World

What is known so far about the land Dr. Brink has washed ashore in, drawn from Chapters One through Five and, where noted, from unpublished draft material beyond them.

The Cove

A small, sheltered cove south of the beach where Brink wakes, home to Scur’s Sauropsian village: a handful of reed-and-driftwood huts, a central firepit, fish-curing racks, and a chieftain’s hut set slightly apart, strung with multicolored fish scales over the door and standing near a river running down out of the forest to the west. Scur keeps a hand-drawn map of the cove and its dangers pinned inside that hut, marking a poisoned stretch of river, a monstrous fish offshore, a reptilian skull far upriver, and an insectoid figure to the southwest.

The River and the Refinery

The river running through the cove turns lethal a few hours upstream, its water acidic and thick with dissolved heavy metals, the surrounding forest stripped bare and silent. The source is a small, crude refinery at a bend in the river: a rusted, half-rotten building whose alchemical process was, in truth, run through the body of a captured Sauropsian, forced to serve as a living component in the machine. Brink’s party destroys the operation in Chapter Four, though the fate of the human alchemist who ran it, working under the direction of a “Foreman Fox,” is never confirmed; no body is found in the burned wreckage.

A line of chalk or limestone cliffs to the north, which Scur calls Spa’ka, is identified by the end of Chapter Five as the likely source of enough alkaline stone to purify the river for good, though the labor of hauling it remains an open problem as the published chapters end.

Beyond the Cove

The following is drawn from unpublished draft material beyond Chapter Five.

South of Scur’s village, the road leads toward more familiar territory: human settlements where Opentongue is the common tongue of both poverty and industry alike, a detail Brink finds quietly significant. The town of Vanesville anchors this stretch of the draft material, home to the Shrine of Felicity (Sister Tiffany’s order), the Garibaldi Inn, and the Fairweather Depot, along with a sealed tomb the party investigates in connection with the ambush that killed the orchardist David Goldstone. A banshee named Claudia is said to haunt the woods northeast of town, holding the trail to a lost spellbook that once belonged to the mage Lysandrick.

The Sauropsians

The reptilian, bipedal people Brink meets in Chapters One through Five are never named by any single ethnonym in their own language on the page; “Sauropsian” is Brink’s own later classification for them, adopted once it becomes clear they warrant one. Scur’s village reads, by Brink’s own clinical assessment, as a healthy society: roles chosen or grown into rather than assigned, children given real freedom, authority that is plainly earned rather than imposed.

Where Brink Is From

Brink’s homeland is never named in Chapters One through Five, but it surfaces in fragments. Brink was serving as a ship’s surgeon, one of a hundred and ten crew, when the vessel was lost at sea without a trace of wreckage or another survivor; home evidently has hospitals, shipboard medical postings, and a native language called Gnomic, alongside a second learned language, Fabrican, that comes out heavier and more threatening-sounding than Brink intends when tried on Scur’s people. Opentongue, the regional trade language Brink reaches for first, turns out to already be spoken widely in this land too, by people in poverty and in industry alike, a coincidence Brink finds quietly significant.

Home is also, by Brink’s own account, more developed and more regulated than anything found along this coast. Its settlements dwarf Scur’s village; alchemy is taught there as an approachable applied science; and the harder, rarer practice of consciously shaping “the fabric” through concentration alone is understood to take most of a lifetime to learn, which is why Brink is startled to find it comes so much more easily here. Brink’s homeland has also spent recent centuries building strict oversight specifically to prevent the kind of unchecked industrial poisoning found staged at the refinery in Chapter Three, and Brink has personally treated victims of comparable schemes back home, which is part of what raises their suspicions even before the refinery itself is found.

Some homeland habits just turn out to be different rather than better: Brink’s instinct to offer a handshake goes unused once it becomes clear Scur’s people seal agreements by clasping wrists instead. As with Brink’s own body, neither the homeland’s name nor its people are given a settled identity anywhere in the published chapters, and this page follows that lead rather than filling in the blank.