Arboris
Floor 7
A mere of resin in the crook of the bough, still setting round everything it caught
When Ambermere's world ended, it ended in amber. The mere thickened from the bottom up and caught everything in it: the boats, the shore, a whole swarm in mid-flight. It is still setting. Resinholm, once a fishing town on piers, rides on rafts lashed between them, on the very thing it is caught in.
Four causeways cross the resin to the shores, where the Glassflats crack underfoot, honey wasps hum in the Honeywood and the Frozen Swarm hangs in the amber. On the Amber Shore, to the north, waits Queen Resinna.
Ambermere, the mere in the crook of the bough, and Resinholm, the town that floats on it. When our world ended, it ended in amber: the mere thickened from the bottom up and caught everything in it, the boats, the shore, the Swarm. The Tree took us in that hour and keeps us there. The mere is still setting. It has been setting for longer than anyone can count.
ResinholmThe Tapping GroundsThe GlassflatsHoneywoodThe Sinking ReachThe Frozen SwarmThe Amber ShoreThe wilds grow stronger the further you go from the Hearth.
The Entombed
The Glassflats, Level 28
A beetle the size of a house with a horn like a ship's prow, caught grazing when the mere set and sealed in the Glassflats. Now and then the glass round it breaks like thunder and it walks, charging and cracking the flats in rings; when it settles, the amber closes back over it.
It wakes on its own about every half hour, and the whole floor hears it: Glass breaks across the Glassflats like thunder: the Entombed has woken!
For a party of up to six, from level 28. Every party walks its own copy.
The Old Hive where the Swarm was born, sunk in the mere beneath the Frozen Swarm, entered by the crack at the foot of its wall once Saskia has read the swarm amber. Galleries of comb run under the amber; the Unhatched swells in its sealed cell, and in the royal cell waits the Hivemother, who soured the whole mere.
Queen Resinna
Level 31
Ambermere's guardian, once its queen: when the Swarm came over the water at the end of her world, she called the resin up from the bottom of the mere and stopped it, and everything else. The Tree made her of amber for it. The rot is in her, and she sets the mere round all who come to her Mirror.
Waits in the Queen's Mirror. Everyone who climbs fights it together, and it grows with them. The first time it falls, Hollowheart opens for everyone; then it returns, to be fought again for what it leaves.
Resinholm
