THE COMPENDIUM

Items

87 entries

Places 211Factions 62 Characters 160Creatures 71 Items 87 Events 14 Concepts 66 Texts 47

A Fenced Working

A palm-sized piece of temple-bronze on Calder's table, still bright under the grime — proof the Ledger really does sell the dead empire's bones by the ounce.

A clouded bead of pale salt-glass from the cold country near the Karth — cast, the tellings say, over a Stillwater monk who sat down to still his breath and never started it again. It steadies the hands and the heart of whoever holds it.

A Pan-Shard

A thumb of raw temple-bronze panned from the flooded Sunken Cut — the thing the Deepcut Pans risk the ash-hounds for, and the seed of every relic the powers fight over.

Ancelot, the Ancient Cross of War

A greatsword shaped like a cross of war — a relic the old tellings tie to the Last Guest of the Sworn Gods, whose name is never said aloud for fear of calling it. Lifted overhead it casts a long cross-shadow, and a line of men who see it tends to remember somewhere else to be.

Ash Bowl

A fired clay bowl in the Asheni style, used for every meal, every offering, every morning reading of the ancestor-ash.

Cliff-Fang Knife

A short blade knapped from a cliff-stalker's harvested fang, used by Asheni hunters who prize the natural edge.

Cold-Kit

Layered oilskin, waxed wool and a face-wrap sold as one bundled kit — the difference between turning back at the snowline and going up past it.

Death of Seasons

A long spear of grey wood and grey iron that brings the turning early. Where its point goes in, the season goes out — green to brown to nothing in a breath — the Ruin half of the old scholars' wheel, set on a haft.

Deep-Lung

A treated-hide bladder and reed tube the Hessk divers swear by — strap it flat to the chest, bite the reed, and a held breath stretches further than it has any business stretching.

Draught of Amber Sap

The Sap-Drinkers' cure and heresy — a measured dose of the Rootbound Hollow's hoarded sap that eases a bad case of Verdigris Lung to a bearable cough for days.

Draught of Stillsap

Amber sap from the deepest root-galleries, distilled by the Sap-Drinkers — the only known brake on Verdigris Lung. It settles the cough and steadies the shakes in a salvor's chest, and roots the drinker a little deeper into the wood with every dose.

Drowned Well Water

A waterskin filled from the deep basin of the Drowned Well — sweeter than rain and cold enough to ache, carrying something the lurkers will not touch.

Frost-Gland Phial

A phial of rendered rime-stalker cold-gland — the Rime-Skinners' main trade good, valued by outfitters and alchemists who work the north road.

Glimmer

A cold mote of fae-light, tucked into odd corners of the Vale by no hand anyone's ever caught at it. The lights glow a little warmer near their own kind; collectors trade them to Wren in Valenfeld for wonders no forge can make.

Gravecount, the Heir's Blade

The longsword of a Vandahl heir laid in the deepest niche of the Sered catacombs, ranked highest of all the house dead. The Lower Wardens keep its door shut; the heir who holds it has not stopped counting.

Hollowfold Tallow Candle

A plain rendered-fat candle sold in Hollowfold — adequate light, a slight sheepy smell, worth almost nothing and useful everywhere.

Holy Thunderforce

A longsword the old tellings say Vallen the Wright forged himself, the way he forged every oath — true, and witnessed, and meant to hold. Drawn, it does not gleam so much as crack the air, and a blow lands like the sky deciding something.

Imperator's Word

The longsword the last Imperator of Vallen drew as his city came down around him — the killing stroke he began at the instant of the Drawing-Down and, in the temple-bronze fused into the blade, never got to finish. The Resonants would burn the Vale to take it apart.

Imperium Bronze Blade

A Vallen Imperium legionary sword salvaged from the Sunderfront Galleries — dull bronze gone green but still holding an edge that no frontier smith has matched in four centuries.

Korl Cairn-Stone

A palm-sized flat stone carved with the Korl wayfinding script, taken from the cairn-line on the Wind-Cut Pass — Three-Cairns will re-stack it with a look, and will remember you either took it or returned it.

Marrow-Lance Toll Token

A stamped iron disc bearing the Marrow-Lance cross-hatch — proof of paid passage on the barrow road. Useless as a weapon; priceless as an argument.

Mournwright's Concordance

Taras Mournwright's three trunks of rubbings, sketches, and architectural notes on Caer Vallen — a complete exterior map of the hall he has never entered, which is either the most thorough document of a living building in the world or a suicide note written in architectural notation.

Oén's Empty Bowl

The worn begging bowl of Master Oén of the Stillwater Order — a relic whose entire power is that it wants nothing, and teaches its carrier, for a while, to want nothing either. The Unclosed find no purchase in a hand that isn't reaching, and a still hand shakes less.

Ossym's Tally Stick

A notched bone rod Ossym carries, marking the years he has kept watch at the barrow's threshold — each notch one winter.

Rope-and-Piton Kit

A waxed coil of rope and a dozen forge-drawn iron pitons, sold as one kit at every smithy that knows Explorers pass through — the plain answer to a cliff a ladder can't reach.

Saltglass Instrument Shard

A fused crystal of salt and Imperium tuning-glass from the Saltglass Vault's apse — it still rings a true note when struck near the apse's old seal-instruments, and studying it teaches something real about the tolerances the empire's engineers cut their bronze to.

Saltkiss, the Fence's Knife

A thin Silt Hands blade cached in the Sunken Cut beneath the town, ground for locks more than throats. Dreva swears it opens anything that was ever meant to stay shut.

Seld's Letter

A sealed Hollow Writ dispatch Pyre Warden Seld was ordered to deliver to anyone who returned from the Cindervault alive — the seal is pressed with Lord Vandahl's mark.

Starfire

An arcane staff capped with a knot of cold light that the Imperium's old Aether-scholars swore was a coal of the divine substance itself, caught before it ever cooled into matter. Whether they were right or simply the finest arcanists of a dead age, a caster who carries it draws on the raw arcane more easily, and the staff makes the drawing easy.

The Ashwalker Smoke Marker

A carved basalt pole topped with a fire-treated copper cup — used by the Ashwalkers to mark fumarole paths, sacred enough that the prior Pyre Warden garrison's seizure of it still rankles.

The Assay Staff

A Far College staff built around a bar of temple-bronze that reads a caster's own arcana back at them and hands it back sharper — the College's ordinary teaching-tool for anyone who's learned to work Old Work salvage into spellcraft. Carried near a great fragment of the old empire, the bronze in it goes restless, which makes it both a finding-tool and a temptation.

The Bought Oath-Horn

The Marrow Lances' muster-horn, sounded to call the company to a contract — carried off to Hewngate Keep by the wing that broke its oath, and blown now to call men to a chain instead of a banner. In a true hand it still rallies; in Bron Coldhand's it only collects.

The Brine-Map

Reshi the Dry's hand-scratched clay tile showing which pans are salt-crust, which are brine-sinks, where the good wells run, and which ones are poisoned.

The Caldera Key

A ward-key smithed from basalt and obsidian-toad flux, cast to the exact profile of the Cindervault's outer lock — the gate opens to it, and to nothing else.

The Cantor's Broken Seal

Half of a bronze sealing-token from the Hushing Deep — a Mourner-Cantor's closing rite, cut short mid-rite when the singer died with the token still unpressed. It steadies a mind the barrow's Unclosed dead are trying to crowd out.

The Closing Bell

A brass bell cast for Temple closing-rites — once rung to mark an ending properly finished, last logged in the Driftmarket's books before vanishing from the ledger entirely.

The Cupped Hand Offertory

A smooth stone bowl carved in the shape of two cupped hands, used by Sister Cael to carry water from Saltreach Spring to the Salt-Pan Shrine each dawn.

The Deep Bell-Piece

A bell-metal casting from whatever the Wrack-Maw swallowed before the Imperium came — a working bell that rings true at exactly the pitch the drowned-faithful shrines used, and stills the drowned faithful completely while it sounds.

The Deep Ember

A fist-sized lump of named temple-bronze pulled from the Cindervault's apse — still warm centuries on, and glowing with a low light that owes nothing to any fire nearby.

The Draughtsman's Glass

A Vyr artificer's sighting-lens carried down from Aelvyrenn — look through it and a made thing shows you its own diagram: the seam that isn't structural, the join that was meant to move, the flaw the maker hid. Athra's way of seeing, ground into glass a lower-world hand can hold. Almost no one who has held one gave it back.

The Drover's Ledger-Stone

A salt-cured tally-stone from under the wrecked caravan's floorboards — not the goods the first looters grabbed, but the record of what the goods really were and who they were really for. A rare lodestone-like stone that still pulls toward the last route walked.

The Drowned Censer

A salt-blackened censer from the altar of the Tidewrack sink, of a sea-rite older than the Ashen orthodoxy. Its smoke does not drown — and neither, for a while, do you.

The Drowned Prayer

A barnacled reliquary from the drowned shrine, holding the last unfinished prayer of a priest who went under before anyone could shut his eyes or speak the closing words over him. Because his ending was never finished, an Unclosed presence lingers in the bronze — and it steadies a diver's nerve and stretches a held breath.

The Drowned Warden's Token

A waterlogged Greenwake token recovered from the Drowned Larach's altar — sealed in something that isn't wax and isn't amber, still holding the same unnatural calm the Drowned Warden kept for decades before the water took her.

The Emerald Sword

A longsword whose blade is a single tapering shard of green stone, kept clear and cold under the drowned shrine of the Lady of the Long Water. The Hessk bow the green to her; this is the green given an edge.

The Falls Cache

A runner's cache hidden on the narrow ledge behind the frozen Falls of Stilled Water — contents unknown until found, rumoured for years, reached only when the ice is solid enough to hold a climber.

The Finder's Glass

A smoked lens the Finders pass down that catches the faint green sheen of temple-bronze through stone — the tool that turns tomb-robbing from luck into a trade.

The First Fork

A tuning-fork of dense temple-bronze lost in the Karth Deep, older than the Listening College — by some accounts the first tool anyone used to find true Old Work bronze by its ring on purpose. It amplifies a Listener's craft the way a staff amplifies a spell.

The First Unhushing

Corr Ash-Tongue's own litany, cut into a small temple-bronze grave-bell at the top of his tower — the song with which the first gravesinger taught the dead their names instead of laying them down, and climbed past dying himself. Whoever sounds it commands what he built: lay the tower's dead to rest at last, or take up his unfinished verse and keep the court climbing forever.

The Fisher's Last Cast

A hook cast in green-patina'd bronze, pulled from the drowned shrine — a fisher's last hopeful throw, cast when the Mirrenmere rose over him and never followed by a body anyone found.

The Frostmaw Shard

A raw chunk of temple-bronze locked in the blue ice at the bottom of Frostmaw Cave — the find the oldest Rime-Skinner forbids anyone to dig toward. Enormous power, dense enough with old green dust to give a carrier Verdigris Lung early.

The Gravesinger's Bone-Flute

A flute carved from an ancestor's shin-bone, lost in the Tabled Barrow when a wight was singing-wrong and the gravesinger dropped it and ran.

The Hollow Key

A large iron key, cold and slightly wrong in the hand — it opens the bricked-up door to the Shut Reliquary in Castle Sered's closed wing, lifted by Veya the Tinner from a sleeping steward.

The Imperial Bonding-Ledger

A sea-customs record from the drowned Imperial station in the south headland, listing everything the empire confiscated through the Narrows gate and the destinations it claimed to ship them — and the ones that never arrived.

The Imperium Relief Standard

The ice-locked battle-standard of the Vallen Imperium column that froze on the saddle below the Sunderfront Galleries — pried from the ice, it may be the key to standing down the dead above.

The Keeper's Vigil

A bead of pale salt-glass off the leaning beacon at Gull's Watch — cast, they say, over a keeper who died at his post and kept watching anyway, his ending never properly closed. It lends a carrier a little of that unclosed, patient sight.

The Korl Greatblade

An oversized Korl iron greatsword from the Lance-Barrow grave-goods — five hundred years old, unrusted, heavier than anything its shape should weigh, and wanted by the Marrow Lances for a Vale contract.

The Last Census of Vallen

The master ledger of the Vallen Imperium — every vault, tribute-hoard, and buried treasury of a dead empire, tallied the year before it fell. The Gaunt Ledger would trade a guild for it, because it is a map of where all the dead bronze went.

The Last Green Hour

A seed-shaped casting of amber resin from beneath the Hollowing Oak — a Greenwake warden's final walk through the living wood, held in the one thing the wood had on hand to hold it, that quickens a carrier's own healing the way the wood quickened around her.

The Last Hold

A knuckle of grey mineral flowstone from deep in the Karth — formed, slow year on year, around a climber's final grip on the rock before the dark took them. It lends a carrier a little of that desperate sureness of hand and foot.

The Last Latch

A hand-bell of temple-bronze paired with its own small latch-pin, cast by the Mourners to finish an ending on the spot — one of the Vale's few unique finds.

The Last Word

A small bronze hand-bell cast by Kessa's people to mourn a death that was never let finish — the Bellwakes' proof that whatever happened in the deep gallery interrupted someone mid-word. A relic of the Unclosed, and the prize of the deepest gallery.

The Living-Wood Bow

A Greenwake bow grown rather than carved, still faintly alive — it draws lighter for a warden of the living land and refuses the hand that's come to strip the wood.

The Market-Day Laugh

A small bronze charm cast in the shape of a laughing child, bought and sold a hundred times around the Tidewrack coast — folk say it carries a little of whatever household's good luck it was cast in, and it warms a hard room for whoever carries it.

The Marrow-Hollow Silver

A small ingot of raw silver from the tribal death-house — real, and exactly wrong to own, because it came from a sealed barrow that was not opened with permission.

The Marrowfold Grave Token

A flat disc of dark temple-bronze carved with a mark no Vandahl mason made, found in the elder sealed chambers of Marrowfold Cairn — older than the house, and worth more to some than the silver ever was.

The Maw Cache

A waterproofed oilcloth bundle of Silt Hands contraband stashed in the Mangrove Maw — the load that never got picked up because the runner didn't come back.

The Oathblade

The Lance-Captain's sword, passed hand to hand for two hundred years — said to dull against a man you've sworn to protect and bite deeper into one you've betrayed.

The Quorum's Well-Map

A hide-scrap showing the Cinder Quorum's charted wash-routes to the deep wells of the wastes — mostly accurate, one entry lethally wrong.

The Road-Dead's Offering

A bundle of grave-goods from the Reshi Ossuary's oldest niche — road-beads, hammered copper, a lock of hair braided with salt-grass — that Veshti Goldeye lost with her caravan and cannot go back for herself.

The Saltless Barrow-Key

A carved linchpin-stone pulled from the Saltless Barrow's innermost seal — shaped in a script no ash-tribe gravesinger will name, and warm to the touch in a way stone should not be.

The Saltsung Compass

The oldest relic in the Saltsung Barrow — a bronze mariner's disc inscribed with the drowned-rite tide-marks, that warms faintly to the touch when wet and points always toward the nearest flooded place.

The Sealing Drum

A hide-drum beaten to keep count for the ash-sealed barrow's closing rite, carried by Sevda Ash-Tongue as the instrument of a rite she was unmade for knowing.

The Sealing-Order Fragment

A rubbing of the Imperium's sealing-order cut into the lintel at the Imperial Reach — the specific alloy recipe and casting sequence the legion's engineers used to bind the vault-weeper. Sethe wants it; the Listening College wants it more.

The Sealing-Ward

A palm-sized iron ward graven with the first figure of a closing-rite, pressed by the Iron Cantors into the hand of whoever casts the vote that seals a living person the Unclosed has taken hold of.

The Sundered Crown

The crown of the last emperor of Vallen, cracked clean through at the moment the Sundering broke his city and his god — and never repaired, and never let finish, in all the years since. The one thing that could make the Hollow Writ's claim on the Vale real.

The Unfailing Font

A hand's-width Imperial reliquary that beads cool clean water in the killing flats, where every other water lies. The dead empire's last congregation prayed to it; something in the deepest room of the Sunbleached Hold prays to it still.

The Unnamed Mask

A burial mask of beaten grey metal from the ash-sealed barrow's oldest dead — the ones the gravesinger's prophecy never named. Wear it and the older dead take you for one of their own.

The Vael Pillar

A working Vallen Imperium arcane pillar recovered from the flooded nave of the Drowned Chapel of Vael — still lit, still charged, and still doing the one job it was cast to do four hundred years after the smiths who made it died.

The Verdigris Vigil

A green-corroded Imperial cuirass the burning brine cannot eat — worn by the warden who sealed the Weeping Vault from the inside and never came up. While a living body wears it, the weeper stays bound.

The Wright's Shard

A fragment of the broken god Vallen the Wright — a wedge of the maker's own body, carried out of the ruin at Caer Vallen and walled in a barrow so that no hand could lift it. The most dangerous thing in the Vale, because it is the only piece of a dead god that anyone can still hold.

Trollhammaren

A vast war-maul a troll warlord of the high passes is said to have forged for its own fist out of a fallen waystone and the haft of a tree — too heavy for any two men to swing, and the single hardest-hitting weapon the Vale has ever weighed. The cold keeps it; the Brood keeps the cold.