Story
Protagonist and Mentor
The protagonist
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:
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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
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.