how many glyphs they have given away, not how many they hold. Hoarding is the worst insult.
• (Idea) Cuts are named after gem-cutting terms (Bevel, Crown, Table, Culet), as are most Facet spells (section 7).
• (Idea) Every Facet designs a personal sigil from two unlike shapes, like their spells. It is worn on the clothes, painted on the door, carved on the grave.
• (Idea) Facet colour is amber (Facet Seal's #FFC66B): sunlight bent through cut glass.
• (Idea) Their flaw is the mirror of the Evane's: no one is allowed to say "not yet". Children are handed spells they cannot control.
• (Idea) The one-armed gateway. Rook, the player's way into the Facets, lost his left arm in a glass storm. He casts by drawing one half, holding it open in the Glass, then drawing the other half with the same hand. To the Evane that is impossible; to the Facets it proves two hands were only ever a habit. (In gameplay the player still draws with two thumbs.)

Protagonist and Mentor Open page

The protagonist Open page

From section 4: the player picks male or female; an ordinary farmer or villager, unaligned, possibly an orphan, born with limitless potential; may join a side or stay unaligned.

• (Idea) Home: a farm at Sallowbank, a village on the Sallow river where Evane land meets the Shardfield. Parents dead; lives alone; Aske the ferry keeper is the nearest neighbour.
• (Idea) The farm: one goat, nine hens, and a roof that leaks over the good chair. The protagonist's mother painted the door-mark on the doorposts; their father taught the nightly tracing, one thumb on each post.
• (Idea) Warm thumbs: the door-mark has always felt warm under the protagonist's thumbs, and they have never asked anyone whether that is usual. After tracing Coil at the Drowned Steps, Aske hears this and says: "Warm. Huh. Mine never were." A recurring motif for the even pair.
• (Idea) Why the potential: the protagonist's hands mirror each other almost perfectly. Casters call it an even pair and see one a generation. The Evane want them because an even pair draws flawless reflections; the Facets want them because an even pair can hold two different shapes without drifting.
• (Idea) Motivation, in order: keep Sallowbank safe from the warp upstream; find out what they are; later, help Aske undo what Aske did.
• (Idea) Arc: a farmer who wants home safe, courted by both sides, finds each side hiding something, and learns that good or bad comes down to the person, not the side (section 2). The player can still end aligned; the "enlightened" path is the one where both sides come to trust them.

The first cast: Repel

Section 5 has the beat: the village is attacked, a prompt shows mirrored Ls, the character "accidentally" draws them and casts Repel. (Idea) How that works in-world:

1. Every door in Velan carries the door-mark: two Ls painted mirrored on the doorposts, an old protective charm. It is the Repel glyph. Almost nobody can actually cast it.
2. As a child the protagonist traced their family's door-marks with both hands every night, a habit their father taught them. Those years of tracing are why Repel starts learned (as it does in the game data).
3. Glints pour out of the river. Cornered at the farmhouse door, the protagonist puts a thumb on each mark and draws. The tutorial prompt shows the mirrored Ls.
4. The cast is overwhelming (section 5's idea): the glints are hurled back, and the whole river goes mirror-flat for a heartbeat. Casters on both sides feel the Glass ring.
5. Aske saw it. That night, in Aske's barn, the protagonist fights an old Warden training golem. This is the prototype's existing battle.

Learning a spell by tracing a glyph Open page

• Find a fragment: in a ruin, on a shard, as a gift or a quest reward.
• Trace it with both thumbs, slowly if needed; no breath limit. A trace counts when it is recognised and clears the learning bar. When enough traces count, the spell is learned. (This is what the learning code already does.)
• Glyphs come in several kinds:
  • Whole: one fragment holds the whole spell, since the other hand's stroke follows from it. Most mirrored and parallel spells.
  • Split: each half of an asymmetric glyph sits on a different fragment, often far apart, and you need both. Facet Seal works this way: the circle is given in Lanternfall, the square is found in the Shardfield.
  • Taught: no fragment exists; a teacher traces it with you, hand over hand, so the teacher decides who learns. Faction secrets and Facet gifts.
  • Reflected: visible only in one reflection, such as a pool at dawn or a shard during a glass storm. You trace it while it shows.
  • Warp-born: surfaces at a fresh warp and fades within days. The in-world form of time-limited content drops.
• (Idea) The first fragment is Coil, at the Drowned Steps at the end of the Prologue, with Aske teaching the method.

The Mentor Open page

From section 5: trustworthy but jaded; once caught in the conflict; was pushed to do something or saw it was pointless, and walked away; living proof that leaving is possible.

• Name and look: Aske Tarran, a woman of about sixty, ferry keeper at Sallowbank for twenty years. Broad, rope-scarred hands. She still wears her Warden glyph bands, turned inside out so the marks face her skin.
• Past: born in Twinhold to a Warden family; a mender by twenty-five, one of the Evane casters who seal warps and enforce the rules; later a company captain under Ondine Ash. Twenty years ago at Corran, a Facet town beside a widening warp, Ondine ordered a five-person mirrored seal. Aske argued against it, then cast her part. The seal held the warp and froze the town with it: Corran's people still stand in clear glass, mid-step. She blames Ondine, and herself more.
• The shard: as the seal closed, a Corran girl pressed a shard into Aske's hand, one half of a Facet glyph her mother was teaching her. The girl still stands in the glass beside the town well. The other half was lost; the player picks it up in the Shardfield in Act 2 without knowing what it is.
• Since then: Aske still knows every Warden glyph and has not cast one in twenty years. She keeps the Sallow ferry because it is the nearest crossing to Corran, and carries anyone for free, Evane or Facet. It is the only rule she still keeps.
• (Idea) The golem: Aske's training golem, stone and old iron under an old sail in her barn. She "bought it cheap" ("Doesn't eat"). The glyph on its chest makes it pull its punches, mostly.
• (Idea) The send-off (section 5's Hobbit-style beat): Aske gives two letters, one to a Warden in Twinhold and one to a Facet in Lanternfall. The Twinhold letter has a pale blue seal, the Lanternfall one amber; the names on the front are not decided yet. "Deliver both. Believe neither until you've met both."
• (Idea) Arc: refuses to go back; follows the player to Corran in Act 3 when the warps reach Sallowbank; faces Prelate Ondine, who gave the Corran order; casts again, once, to help undo the stilling. Joins neither side afterwards.
• (Idea) Voice: short, practical sentences. Distrusts speeches from either side, including the protagonist's.

Story Outline Open page

(Idea) A prologue and four acts. Spells arrive in difficulty order (mirrored, then parallel, then asymmetric, then composites across sides), so the story teaches the casting tiers from section 6. The main line stays loose (section 1): side quests fill the world between beats, and the world carries on after Act 4.

Prologue: The Door-Mark (Sallowbank)

• Farm life; overworld movement tutorial.
• Villagers to talk to in the square: Tobin, Marra Hesk and Fenn (section 5). What they say changes after the glints and again after the send-off.
• Glints come up the river. First cast at the farmhouse door (section 3 of this tab).
• Aske's barn: the training golem fight, the prototype battle as it exists today.
• The send-off with two letters.
• Aske walks the player along the Sallow to the Drowned Steps, a Still Age shrine half under the river, and teaches fragment tracing there. Coil is the first fragment. Aske turns back for home.
• Set piece: the glint pack at the farm door, then the golem.
• Spells: Repel, Coil.

Act 1: The Sallow Road

• The player walks on alone from the Drowned Steps, carrying the two letters.
• Halfway, the neutral market town: both sides trade under truce. Introduces the Market (section 9) and the Proving Ring, the PvP arena (section 10).
• Tamsin Vale (Wardens) and Rook (Facets) both arrive looking for "whoever rang the Glass".
• Set piece: the Sallow Wyrm, a river serpent made of reflections, rising at the Drowned Steps once Aske has gone. Repel to stagger it, Coil to hurt it.
• Spells: Coil, learned at the end of the Prologue, put to work against the Wyrm.

Act 2: Two Courts

The player chooses which letter to deliver first; both cities can be visited in either order.

• Twinhold (Evane). Tamsin guides. The five factions court the player according to how they draw (section 6's idea). The player watches a public un-teaching.
• The Long Road. A Waymaker caravan job with Caravan-master Dace teaches Gale.
• Lanternfall (Facets). Rook guides. The circle half of Facet Seal is given freely; the square half has to be found in the Shardfield. The player meets Lio, a child handed a glyph too early.
• Composites. Rook (or Dace) shows threading: keep both thumbs down between two spells so the Glass never closes. The first thread is Repel into Gale.
• Midpoint choice. Prelate Ondine asks the player to guard a mending at the Sallow warp. Iver the Cutter asks the player to steal glyphs from the Measure Vault in Twinhold. Do either, both or neither; each has a cost and moves reputation with each side.
• Set pieces: caravan defence in the Long Road wind pass (Gale); a glass storm in the Shardfield (Facet Seal); the Measure Vault break-in or the mending guard.
• Spells: Gale, Facet Seal, first composites.

Act 3: Corran

• The warps spread and reach Sallowbank. Aske leaves the ferry and comes with the player.
• Corran, the stilled town. The player learns Aske's story from the glass itself.
• At the Hour Stair, Keeper Hale's sealed records give the truth of the Breaking. Asymmetric glyphs were already straining the Mere; the Evane's first Great Mending, meant to stop them, broke it in a single night. Both sides caused it; each tells only the half that blames the other.
• The same pattern, small: the Sallow warp began as a crack widened by Facet glyph-hunters, then torn open by a Warden mending.
• Set piece: a glint colossus guards Corran's warp. After it falls, Aske's half-glyph and a half the player found in Act 2 combine. The stilling is undone by a composite threading an Evane spell into a Facet spell in one stroke (section 6: the strongest composites mix sides).
• Spells: the Corran glyph (new, asymmetric); cross-side composites.
• Underworld: players on the evil path find the Undermere here (section 7). A way back always exists, but it gets exponentially harder the further they have fallen.

Act 4: The Heart Pane

• Both sides converge on the Heart Pane, the last unbroken piece of the Mere, at the centre of the Shardfield.
• Prelate Ondine leads all five factions in a second Great Mending, which would end asymmetric magic for good. Iver the Cutter means to shatter the Pane and free every glyph at once, which would open warps everywhere.
• The ending is open-ended for now. The player can help either side or stop both, and the story picks no canonical outcome. Stopping both means holding the Pane with a composite drawn from both sides.
• The conflict does not end. The two sides go on arguing; glyphs keep surfacing; the world stays open (section 1: no endgame).
• Set piece: a two-phase finale. Phase one against Ondine's mirrored chorus, phase two against Iver's asymmetric shattering, fought on the Pane's mirror surface with the sky above and below.

Key Cast Open page

Every name below is (Idea). Only the protagonist and the mentor's role come from the Codex.

(Idea) Recurring enemies: glints (loose reflections leaking from warps, the common monster); Warden training golems; Sallow Wyrm; glass storms in the Shardfield; outlaw casters of both sides in the Undermere.

Key Locations Open page

Every place below is (Idea). The Look column is written as a brief for concept art.

Spell Lore Open page

Shapes and effects match the Spell Book in section 6 and the spell data files. The faction for each Evane spell and every line of in-world text are (Idea).

Composites: threading Open page

• (Idea) In-world, a composite is a thread: both thumbs stay down from one spell into the next, so the Glass never closes and the spells run together. Lifting a thumb closes the Glass. This explains why composites are drawn as one continuous stroke (section 6).
• (Idea) A thread is named by its parts in the order drawn, e.g. "Repel into Gale". Players never name or invent anything.
• (Idea) Example threads:
  • Repel into Gale: the push lands, then the wind carries the target further back.
  • Gale into Coil: the wind throws the vine, so Coil hits from range.
  • Coil into Facet Seal: a shield of thorns. The first cross-side thread most players find.

Naming future spells

• (Idea) Evane spells: one plain English word, verb or noun, from the faction's domain.
  • Wardens of Measure: weight and measure (Repel, Brace, Tally).
  • Tenders: growth and decay (Coil, Root, Wither).
  • Keepers of the Hour: time (Toll, Linger, Hasten).
  • Still Choir: sound and silence (Hush, Echo, Veil).
  • Waymakers: motion and weather (Gale, Drift, Slip).
• (Idea) Facet spells: two words, a gem-cutting term then what it does: Facet Seal, Bevel Lash, Prism Snare, Crown Ward, Culet Spike.
• (Idea) Colour: a spell's glyph colour follows its faction (the color field in the spell data). The four existing spells already set the palette for their factions.
• (Idea) Ids: the name in snake_case, as now (facet_seal).

Open Story Questions Open page

Decided (Ray, 2 Nov 2026)

Still open

• Is Rook the one-armed gateway, or should it be a new character?
• "Falls to one side": deeper into evil, deeper into one side's camp, or both?
• History dates: the Evening about 5,000 years ago and the Breaking about 2,000. Right?
• Who are Aske's two letters addressed to? The seals are set (pale blue for the Twinhold Warden, amber for Lanternfall); the names are not.