The Realms

The Surface

The realm of the open air and of Irus of the Wild. Every forest on it is his, and the Irugaine are its guardians. The cities of the Nu'uman stand on it, and most of the WildKin were bred to live somewhere on it.

Its far west is the Dead Continent, the homeland of the Mekuhlian, where necromancy is not looked down upon, the dead labour and the living read them. The High Throne of the Lich stands there in the open, because it is the one place on Nu where such a seat could, and beyond the black terrace of it lies the field of the twenty million who were sacrificed to the void in a single act. Nothing grows on that ground.

The Deep

The Salted Depths, Orton's ocean, and the Sea Tower that is his seat, the way to which "was cut off and heavily defended." The Omari hold it. Their city Ien was not built but grown out of living coral, and it is still growing.

The Under

The cliffs, the caves and the mountain depths, the ever-expanding country beneath the surface. This is Aezithis' Under Realm, where he left his people to cower. The Thojar were made for it. The Do'urssan built their holds in it, and the Gorklin were born in its pits.

Fifty six Alverian lords are down there as well, each sealed in a sphere of Whitestone set deep in rock with the seams grown shut, breathing replicated air off a bank of trapped souls, each with a plan of return refined every day since the doors shut. The Thojar have walked over them for an age without noticing.

The Inner

The innermost realm, beneath the Under, the living flesh of the sleeping goddess at the core of the world. It is not an underworld of souls. It is a place with tissue in it, and it holds the only air of the old kind left anywhere on Nu, in a fold of Nunamnir's body.

Sixteen Alverians live in that fold, the kinder sort who never joined the cult of the three hundred. They keep no hosts, they have grown nothing and dug nothing in an age, and they lie against the wall of the world with their tendrils in it and listen to her. She lets them stay. They are the only Alverians who ever worshipped Nunamnir, and they were doing it before the storm, which is why they are alive.

The two moons

The Gardens of Zuella and the Wastes of Zaona. The twin sisters became the moons, and each moon is a realm of its own. Near one of them, on the edge of the Caelyrean, rests the Tantillian, "a swan shaped opal ship," which carries the dead to the auction of the star gods. While a soul has not begun its venture on the vessel it can still be called back, and something is sent after it when it is.