Story
Story Outline
(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.