The world, indexed
44 entries. The same scene bible drives the story pages, the shared world, and these cards. Entries tied to vault scenes are summarised for everyone and shown in full to supporters. Design and inventory, not final art.
Adaptation lock
A period mining plant under a hard sky. A timber headframe stands over the shaft, cable drums turn slowly, and the town's lights lie low and amber beyond the fence. Men check each other's lamps without speaking. Below your boots the ground hums very faintly, as if something large were breathing.
Scenes: none yet
Adaptation lock
Boarding houses and a company store climb the slope behind the headframe. This is the 1920s surface the adaptation chose; the novel's narrator is a nineteenth-century American. A sealed glow is said to sit below the hill.
Scenes: none yet
Adaptation lock
The cage drops through timbered dark. Water ticks from the rails. This is a working passage and nothing mystical, but the air changes as you fall: cooler, then strangely still, then faintly lit from below.
Scenes: 1
1871 canon · Book II
A ledge of rock above a fissure with an unnatural light in it. In the book a second descent on ropes ends when the rock crumbles and the engineer falls to the bottom, an inanimate mass. Something enormous stirs in the crack. The way back up is the way you came; the only other way is the road below.
Scenes: 2
Adaptation lock · Book III
An endless road lined with lamps runs between cultivated fields. The crops are leaden and golden-red. Pools of naphtha-like liquid shine to either side, and fern-like trees stand where no sun has ever reached. Far ahead, a great building is cut into the rock.
Scenes: 3
1871 canon · Book IV
A vast façade hollowed from living rock, early Egyptian in character, its columns more ornamented than any you have seen. A tall winged figure stands at the entrance with a calm, sphinx-like face and a staff of bright metal. It regards you without alarm.
Scenes: 4
1871 canon · Book V
A tessellated floor of precious metal, music from no visible source, and a mechanical servant gliding at a staff's touch like a phantom. Lamps burn without flame. A boy of about twelve with small wings watches you from beside a couch. The household of Aph-Lin receives the stranger.
Scenes: 5, 10, 13, 20, 25
1871 canon · Book V–VI
A luxury chamber with an aviary of singing birds, divans, and uncut jewels set in the walls. Zee's breath carries a healing warmth. In the book she teaches the stranger language by trance, then speaks his own tongue to him when he wakes. Her height and her folded silver-ribbed wings are adaptation locks, not the novel's measurements.
Scenes: 6, 7, 8
Adaptation lock · Book III–V
Stepped terraces climb away in every direction, linked by bridges, with columns of lamp-light along a single axis. Courteous children keep the shops. The adults, the book says, are indolent philosophers. Everything is clean, and it is hard to tell whether that is peace or concealment.
Scenes: 14, 16, 27
1871 canon · Book XIX
Shops staffed by children who assist and control machinery. Their pay goes into a public fund that becomes their independence when they marry. Shells serve for small change.
Scenes: none yet
Adaptation lock · Book IX
A circular hall under a shallow dome. At its centre stands a clear glass column taller than a person, with exactly three dark metal rings and a stepped dark pedestal; glow rises from the base. The Tur governs here, in the book, with almost no law but custom.
Scenes: 21, 26
1871 canon · Book IX
Murals of the flood, the first rods, and the long refuge in the caverns after the surface was lost to the Ana. A figure you cannot place reads aloud at the far end. The legend tells how vril ended war and the rule of force. This set is authored for the feature but not locked.
Scenes: 9
1871 canon · Book IX, XII–XIII
A closed temple door, a courtyard of quiet instruments, and sages who speak only when they have something to say. The archive wall beyond the door is where the commonwealth keeps its language, its theodicy, and its record of the debates it abandoned to preserve peace.
Scenes: 11
1871 canon · Book XII–XIII
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Scenes: 12
1871 canon · Book XVI
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Scenes: 15
1871 canon · Book XV, XX
Open terraces where children and Gy-ei learn to fly in a real garment, a mantle of wings with inflated bladders. In the book the narrator tries and fails, and Zee catches him before he falls.
Scenes: 19
1871 canon · Book XVIII
A broad lit lake with a crag over it, at the edge of the cultivated world. Once a year something enormous comes out of the reeds. The book's rule is mercy: the Vril-ya spare stranded life when the reason to kill is gone.
Scenes: 17
1871 canon · Book XIX
Land and air vehicles powered by vril wait at a departure terrace. Emigrants leave here when the commonwealth passes its limit of twelve thousand families. The book gives the Station a paragraph; the rest of it is designed by guesswork and marked here as a proposal.
Scenes: 18, 22
Proposal · Book IX, XXII
The corridor beyond the Station where official correspondence passes to neighbouring Vril-ya states. The book names these states and never visits them; its narrator is refused leave to tour. Anything past this door is a proposal.
Scenes: none yet
1871 canon · Book XXIII
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Scenes: 23
1871 canon · Book XXIV
A quiet town house. A kinsman has been recalled to the All-Good, and the household sings the Birth Song, not a dirge. A machine reduces the body to honoured dust, which is placed in a small patera. Nobody weeps loudly. The narrator, in the book, is struck that grief here is a courtesy and not a collapse.
Scenes: 24
1871 canon · Book XXVIII
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Scenes: 28
1871 canon · Book XXIX
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Scenes: 29
1871 canon · Book IV
It looks at you for a long moment, then gestures, unhurried, toward the entrance.
Scenes: 4
1871 canon · Book V
Taee, a boy of twelve, studies you with open curiosity. In the book his name is spelled Taee and said 'Tar-ee'.
Teaches: Taee
Scenes: 5, 10, 13, 20, 25
1871 canon · Book V–VI
Zee tilts her head. 'You are Tish,' she says, 'a stranger. Sit. Learn.'
Teaches: Vril, Tish
Scenes: 6, 7, 8
1871 canon · Book XIX
'Welcome, Tish,' a child says gravely, and weighs a shell on a small balance.
Teaches: Shells
Scenes: none yet
1871 canon · Book IX, XII–XIII
'We stopped arguing about the ultimate things,' the sage says, 'because it kept us from living.'
Teaches: All-Good
Scenes: 11
1871 canon · Book XV, XX
'You have to stop being afraid of the fall,' the child says. 'It is not so far as you think.'
Scenes: 19
1871 canon · Book XIX
'Surplus people go out at appointed times. Nobody is forced. Nobody is kept.'
Teaches: Station
Scenes: 18, 22
Proposal · Book IX, XXII
'Tish, you are a guest, and a guest does not travel,' the clerk says, not unkindly. 'Ask Aph-Lin. He will say the same.'
Scenes: none yet
1871 canon · Book XXIV
"He is not lost. He is recalled," the mourner says. "We sing so that he hears us go on."
Teaches: Ana
Scenes: 24
1871 canon · Book XXVIII
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Scenes: 28
Adaptation lock
A brass safety lamp, dented and trusted. In the book its light is the last familiar thing before the descent.
Scenes: none yet
1871 canon · Book II
A coil of rope, frayed where the ledge gave way.
Scenes: 2
Adaptation lock · Book III
The pools give off a faint warmth and a smell like lamp oil. Do not touch them.
Scenes: 3
1871 canon · Book V
An automaton. It follows the touch of a staff and nothing else.
Scenes: 5, 10, 13, 20, 25
Adaptation lock · Book IX
The three-ring vessel. The glow does not flicker. The rings are exactly three.
Scenes: 21, 26
1871 canon · Book IX
A flood. Then people in caves. Then a bright rod laid across a ruined field.
Scenes: 9
1871 canon · Book XII–XIII
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Scenes: 12
1871 canon · Book XVI
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Scenes: 15
1871 canon · Book XXIII
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Scenes: 23
1871 canon · Book XXIV
A shallow dish holding a pinch of fine dust. It is honoured, not feared.
Scenes: 24
1871 canon · Book XXIX
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Scenes: 29