Heavenly body
The Eclipse
“On the Twilight Line, the sky is always halfway.”
The Eclipse is not a god. It is what the sky was for a thousand years: the Moon pressed against the Sun, a ring of fire in a dark disc, held by the rings of the Astrolabe. It is the light that was neither Sun nor Moon, an even grey-lilac without long shadows. And it is the balance that the people of the Twilight Line still seek between the two heavenly bodies that woke up hungry.
Its people trust in time and distrust the stars. They are the Pilgrims, who walk; the last Clockmaker in his tower; the astronomers without an observatory. Their land is the middle of Lumen, where the Tide stands closest to zero, and where the Ancients left their greatest works: the Meridian Pillar, the Celestial Circle and the tower that binds the earth to the rings above. Their flaw is inaction, and the guilt of the past.
Choose one of its places to continue.
Places
The Twilight Line
The grey-stone strip between the highlands and the lands of the Night, where the light was neither Sun nor Moon, and where the Pilgrims live.
Halvar’s Tower
The tallest thing between Auren and Nocturna: a lighthouse of grey granite and green bronze that is really a clock, bound by gears to the rings of the sky.
Stillrock
Twenty stone houses around a well at the foot of the tower’s hill, on no road: the village that survived the Full Night.
Highstone
A village of old bronze miners where the Order Road ends, abandoned by its people and turned into the Order of Dawn’s camp.
Ashford
The first village on the Line for anyone coming from Auren, burned by the Order on day 19.
The Crater Field
Grey hills pitted by craters, old and new, where Old Boulder slept guarding a hole and where Teo and Nyra fell.
The Meridian Pillar
A column of white, gold and silver light that rises from the only flat land on the Line, beyond the sky, to the Celestial Circle.
The Celestial Circle
A round platform of star obsidian above the ring of dust, reached only by the Meridian Pillar: the neutral arena where Weavers duel.