Dark Zone

Half the Everdawn world lies past Wall Sina, and it gets worse the further you go. The short version is on the Dark Zone page on the site; this is the long one.

Wall Sina

A row of Svitanok stabilisers with a red field between them. It pins the edge of the Cascade and stops nobody: nothing keeps you from crossing.

The map shows the Dark Zone in red. The sign right of your hotbar says how far past the wall you stand, and each layer is named in words as you walk into it.

What changes past it

What changes is what the world asks of you: each layer is deeper than the one before and adds one new way to die. These hold past the wall and nowhere else:

• the sour gas — see Air;
• your nerve in the dark;
• crops and herds that will not grow or breed outside a sealed room;
• a blow that would kill you — out there it leaves you downed instead, for somebody to pick you up.

Food taken out there is another matter: it carries its taint home. Weight is the one rule that is the same on both sides of the wall: a heavy load slows you everywhere, which is what railways are for. Go prepared or go twice.

There is no witness

No land can be claimed past the wall, no border bars anybody, no road charges a toll, and the register takes no goods into its keeping — nothing is sold, delivered or taken from storage there. Nothing done there is written down or can be brought before the court.

With one exception: a killing still makes the killer a renegade, hunted as anywhere — though no blood-debt is owed past the wall. How that works is on Renegades and reapers.

What you lose is not permission. It is the witness. The archive learns only what somebody carries back: a field journal, a first footstep in a new layer.

More

• Layers — their names and what each one holds.
• Air — the mask, filters and the sealed room.
• Oil — seeps, surveys and metal drums.
• Rifts — holes into worlds the Wormhole War ruined.

One counter trades past the wall — in Market, under Black market — and the coin you pay it stops existing.