The Narrowing
Book One
Seventy-three. Not yet a hundred. A number she could carry.
A healer trained in two traditions. A town unmade by something beneath the mountain. The dead arranged in rows, the living waiting for answers that the institutions above them are not designed to give.
In Terheia, magic is real, measured, and regulated — divided into five schools that correspond to five moons. But the instruments show something the classification system was built to ignore. And the ground is no longer quiet.
The World
Empiricists who measure everything and explain nothing they cannot prove. Their instrument technicians keep noticing a shared resonance beneath the five school signatures. The institution has not investigated it.
A theocratic hierarchy where healing requires ecclesiastical permission and jurisdiction extends to every surface within their borders. Their concern is authority. Their instrument is obedience.
Nomads and root-tenders who heal by touch and bury their dead on open ground. Split between those who stay and those who leave — and neither side is certain the other is wrong.
The space between what the institutions permit and what the ground requires. Where the healer kneels. Where the technician recalibrates. Where the dead accumulate in patterns no framework was built to hold.
The institutions described in these documents do not speak for their author. The people trapped inside them do.
The Weight of What Holds — Field Notes from Terheia
Free Companion
Field Notes from Terheia
Twelve in-world documents — geological surveys, tribunal transcripts, field assessments, trade manifests, testimony. No editorial commentary. No context provided. Assembled from sources that do not agree with one another.
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Inside the Companion