Alca, the World

Begin where every tale on these shelves begins: with the ground underfoot, and the fact that it is alive. The makers say it plainly in their own charter. Soulframe is set upon Alca, "a world that lives and breathes with the spirit of nature" and with the old magicks of the Fey. This is not ornament. In the playable Preludes build her breath is a Rune an Envoy may carry into battle: Alca's Breath, given with Preludes 11. And the official page warns what her temper does to her own body: the worldflesh splits with rage. Her weather is temperament. Her stone is skin.

She is spoken of as a mother, and her defenders answer in kind. A pact worn on the arm carries the blessing that Alca defends her children; the beasts that ward her essence are called Omen; her first and favoured children were the Fey. The wiki-keepers, reading the in-game Histories, give her body names: the lands of Aurel, Cassia, Kaxia, and Skelfland. Of all this the Preludes build charts one shore only, the northern isle of Midrath. What lies beyond the Silvern Seas no record yet says, and this archive keeps the gap rather than guess at it.

Two suns share her sky, and they are married. Mora is the red sun, rageful, keeper of the old flame. Saphene is the blue, and burns thrice as hot. Before ever the Fey gathered, the Histories say, the two were locked in a fight that rent the planet, and when it ended a child was born of them: Iridis, the green moon, their ashen babe, bringer of life. He walked Alca once in the shape of a man, and where his moonbeam bored the ground, magick welled up for the Fey to drink. His halos, the Histories hold, are the resting place of departed souls; the innermost ring bears the name Virdigris.

From each of the three, a seed in mortal hearts. From Mora came Courage: strength, bravery, resolve. From Saphene, Grace: cunning, agility, insight. By Iridis we knew Spirit: empathy, imagination, arcanics. In the Preludes build these are the Envoy's three Virtues, bound into their triquetra with Preludes 13 and loosened again in 15, so an Envoy now chooses their alignment freely. And mark this, told at Devstream 16 under TennoCon's roof: the three now have twisted reflections, born where the enemy's machinery corrupts nature — Wrath, Death, and Doom. They are named Vespers, an evening-liturgy word of the enemy's own music. They come this fall with the Vadagar arm. They are announced, not yet playable, and they are named here as the enemy's things.

Across Midrath stand the World Trees, great growths older than any charter, and the whole war is legible in their bark. The enemy's engines foul them; Envoys wash them clean. The first cleansing is played, not read: in the fable Rise, Envoy, the newly woken Envoy meets the storm-staffed Nimrod corrupting a World Tree and performs the rite before their first day ashore is done.

A cleansed tree becomes a hearth. Sparrows bring their Tales there. Since Preludes 14 the small found-adventures hang strung upon certain World Trees as votives, the way a village ties ribbons to a wishing bough; since Preludes 15 Envoys trade with one another beneath the branches. Even the Nightfold, the hidden sanctuary upon the Silvern Sea, keeps a hollowed World Tree at its core. Of that tree little is yet told, and the record says so.

When day wrought night they did arrive: so runs the hidden verse the wiki-keepers rescued from the old official site. The Ode holds Alca under violent occupation. Their mercenaries, the Sinecure, have descended from their Skytowers to strip Alca of her flesh and remake the world; that is the makers' own sentence, and no gloss improves it — the hidden poem gives the same descent its own image, songs cast in the night from skyward castles. Their Ichor is poured into her waters and her air so the invader may drink and breathe her. Their great machine, the Organ, corrupts the very air of Midrath, and the isle has been so remade that its sky can no longer make snow.

The cost is kept by her wardens. The official page shows the Omen beasts in the enemy's chains, bellowing in mourning; the reveal ballad says they remember still and tell the cost. The night the invasion fell upon Dendria is playable as the opening fable, Warsongs: the siege of Castle Kearnhold, an infant's blue arm reaching from the smoke. But in what year that night fell, no source says. The Timeline the wiki-keepers assemble leaves the date empty, and so does this record. A wound may be measured without being dated.