The Wanderer

The one light in the night sky that does not keep to the wheel — a slow, pale star the old creeds call the Far House of the Sworn Gods. Star-watchers say it has run fat and low these last decades. Almost no one looks up long enough to care.

Every people in the Vale has a name for it and none of them agree on more than this: the Wanderer crosses the sky on its own road, on its own years, and the old creeds put the Sworn Gods there — not in the clouds, not under the hills, but in a far house that walks. The Imperium's star-tables tracked it for four centuries; a Listening College fringe still does, and their claim — that the Wanderer's road has bent, that it runs nearer and brighter than any table says it should, and that the fat tides, the shivering ground and the dry burning summers keep its calendar — gets the same eye-roll every doom-crier gets. They are right. HIDDEN TRUTH (authors only, never resolved in play): the Sworn Gods are not spirits but dwellers of that far world, and the Vyr know it — their Fair Copy is a working to CALL THE WANDERER NEAR, to take up broken Vallen's mantle by bringing the gods' own house close enough to hold the world's chord. Its approach is the mechanism of the washing: the seas rise to meet it, the ground cracks under it, the hills burn in its long summer — the collapse the lower world calls the Lean Years is, in part, the summoning already working. Aelvyrenn floats above what the approach will drown. Per the conflict doctrine this stays hint-level: an odd tide-table, a mocked star-watcher, a Vyr ambassador who will not look at the night sky.