THE LORE
The Fair Copy
aka the Clean Sheet, the Second Setting, the Foul Draft
The Menders' plan, four centuries in the making: to erase the spoiled lower world and set creation down again, done right this time. Rooted in Athra's completion-drive and Vyr guilt over the god they broke. Its method is a successor creation — and the built monsters eating the frontier are its reject pile.
A scribe who blots a page does not argue with the blot; they make a fair copy — the clean final version — and discard the foul draft. That is how the eldest Vyr have come to think of the world they broke. They drew on the humans' god to lift their heaven and cracked him doing it, and in the long silence since, guilt curdled into a colder certainty: the world below dragged our god down to his death; it is spoiled past mending; so we will erase the foul draft and set the fair copy down right. This resolve is not madness. It is Athra's own indifference — the Design cares only that a world be finished, not which — taken up by people who cannot forgive themselves and cannot bear to do nothing. The method is the terrible part, and it explains the bestiary. Dead Vallen was the maker of living things; with him gone, someone must make life again for the fair copy to have anyone in it. So the Menders attempt a successor creation — they build new life to Athra's designs, a whole new draft of people and beasts to inherit a cleaned world. They are not good at it. Nothing living has been made from scratch since the god died, and the Design gives them diagrams, not the knack. What comes out is the reject pile: the constructs and riven things that lurch out of the deep vaults and the high wastes and come downhill to eat the frontier. Every misshapen horror the Vale calls a monster is a botched attempt at a person — a failed draft, discarded or escaped, doing a crude parody of the living work dead Vallen used to do. NOTE TO AUTHORS: this is unresolved backstory. The game never confronts or stops the Fair Copy; it surfaces only as dread, as an ambassador's evasion, and as the slow reveal of what the monsters actually are. The lower world's story is repair and survival, not revelation.
KIND
cosmology
DOMAIN
the Vyr's secret plan to erase and remake the lower world
AUTHORS
the Menders — the faction of eldest Vyr who pursue the plan (see concept.the-vyr-schism)
MOTIVE
Athra's completion-drive + Vyr guilt: they broke the humans' god drawing on him; the draft is spoiled; erase it and set the fair copy down right
Connected
Type Fields
All Relationships (21)
attempts_to_restart
- →The Cycle of Rebirth — The Fair Copy is a forced completion of the Ruin cycle (bring Fire, cleanse the stuck Earth, restore Aether) so the Rebirth cycle can begin its next pass. The Vyr's plan is cosmologically coherent — and cosmologically total.
expressed_through
- →The Wanderer — The Fair Copy's engine: the Vyr are calling the Wanderer near, to take up Vallen's mantle — and the approach itself raises the water, cracks the ground and burns the summers.
disputes
- ←The Last Guest — A death by monster-swarm is a botched, uninvited ending — exactly the kind of unclosed door the Last Guest works against.
- ←The Breath in the Mud — The two wagers on the dying world, opposed at the root: the Vyr's Fair Copy would wash the world and redraw it because they believe it cannot be saved as it is; the Breath in the Mud bets it need not be redrawn, because the elementless can carry it out of the jam. Dread and hope reading the same collapse two ways — the game confronts neither, but an Explorer's finds tilt which one the player believes.
caused
- →The Vyr Schism — The Vyr do not agree about the Fair Copy; that disagreement, kept as silence rather than argument, is the schism itself.
caused_by
- →Athra, the Endless Design — The plan is rooted in Athra's completion-drive as much as in Vyr guilt over the god they broke.
references
- ←The Vyr Schism — The schism exists entirely over whether, and how, to carry out the Fair Copy.
- ←The Hanging Choir — The Hanging Choir are the architects of the Fair Copy — the eldest Vyr who, unable to mend the god they broke, turned four centuries of grief into a plan to wash the world and set it down again clean.
- →The Drawing-Down — The Fair Copy is the redo of the breaking — the failure it means to correct by starting the whole world over without the blot.
- →Aelvyrenn — The work is designed in the silence of Aelvyrenn, behind the cold courtesy the sky-seat shows the ambassadors it tells nothing.
- ←The Vyr — The Fair Copy is the Vyr's design — the proudest people, closest to the gods and rejected by them, claiming the standing to remake creation by their own hand.
- →The Lean Years — The lower world's Lean Years are, to the Vyr, the spoiled draft — the ordinary ruin they would wash away rather than mend, never telling those who suffer it that the tide has an author.
created_by
- ←Ember Wraith — A Mender-built creature drawn to old-empire artefacts — one of the successor-creation's failed drafts.
- ←Hedge-Imp — A Mender-built creature that slipped loose from a botched binding — the reject pile, released downhill.
knows_origin_of
- ←Nevaryn Vhael — [conceals] character.nevaryn-vhael → concept.the-fair-copy
- ←Ellery Coss — [unknowingly_right_about] character.ellery-coss → concept.the-fair-copy
- ←Auver — [leaks] character.auver-the-downcome → concept.the-fair-copy
expressed_in
- ←Sela, the Ringing Child — [symptom_of] character.the-ringing-child → concept.the-fair-copy
documents
- ←A Leaf of the Skyblamer's Tally — [concerns] text.the-skyblamers-tally → concept.the-fair-copy
- ←What the Water Keeps — [concerns] text.what-the-water-keeps → concept.the-fair-copy
- ←The Rejected Leaf — [concerns] text.the-rejected-leaf → concept.the-fair-copy
This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →