The Fair Copy

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.