What happened, and why anyone walks north

Everything in this world comes from one decision made a long time ago, in a hurry. The ring went into the fire. The war stopped. Years later, the mountain started giving the metal back.

The old ring

A smith made it. That's nearly all anyone knows about him: he worked the mountain because it was the only fire hot enough, and by the time the south knew his name, he held the north.

Whoever held the ring got what they wanted. Deals, harvests and arrows went their way, and the people nearest them lost whatever the holder gained. A man who wore it long enough ended up very rich and entirely alone, which is roughly what happened.

It was made in that fire, so it could only be unmade in that fire. That's the whole reason anyone ever had to go north.

The war and the throw

The war was everyone else trying to take it off him, and for a long time it went badly, because nothing goes badly for the man holding that ring. The southern holds spent a generation on it. The front moved north and then stuck, roughly where the dead forest starts now, long enough that people were born and buried on it.

It ended when somebody got the ring away from him and carried it into his own forge, the one fire that could destroy it. Nobody knows who. The holds have four versions, each from a hold that wants the credit.

When the ring melted, he went with it. The war didn't end in a surrender or a treaty. It just stopped, all across the north at once.

The dead

Nobody collected the bodies. There were too many, too far north, and the people who would have fetched them were mostly among them. So the war's dead stayed where the line had stood, through one winter and then another.

Then they got up. When and why is something the south has argued about ever since. Everyone agrees it started in the north, has been spreading south, and stops at anything burning.

Most of these zombies are the unburied: the war's own soldiers, still on the ground they died on. That's why they're thickest at the old front and thin near the Cut, the trench the south dug to keep them out. They don't see well. They hear very well, and better in the quiet, so a whistle at midday is a small mistake and a whistle at midnight is a large one.

They also wear down the further they walk from the mountain. The ones you meet near the Cut came furthest south and have the least left in them: slower, softer, easier to put down than anything at the old front. Right at the edge of the Cut stand the ones that walked as far as they could and stopped, facing the holds they can't reach. They don't hear you and they don't turn. Even the captains give up down here. This far south there's nobody left to give orders to.

Light doesn't kill them. It keeps them away. They won't come inside a burning lamp's light, and in daylight they're slower to notice you and hit softer. Cloud is a problem for the same reason sunset is: it brings the dark early, and the mountain's smoke has been thickening the sky over the north for years.

The pour

The metal didn't leave with the ring. It sank into the mountain, and the mountain has been slowly giving it back: every so often molten rock runs down its sides, mostly worthless, carrying a trace of what the ring was made of.

A ladle of it, filled while it glows and carried south while it still glows, cools into a small ring. Not the old one, nothing close. But it does a little of what that one did, and everyone in the south knows what "a little" was worth to the man who had all of it.

That's what turns an old story into a stampede. When the mountain pours, its smoke lights up, the holds open the crossings over the Cut, and everyone who was ever going to try goes at once.

The world runs south to north, with the mountain at the top. The south end is farmland. The north end is a volcano's crater. Everything between is the game.

The Cut

The Cut is a trench running east to west as far as anyone has walked, and the biggest thing the southern holds ever built. It took eleven years to dig. Its south wall is dressed stone, undercut at the top, so anything that can only walk can't climb it. The dead only walk.

South of the Cut are farms, holds, law and boredom. North of it is open ground where nothing you do is anyone's business. The dead never come south of it, and mostly neither do the rules.

Every few hundred metres there's a crossing: a bridge of seventy metres of open deck on stone piers, with a lamp at the south end and no cover. Going out, a crossing is nothing, because you're carrying a stick and nobody wants it. Coming back with a full ladle, in the dark, it's the most dangerous seventy metres of the run.

The road and its stations

Before the Cut, the holds tried something more hopeful. They built a line of stations up the middle of the world, each a lamp on a post with a stone cache (a chest) under it, and for a while there was a real road north.

The stations are still there, and about half are still burning. An unlit one is exactly the kind of dark, sheltered place the dead settle into, so relighting it is a fight. The lamp housing also locks the cache below, so you can't open it until the lamp is lit.

The cache isn't treasure. It's what the holds thought a road party would need: someone fast enough to scout, someone solid enough to hold a doorway, and someone who could shoot. Each cache is stocked for all three and you take one thing, so most of a run's big decisions are made standing over an open box.

The deeper you go into one of those kits, the better it works. Half a scout's kit and half an archer's is two halves of nothing.

The ground, south to north

The world is usually described in five stretches, though each holds several different places and the edges are blurry.

The captains

The smith had officers. When he went into the fire, every order he'd given was left standing, with nobody left to cancel it.

So the captains are still out there, still commanding the dead. You won't meet one near the Cut. They start about a fifth of the way to the mountain. The dead near a captain move as a unit. Kill the captain and they fall apart for a few seconds, which is often what saves a run in the dark.

None of this is a quest. There's no order, no patron and no plan. A claimant (a player) is someone who heard the mountain was pouring, walked to a crossing and went over it. Going North is what they do for the next hour.

What a claimant does

The goal is simple. Get to the mountain. Fill a ladle. Get back across the Cut while it still glows. Nothing else counts, not distance and not kills. A claimant who reaches the crater and dies 400 metres from home has done exactly as well as one who never left.

A full ladle isn't subtle. It glows and throws light. Every other claimant gets a rough fix on where a carrier is, updated every couple of seconds and a little out of date: enough to hunt with, not enough for a clean ambush.

Going out, you have nothing anyone wants. Coming home, you're a lamp walking through a country of people who need one.

Customs of the road

Calling to someone means making a noise, and everything in range hears it, so every social act out here costs something.

• The whistleThe quiet call. It carries far enough to find someone you've lost, and not much further. Use it when you still care about not being found.
• The yellThe loud one. It carries a long way and brings everything that hears it. Used to warn, to gather, and, by anyone with the nerve, as a lure.
• Shaking on itThe road custom. Two people close enough to touch, hands taken within a breath or two, and that's a deal: allies, names exchanged. It lasts until the match ends. There's no oath and no way to enforce it, on purpose: the north has seen what happens to people who swear things they can't get out of.

The name over another claimant's head is the one they gave when you shook. Everyone else is a shape at a distance, and telling a claimant from a captain at four hundred metres in bad light is a skill people are quietly proud of.

The last ten minutes

A pour doesn't last. The mountain runs for a while, then stops, and the holds only find out by watching who comes back. So the custom is: the first ladle across the Cut settles the claim, and the crossings stay open for ten more minutes (one glass, the holds say) so everyone still out there can get home and be counted.

That makes the last ten minutes of a match unlike the fifty before. Everyone holding a ladle knows how long they have. Everyone who isn't knows where the carriers have to go. The first one home sets the time, and everyone after is ranked behind them.

If nobody gets one home before the pour cools, the claim goes to whoever got furthest, which nobody has ever been happy with.

On dying

Claimants aren't sent north, but they are backed. A hold that likes its chances will stake a name (kit, a place in the queue at the crossing, a share if that name comes home), and if that person falls, the hold sends the next one out before the pour ends.

So a claimant comes back at a station whose lamp is burning, with whatever that station had for them, and without whatever the last one picked up further north. The hold knows what it packed. It doesn't know what you found.