{
"entries": [
{
"comment": "The Ash March overview (always-on identity — kept shadowless for Act I)",
"constant": true,
"order": 10,
"keys": [],
"content": "Beyond the last living border lies the Cinderwaste, a grey desert of ash and silence ruled from the black fortress of Korhaast by the Ashen King and his hollow host of Skarn and Vael. The Wardens of Solenn held the rim for generations until Solenn burned; now one Warden walks in alone, on foot, to reach the source of the King's power at the heart of Korhaast and put it out before the ash spreads to the living lands. The deeper one goes, the more awake the waste becomes."
},
{
"comment": "The Cinderwaste (the dead country — ambient surface)",
"order": 20,
"keys": ["Cinderwaste", "the waste", "le désert", "désert de cendres", "the ash", "les cendres", "cendre", "dead land", "terre morte", "the grey", "le gris", "the silence", "le silence", "ashfall", "cendres tombantes"],
"content": "The Cinderwaste is grey from edge to edge: ash for soil, ash on the wind, ash settling on the tongue and in the lungs. There is no proper weather, only a cold without season and a light that never fully comes up. Worst is the silence — no birds, no wind in anything that could hold wind, no sound but your own steps and breath, so the smallest noise carries like a struck bell. Distances are deceiving and the sky is always the same dim pewter, so a traveller loses the days. Nothing grows; nothing rots; nothing is in a hurry, because the waste has all the time there is."
},
{
"comment": "The rim and the ruin of Solenn (the threshold — ambient surface)",
"order": 30,
"keys": ["the rim", "le bord", "la lisière", "the border", "la frontière", "the threshold", "le seuil", "Solenn", "the ruin", "la ruine", "the last green", "marker stone", "pierre de seuil", "the watch-keep"],
"content": "The rim is the last living border — a thin band of grey grass and stunted thorn where the world ends and the ash begins, marked by old warden-stones. Here stood Solenn, the watch-keep of the order, until the night it burned; now it is a roofless shell of scorched stone at the very lip of the waste, and the few who still come this far come to trade with the dead order's last keeper, or to stare at the ash and turn back. To step past the last marker is to leave everything that can help you behind."
},
{
"comment": "The Wardens of Solenn (the order — establishable base)",
"order": 40,
"keys": ["Warden", "Wardens", "Gardien", "Gardiens", "the order", "l'ordre", "Solenn", "warden's grey", "the grey order", "order of Solenn"],
"content": "The Wardens of Solenn were a small sworn order — part soldiers, part monks of a sort — whose single duty was to hold the rim and keep the Cinderwaste from spreading. They trained from childhood in three crafts: the blade, the watch (the patient reading of a hostile land), and the Ember. They took the grey, kept no families, and were buried at the rim. They never numbered many, and now they number one. Whatever else the order knew, it kept close, and most of it burned with Solenn."
},
{
"comment": "The Ember (the order's inner light — ambient, the player's own craft)",
"order": 40,
"keys": ["Ember", "Braise", "the light", "la lumière", "inner light", "lumière intérieure", "the flame", "la flamme", "truefire", "vraie flamme", "the lantern", "la lanterne"],
"content": "The Ember is the craft that made a Warden able to enter the waste at all: a tended inner light, fed by will, memory and discipline, that the Cinderwaste cannot reach the way it reaches everything else. A Warden carries it like a flame in cupped hands — it can be spent to push back the cold, the whispers, and the dull pull of the silence, and it gutters lower with every such use, with exhaustion, and with despair. It is restored only slowly, and only by a true fire, real rest, or holding fast to something the waste cannot take. A Warden whose Ember goes out does not simply die; the waste finds nothing left to refuse it."
},
{
"comment": "The Blight (the seeping unmaking — ambient survival texture)",
"order": 50,
"keys": ["the Blight", "le Fléau", "la Souillure", "the seeping", "the cold", "le froid", "the whispers", "les murmures", "the pull", "the numbness", "l'engourdissement", "the unmaking cold"],
"content": "The deeper one walks, the more the waste works on a body that lingers: a cold that no fire fully answers, a numbness in the fingers and the thoughts, a flat grey calm that whispers it would be easier to stop, to set the pack down, to be still and let the ash settle over you. The order called it the Blight, and taught that it is not an illness but the waste's ordinary appetite, patient and impersonal, wearing at the Ember until there is nothing left to wear at. Those who give in are not killed; they simply become part of the grey."
},
{
"comment": "The Ashen King (the lord of the waste — establishable base)",
"order": 60,
"keys": ["Ashen King", "Roi de Cendres", "the King", "le Roi", "lord of Korhaast", "seigneur de Korhaast", "the grey king", "the lord of the waste"],
"content": "The Cinderwaste is ruled, if a desert can be ruled, from Korhaast by the Ashen King: a tall grey figure, crowned and ageless, who has held the black fortress longer than any living record outside the order. He is cruel with the patience of something that cannot be hurried and does not fear death, and the host obeys him without a word ever spoken. The order taught that his power has a source, and that the source can be put out. Beyond that, what he is — and how long he has been it — the order did not say aloud."
},
{
"comment": "Korhaast (the black fortress at the heart of the waste)",
"order": 60,
"keys": ["Korhaast", "the fortress", "la forteresse", "the black fortress", "forteresse noire", "the citadel", "la citadelle", "the heart of the waste", "the gate", "la porte"],
"content": "Korhaast stands at the centre of the Cinderwaste, the one structure the ash never quite buries: a black fortress of fused stone, neither ruined nor maintained, simply enduring. The land tilts toward it — roads, ridges, the very drift of the ash all run inward, so that a traveller deep enough finds the waste itself walking them to the gate. It is cold past cold inside, and quieter than the waste without. Somewhere in its depths is the source of the King's power, which the order's last duty is to reach and end."
},
{
"comment": "The Skarn (ash-born footsoldiers — establishable base)",
"order": 70,
"keys": ["Skarn", "ash-born", "cendre-nés", "footsoldiers", "fantassins", "the grey soldiers", "soldats gris"],
"content": "The Skarn are the King's footsoldiers: grey, lean figures the colour of the ash they rise from, neither quite living nor quite dead, that move in silence and feel no fear or pain. Singly they are slow and clumsy; in numbers they are a tide. They do not loot, taunt, or break ranks — they only advance, and close, and pull a thing down into the grey. A Warden learns early that the Skarn are not the danger so much as a sign that something has noticed you."
},
{
"comment": "The Vael (the King's hollow knights — establishable base)",
"order": 70,
"keys": ["Vael", "the knights", "les chevaliers", "hollow knights", "chevaliers creux", "the King's officers", "officiers du roi", "the grey knights"],
"content": "The Vael are the host's officers: tall figures in ash-grey armour, terribly skilled with the blade and worse to face, for where a Skarn is empty a Vael is almost not — there is a flicker behind the visor of something that was once a person, and it is that flicker, not the steel, that unnerves. A Vael will sometimes pause, as if half-remembering, before it kills. They speak rarely, in fragments, and command the Skarn without sound. To stand against a Vael wears at the Ember as much as the body."
},
{
"comment": "Things of the waste (the lesser horrors — ambient bestiary)",
"order": 70,
"keys": ["cinder-hound", "cinderhound", "chien de cendre", "hound", "limier", "revenant", "ash-revenant", "revenant de cendre", "the dead", "les morts", "creatures", "créatures", "beasts", "bêtes"],
"content": "Other things move in the grey. Cinder-hounds — lean, ashen, silent until they are on you — course the open waste by scent and by the warmth of a living thing. And in the deeper reaches the ash gives up revenants: slow, relentless dead in the dress of an age no one remembers, that do not stop and cannot be reasoned with, only outlasted or outrun. None of them hurry. None of them need to."
},
{
"comment": "Vorrh and the source (the dread power — surface understanding, shadowless)",
"order": 80,
"keys": ["Vorrh", "the unmaking", "le défaire", "the dark power", "puissance noire", "the source", "la source", "the Cinderheart", "Cœur de Cendres", "the black flame", "flamme noire", "what is at the bottom"],
"content": "The order named the power at the bottom of the waste Vorrh — the unmaking — and taught that it is the dread will the Ashen King serves and draws upon, the thing that turned a country to ash. Its source, the Wardens believed, burns in the depths of Korhaast as a black flame the King tends: the Cinderheart. Put out the Cinderheart, the order held, and the King's power fails and the waste begins, slowly, to die. That is the whole of the doctrine a Warden is given before the rim. What the doctrine leaves out is the part the order could not bear to write down."
},
{
"comment": "What the waste was — Vhast (gated: the-waste-was-vhast)",
"reveal": "the-waste-was-vhast",
"order": 101,
"keys": ["Vhast", "the old kingdom", "ancien royaume", "what the waste was", "the kingdom that was", "buried road", "route enfouie", "lintel", "linteau", "orchard", "verger", "ruins", "ruines", "grey glass", "verre gris"],
"content": "The Cinderwaste was not always a desert. Under the ash lie paved roads, doorways with the lintels still standing, orchards turned to grey glass — the bones of a living kingdom called Vhast, green and peopled within the reach of the order's oldest records. It was not buried by time. It was unmade, in the span of a few years, and the ash is what a whole country becomes when the silence is done with it. A Warden deep enough stops walking a natural desert and starts walking a grave the size of a realm."
},
{
"comment": "Who the host were (gated: the-host-are-vhast-dead)",
"reveal": "the-host-are-vhast-dead",
"order": 101,
"keys": ["the host", "l'armée", "the hollow host", "who they were", "qui ils étaient", "the unmade", "les défaits", "the dead of Vhast", "morts de Vhast", "Skarn", "Vael", "they were people", "the faces"],
"content": "The Skarn and the Vael are not demons summoned from anywhere. They are Vhast — its farmers and its soldiers and its lords, hollowed by the unmaking and reshaped into the host that keeps the country that killed them. The flicker behind a Vael's visor is the last sliver of a person who lived here when there was a here to live in. Every foe the Warden cuts down in the grey is a death twice over, and the army marching on the living lands is the murdered kingdom, made to march."
},
{
"comment": "Who the King was (gated: the-king-was-warden)",
"reveal": "the-king-was-warden",
"order": 101,
"keys": ["Ashen King", "Roi de Cendres", "First Warden", "Premier Gardien", "the founder", "le fondateur", "who he was", "qui il était", "the road walked before", "the first to go in", "the order's shame"],
"content": "The Ashen King was the First Warden of Solenn — the founder of the order itself, the first to take the grey and walk into the waste to put out the source and save the living lands. He reached the Cinderheart. And the thing the order buried, and could not bear to write where a novice might read it, is that he is what became of him: the road the last Warden walks now is the founder's own footsteps, and at the end of it is what walking it makes."
},
{
"comment": "The King's true name (gated: the-true-name)",
"reveal": "the-true-name",
"order": 102,
"keys": ["true name", "vrai nom", "the King's name", "le nom du roi", "the name", "le nom", "his name", "son nom", "the word", "le mot", "warden-name", "nom de gardien"],
"content": "Because he was the First Warden, the order kept his sworn name — the name he took with the grey, before the waste took everything else — in the one record that survived Solenn. It is the single thing in the world that still belongs to the man and not to the King. Spoken to his face, the order held, his true name will stay his hand for one moment: not a weapon, not a victory, only a breath in which the man surfaces under the King. What is done with that breath is the Warden's to decide."
},
{
"comment": "The price of severing (gated: severing-costs-self)",
"reveal": "severing-costs-self",
"order": 102,
"keys": ["the price", "le prix", "sever", "trancher", "put it out", "l'éteindre", "take its place", "prendre sa place", "the Cinderheart", "Cœur de Cendres", "the black flame", "flamme noire", "the next keeper", "the next king", "inherited"],
"content": "The black flame of the Cinderheart cannot simply be put out. It must be kept, and to stop keeping it, a living will must take it up in the keeper's place — whoever puts out the flame becomes the flame's next warden, the next Ashen King, and the unmaking goes quiet under a new hand for as long as that hand can bear it. This is what the First Warden learned at the Cinderheart, and what the order buried: the source cannot be ended, only inherited, paused, or starved by degrees. There is no version of reaching the heart that the Warden walks away from unchanged."
},
{
"comment": "What Vorrh truly is (gated: vorrh-is-silence)",
"reveal": "vorrh-is-silence",
"order": 102,
"keys": ["Vorrh", "the unmaking", "le défaire", "the silence", "le silence", "the absence", "l'absence", "the hunger", "what is at the bottom", "not malice", "indifference", "indifférence"],
"content": "Vorrh is not a god of hate, and that is the worst of it — there is no malice to appeal to, bargain with, or defeat. It is an absence, an appetite without a face, that simply ends things and would as soon end the question as answer it. The Ashen King's cruelty is a man's cruelty, learned over centuries of keeping the flame, laid over a power that feels nothing at all. You cannot make the silence stop wanting. You can only feed it, starve it, or step between it and the world — which is the whole of what every keeper has ever done."
}
]
}