The Sky Wound
For as long as anyone remembered, the sky over Atherea was whole. Then, one night, it tore.
A wound opened across the heavens and poured out a light no dawn had ever made: a hard, divine gold that burns without warmth. People called it the Rift. The silence of that first night broke with a sound that has never fully faded, and the world below began to change.
What came through was not gentle. First fell the Rift Titans, colossal beings that walk where mountains stood and leave valleys behind them. After them came the Riftborn, smaller and countless, slipping through every crack the Titans opened. Both carry the same thing into the world: the six Aspects, the old forces that shaped Atherea long before the sky broke, now pouring in raw and undiluted.
The Six Aspects
Hunger wants to consume. Where it rules, bones turn to blades, rust spreads like moss and mouths open where no mouth should be. Nothing is ever enough.
Order wants perfection. Its lands are geometry made solid: flawless circles, endless symmetry, machines that never stop. It would trade every living thing for a world that never makes a mistake.
Time wants to be felt. Clocks run backwards, ruins age and un-age, and a moment can repeat until it breaks you. In its lands you may meet your own afterimage.
Decay wants softness. Mould, spores and slime return stone and bone to the earth, so that something new can grow from the rot. It is patient, and it always wins in the end.
Memory wants to keep. Ink-stained ghosts, pages turning in windless halls, echoes of words nobody remembers saying. It would hold every life forever, like a book that is never closed.
Dream wants to wake the impossible. Mist, sleep without end, places that are bigger inside than out. Where Dream is strong, the only law is what the sleeper believes.
The Regions
- Mawlands (Hunger): from Rustfang Shore to the Pilgrim Highway, a coast of bones and rust.
- Iron Dominion (Order): the Cinder Plains, the Foundry Deep, and the Glass Spire rising over them.
- Broken Hours (Time): the Stopped Ruins, rivers that run uphill, and the Skyscraper Temple.
- Rot Communion (Decay): the Silt Flats, the Mycel Tunnels and the Verdant Wreckage.
- Pale Archive (Memory): the Dust Stacks and the Fossil Archive, where the past is shelved.
- Sleeping Wilds (Dream): Silverwood and Cloud Hollow, the edge of the waking world.
- The Fractured Maw: at the centre of everything, the place the Rift touches the ground. Whoever holds it holds the crown of the hunters.
Titans and Riftborn
The Titans are the Aspects in their most extreme form, too large to reason with and too strong to face alone. When a Titan falls, it falls to many hunters together.
The Riftborn are smaller, stranger and far more varied. Some are monsters. Some, given patience and care, become companions that fight at a hunter's side, rest in the den and grow with every victory. They also breed, and no two crosses are quite alike: the world is learning new shapes faster than anyone can name them.
The Hunters
Every hunter begins Unbound: no allegiance, no craft, only the will to walk into the light. Those who survive their first hunts are changed by them, and choose a path:
- the Reaver, who meets hunger with greater hunger;
- the Huntsman, who marks prey and never misses;
- the Pyromancer, who carries a sundered ember;
- the Trickster, all guile and borrowed faces;
- the Warden, who brings dawn light to the wounded;
- the Vanguard, a living wall against Titans.
Hunters band together in guilds, trade what they find, craft what they cannot find, and slowly push from the coast toward the Fractured Maw.
The Voice in the Light
Deep in the golden glare, something speaks to every hunter by name. It knows your craft before you choose it. It knows that the Iron Dominion keeps records of hunters like you, and that most of them end in ash. It knows that in the Broken Hours an older you is still fighting, and that the Rot Communion remembers an oath your kind swore long before the Rifts.
Follow it far enough, and at the edge of the Sleeping Wilds it will show you its face.
You may not like whose face it is.
The Rift has opened. Hunt the Titans beyond it.