The World
Arboris is the World Tree. It grows in the void, and it keeps the worlds that end.
The Tree
Every branch of Arboris holds a world, each with its own people, its own kingdoms and its own creatures. When a world ends, the Tree catches it and hangs it on a branch in the hour of its ending. Emberleaf is held in its last autumn, Thornreach at the noon of its last summer, Frostcrown in the longest night of the year.
Up the trunk, from the roots to the Heartwood, climb a hundred floors. Each floor is the gate to one branch: a piece of a world that broke away.
The Silence
The Heartwood, at the top of the trunk, is where the sap rises from, and the sap is what joins the worlds together. Then the Heart fell silent. The sap stopped, the passages between the floors sealed, and the worlds were cut off from one another. Some sank into the dark.
The Withering
A rot climbs up from the roots, and it grows stronger the longer the Heart is silent. It takes the guardians of the floors first: the great keepers each world had, turned against the people they kept. A Stormward that drank the lightning now throws it; a warden of winter sits on its throne and will not let the spring come.
Free a floor's guardian, and the sap flows into that floor again.
The Seedborn
Since the Silence, the Tree still gives seeds, once in a few hundred years. Each giving is a cycle. The seeds open in Rootfall, on the first floor, and what steps out of them is Seedborn: alive, strong, and without a single memory.
The Seedborn are bound to the Tree. They cannot harm one another, and they do not stay dead: a fallen Seedborn wakes again at the last Hearth they rested by, though each time a little of what they were flows into the roots.
There have been Seedborn before. They climbed in other cycles, and the townsfolk on the floors remember them. None of them woke the Heart.
The ten open floors
- RootfallWhere the roots of the World Tree meet the earth Levels 1–10
- EmberleafThe first great bough, where the leaves never stop turning Levels 10–14
- GlimmerdeepUnder the great boughs, where the only light is what grows Levels 13–17
- ThornreachA bough burned by a sun that stopped at noon, where the roses grow as tall as houses Levels 16–20
- HighbarkThe city at the crossing of the boughs, where the harvest never ends Levels 19–23
- Galewind SpiresSpires of bark above the cloud, in a wind that has never once died down Levels 22–26
- AmbermereA mere of resin in the crook of the bough, still setting round everything it caught Levels 25–29
- HollowheartInside the trunk of the Tree, where the sap stood still and grew into crystal Levels 28–32
- FrostcrownThe high boughs gone into winter, where the snow has not stopped falling since the Silence Levels 31–34
- The Withered CrownThe dying crown of the Tree, where the ash falls and makes no sound Levels 33–35