Serpentine Squiggles

What is a Thresholder?

Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.

Except they’re not like you. If you believe in equality, they’ll think it’s acceptable to do the bidding of slavers and bigots. If you fancy yourself a free market entrepeneur, they’ll be a communist who wants to saddle your efforts with labor law and insidious union talk. If you see no issue with eating meat (if “in this world, they butcher and eat animals” doesn’t even occur to you as a observation to make), then you’ll meet a vegan willing to treat carnists with that same callous regard.

Even if the differences aren’t philosophical, you just won’t be able to stand them. They’ll be reckless if you’re careful, blathering if you’re quiet, and don’t even ask their opinion on pineapples on pizza.

You can‍ ‍—‍ must‍ ‍—‍ suppose there’s an intelligence behind the portals.^note A guardian of the threshold, if you will.^endnote Of all the uncountable places in the multiverse, they’ll plop you down where there’s air to breathe and proteins that don’t prion‍-​ize your biology. The people will speak your language, they’ll probably even be human.

If it can select for all that, of course it can select just the wrong person, whom you’ll have no choice but fight‍ ‍—‍ kill, even. And if nothing else, they will have been through more portals than you, and it came to blows in every world. Why wouldn’t they expect you to be the same as all the monsters and wretches they’ve faced before? Why would they even give you the chance to explain? The portals can turn anyone into a thresholder.

After all, the next portal won’t open until one of you beats the other. If you find yourself in a world of post‍-​nuclear desolation where acid rains from the sky, the only chance of seeing air conditioning again is to kick some ass.

What Is the Squiggleverse?

Thresholder is inspired by jumpchain stories. Jumpchain usually focus on established franchises. It’s an exercise in a particular kind of power fantasy‍ ‍—‍ what if you could get Naruto ninja training and have a Star Wars lightsaber and team full of Pokémon beside you? How unstoppable could you become after five jumps?

Thesholder is all original worlds, though. (And quite creative ones, I’d say.) Still, it’s the sort of premise that invites you to imagine your own worlds, your own adventures‍ ‍—‍ and I dare say it makes for more interesting hypotheticals to consider than your average jumpchain. Certainly the engine for ever‍-​escalating conflict keeps things moving.

I’m not sure how far most get in those sort of daydreams, though I know of at least one Thresholder fanfic. Personally, coming up with weird and magical worlds is something I’ve spent a good fifth of my life seriously pursuing. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but if nothing else, I certainly have something to show for it.

So, I decided this could be an interesting exercise: how would my original settings stack up as thresholder arenas?

But first, a gesture at ground rules. The number of worlds I’ve “properly” “written” about is rather modest‍ ‍—‍ half a dozen, or more depending on how you count. But there’s a plenty of settings I have detailed notes about despite having never committed to final draft prose.

I’d be remiss to include the (frankly underbaked) setting of And the Darkling Reefs Abide yet neglect the much more mechanically interesting world of, say, Running Out of Skin & Time.

Will I be dedicating paragraphs to every figment I’ve had a fleeting thought about? No. The loose standard I’m operating off of is I’ll list a setting if I could (or better yet, have) given a thousand word‍-​long rant about its lore purely off the dome. Not rigorous, but ultimately, who cares.

More importantly, if the idea is that I could talk at excessive length about any of these worlds, how do I stop this document from being exponentially excessive in its own length?^note Spoiler: I don’t. You might’ve noticed the scroll‍-​bar.^endnote

I’ll just have to cleave to the essentials of each world. A brief description of its look and feel, and then a rundown of what sort of powers you’ll gain and what sort of dangers you’ll contend with.

This page will mostly be protracted exposition about my own magic systems, intercut with occasional commentary on the worldbuilding implications of the grand spell. Let that be a warning or invitation according to taste.

Now, let’s get on with it.^note Okay, one last warning‍ ‍—‍ I’m embarassed of the quality of the early worlds. Bear with me, please, or feel free to skip around.^endnote

Chose Your World

1: The Land of Glass and Secrets (Endless Stars)

You’ll know you’re in another world when you look up. Two moons circle the sky, reflecting the light of binary stars orbiting close enough that on some days you can mistake them for one. Floating islands hang among the clouds‍ ‍—‍ and dragons fly between them.

Or maybe you see none of this, and the portal drops you in hell. Lake Berwem is where Endless Stars begins, a “lake” made of seething molten glass beneath a thin shell of dusty earth, clouded with toxic gasses. Even a seasoned thresholder might find their death out here, but dragons prowl the lake’s surface day after day, sifting through molten sand to find precious treasure. If you’re lucky, a kind dragon will find you, rescue you, and introduce you to the world.

Whether you’ll meet such a warm welcome will depend on what you are, though‍ ‍—‍ the inciting incident of the main story, after all, was the discovery of humans in the Berwem. Humans who were promptly killed, and throughout all the ensuing politicking, no one important considered that the humans might be more than prey, or a mage’s pawn.

So, what are these mages capable of? This world’s magic system is atomic and ill‍-​defined. There are several artifacts of power and mutations of the flesh, but few if any mechanics that unite them.

The protagonist has a heirloom cloak capable of manipulating light, making them invisible or creating startling illusions. Her friend studied alchemy, a practice capable of creating mixtures like weird healing potions or dragonflame oil, which required a surgical procedure to expell as firebreath, leading inevitably to health complications.

If anything ties together every weird thing, it’s the ostensible first mover. The ultimate origin of everything magical is a race of metal‍-​based lifeforms dwelling in the planet’s crust, for whom dragons and humans alike were but pawns in their machinations.^note Distantly, cryptically hinted at… but (as will be a recurring theme) never touched on in the actual story.^endnote

The treasures dragons are sifting for in the glass lake are fragments of one such entity, sealed beneath the local town, crawling out through crystalline outgrowths. If there’s a plot you’re likely to get wrapped up in, it’s that one. A backwater cult has been attempting to awaken this entity to resurrect the first mayor of the town and oust his big city replacement.

Secretly among the townsfolk, there are dragons who, through alchemy or an entity’s influence, have become immortal. They remember the first mayor and why he went mad, and were responsible for sealing the entity to begin with. They can feel something is stirring down there‍ ‍—‍ but can they do anything before it’s too late?

In short, it’s small town politics and cosmic horror with dragons.

For thresholders, communication barriers are worth considering. Many of my worlds feature nonhumans prominently. One of the conceits of Thresholder’s multiverse is that languages like English are impossibly common. However, this world features dragons heavily rooted in the biology of monitor lizards and crocodiles‍ ‍—‍ the prospect that their vocalizations would have a human‍-​equivalent phonetic inventory is quite questionable.

But another iconic quirk of this setting is that the dragons have highly detailed body language, focusing primarily on tongues, ear‍-​frills, and the flushing of lidless eyes‍ ‍—‍ they don’t even nod to indicate “yes.” Further, their fangs are akin to spitting cobras, except adapted for “dewing”, secreting a coat of pheromone‍-​venom that conveys subtleties of mood depending on scent. Think of it as an extended analogue of crying.

How good is your nose? You’ll miss meaningful conversational beats if you can’t (or don’t think to) pay attention to what you smell. I won’t dedicate this kind of detail to species in every world that we cover, but I bring this up here at the beginning as a gesture at the difficulties that arise once even the human baseline is out of consideration.

But I digress. If you are to walk away (portal out, rather) with anything from this world, it’ll probably be a weird artifact or mutation, either looted or made bespoke for you. Learning alchemy itself is probably a waste of time, it requires species and materials unique to this planet. Getting the dragonflame surgery then adapting to use replacement oil brewed in other worlds would be a fun plot (a neat parallel to Perry’s early struggles with bullets and repairs).

2: The Godly Reefs (And the Darkling Reefs Abide)

You arrive in a world where the sun never sets, beating down so savagely your flesh turns to dust simply from exposure to its light. Ruins dot the land, and in those towering once‍-​cities, statues of birds dressed in all manner of robes and dresses abound, so life‍-​like that they seem to have frozen mid‍-​breath. Deep in the shadows shambling abominations of flesh and slime slither, while in the light and open air, jellyfish rule the sky, as if regent for the vanished birds, taking flight via telekinetic force expelled from their tentacles.^note Why jellyfish? Why birds? These days, my stuff tends to have some sort of inner logic to it, but this setting is old enough that I think, at this point in my journey, my thought process really was “I’m the xenofiction writer, right? What’s a weird animal to write about? Jellyfish? Okay, let’s go with that.” Then I just went “Uhh, what would a jellyfish find spooky? …Birds?” And left it at that. No ramifications, no knock‍-​on effects, nothing. Man, I was so bad at it early on.^endnote Each bears a shield to protect themselves from the sun.^note I don’t even know what’s up with the sun. The text describes the desiccation effect happening so fast it must be magic‍ ‍—‍ it can’t be heat alone, especially if a little shade is enough to protect you. There’s just, no system to this early stuff.^endnote

When they meet you, they’ll be curious‍ ‍—‍ if you can make conversation with them, then first among the topics to come up will be the gods. To whom do you pray? Have you conducted yourself according to their doctrines? If it’s clear you’re from another world, they’ll take you to a temple posthaste.

The real setup here takes some explaining. The core of the world’s magic is the hearts of the earth, crystals buried deep underground endowed with phenomenal cosmic power. By unearthing a single crystal, a still‍-​industrializing society of birds was able to create marvels of engineering that accelerated their growth. They uplifted races of beings to serve them, first simple jellyfish and then shoggoths. The pace of progress was moving faster and faster‍ ‍—‍ soon they would take to the stars.^note Where do hearts of the earth come from? What process turns “cosmic power” into technology? Where are the ramifications, the worldbuilding? How did I ever think this was sufficient???^endnote

Then a couple of college students go on this big dramatic adventure, and discover seven more hearts of the earth. A single heart of the earth sent them into the space age. What could seven be capable of? Already things were moving too fast; the birds were still in the era of kings and queens, did they really want to let those empires subjugate space?

So the students use their hearts of the earth to cast a spell that freezes the rest of their race in permanent stasis. Then they free the jellyfish and shoggoths that had been created as slaves and grant them free rein of society. The students use their newfound power to act as gods over their new subjects. Ostensibly, they seek to discover the optimal arrangement of society, each “god” organizing their domain according to their predilections, hoping or promising to one day revive the birds into their newly‍-​wrought utopia.

The most expansive of these domains of that of the “sun god” Aveltane, who enforces an orderly stasis.^note Indeed, it’s crossed my mind whether the tidally locking is a new thing‍ ‍—‍ the sun never setting is such a fitting metaphor for the artifical stability they’ve crafted.^endnote Other gods bear little mention, but the wild card among this mock‍-​pantheon is the “death god” (bearing a terrible name starting with M), who wants to overthrow Avelt’s suffocating order. It’s M—— who finds and commands pawns (such as AtDRA’s protagonist) to kill the high priestess of Avelt’s domain.

M—— has been trying this for a while, though I’ve vacillated as to whether Avelt’s grand order has endured continuously akin to an ever‍-​rekindled age of fire, or whether some cycle of “God, conquered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God,” has played out over and over.

It’s likewise unestablished whether M—— wants to merely overthrow Avelt, or the system of gods entirely‍ ‍—‍ i.e. bring all the birds back to life.

Whatever the case, it’s almost certain that a prospective thresholder will find themself an agent for one or the other. The power to be gained in this world could only be the blessing from a member of the pantheon: godstingers are given to the jellyfish who become their champions.

One thing that sets these powers apart, compared to those that’ll come up in later worlds, is that as a rule, they are copy‍-​pasted. Jellyfish with “flamestingers” are widespread and all can expel fire from their tentacles. While skills and applications can vary with the user, the principles of operation are shared. Truly unique godstingers are uncommon.

Other than that, they’re basically just superpowers, because the magic of the hearts of the earth can do whatever you want.

Which is exactly why a thresholder should never carry a heart of the earth with them into a new world; it’s far beyond the power level of anything else. In fact, one compelling idea is that you can’t carry a heart through a portal‍ ‍—‍ it would trigger the same sort of universal calamity that Fenilor threated in Book Four.

I like this, because it would make an interesting and meaningful destination out of what’s otherwise among the weakest of my settings.

3: Greyhaven (Of Waterweft)

Through the mist and the rain, you see a city. Sloped roofs and gutters speak to an architecture well‍-​acquainted with rain. You start walking, but be careful‍ ‍—‍ translucent worms wriggle in the puddles, fain to crawl into your flesh and swim amid blood.

This is the first of what I’ll call the filler worlds, fodder for a thresholder’s backstory and not much else. Maybe it’s where they come from, or gets briefly mentioned in a “Worlds of” chapter. I don’t have much to say about this one, because I stopped writing Of Waterweft without establishing much of true depth.^note You might ask why I even included this if it’s filler. When I wrote the first few entries, I aspired to be exhaustive, then near the end I decided some worlds^note Like those of Devouring Inane / Regent Kindred, or A Path Lit Only By Fire, or Hymns of Hyperwar.^endnote had, charitably, a single interesting idea and couldn’t sustain a full exposition.
For consistency’s sake, I should cut this, but then I’d want to find somewhere to but this little quip about filler worlds, and I’d have to renumber everything… and I kind of just want to hit post.^{endnote note} A better writer would have written a shorter letter.^endnote

This is a fantasy world with a city called Greyhaven where it never stops raining, and that’s kind of it. There’s nine different races; one is akin to anthropomorphic goats, another is scaled and slit‍-​eyed.

There are demons and spirits. In the wild country around Greyhaven, Demons are a terrible bane, but powerful wards keep Greyhaven safe from them‍ ‍—‍ except we learn early on that all it would take would be one diabolist to invite a demon in and jeopardize the whole city.

Spirits can be bound to wards, and there’s likely at least one other magic system‍ ‍—‍ the protagonist has a strange voice in their head, and I think it would be far too cliché for it be a demon. Also, the protagonist was secretly not of any of the nine races, but some sort of changeling.

5: The Worldskein (Kaon Rising)

You find yourself in a vast, empty void. Floating shards of rock and gravel surround you, and in the distance, what must be an archipelago of larger islands. Beyond that, nothing. Mist and the pale occlusion of atmosphere. There are lights, too faint to be stars, but the islands gather round them.

Maybe you see it, or just feel it with some new metaphysical sense. Diaphanous strings ravel out from every object. If you try jumping, or fall from your tiny island, those ghostly strands will bind you to that platform. With some new inner will, you can grab hold and pull, conjuring a force between yourself and your target to bring you back into contact with the ground.

Winds slide and roar through the vast empty space, and maybe you’re wuthered along, or you find a long, subtle strand bridging you to one of those distant islands‍ ‍—‍ either way, you slowly float across the distance. Coming nearer, you see the inhabitants of this world. Colorfully scaled, winged, and glowing with power.

Dragons.

What I wrote above has, frankly, little to do with the Worldskein‍ ‍—‍ I made it up for introductory purposes, as I hadn’t put much thought into the mechanics of the islands, I admit. Indeed, the worldskein verges on being another filler world where I have little to describe. But it’s just interesting enough to adopt a more intermediate status.

The core idea of the Worldskein is dragon cultivators. Breath weapons are simply the foundation of a dragon’s power. As they grow in magical ability, they unlock nexuses of power farther down their bodies. One allows them to channel magic through their arms and foreclaws for more conventional casting, followed by their wings to perform area of effect spells, then their hindlegs, then along their tail.

Hoards are a source of power too, objects turned into a gestalt extension of a dragon’s soul. This sort of “hoard‍-​phylactery” is a natural part of the dragon lifecycle, and has implications for mating I’ve admittedly forgotten at this point.

I do remember that the underlying conflict of the story involved a “magic academy” full of young dragons. The headmaster had knowledge itself as his breath, and secretly the magic academy was a front for a plan to use his students as his hoard.

The little bit of this world depicted in Kaon Rising already offered a number of weird phenomena. The sky is teeming with “zephyrs”, linear vortices created by magically charged air‍ ‍—‍ like if windstorms had an equivalent of lightning discharge. The glowing balls of light you first saw in the distance are in fact not actually any different from the lanterns you’ll see all over the settlements.

Each is the dwelling place of a lightslime, a creature summoned from the elemental plane of light. Indeed, light itself is a kind of waste vented from that plane, and (if memory serves) its nature was borderline ecological rather than physical.

Which is as good a time as any to get into the real heart of the worldskein‍ ‍—‍ why it’s called that. It’s not a continuous world. Rather, it’s a collection of small pocket dimensions that can be bridged by the magical abilities inherited by a clan of dragons, the Omnia.

The worldskein was once united by an Omni Empire, but (thus always to empires) it fell, and in the wake, people are suspicious of any attempt to even bridge the space between realms‍ ‍—‍ it could only be the will of a tyrant.

This broaches a question that will become more pertinent in the next world. That question is: isn’t this already a multiverse?

To the people of the worldskein, what makes travel from one pocket dimension to another different from universe to another? Perhaps the analogy is sailing a lake versus sailing the ocean‍ ‍—‍ but nonetheless, you are a sailor.

This, again, serves to add an interesting draw to one of my less accomplished early settings‍ ‍—‍ if any of them is likely to have magic capable of probing or traversing the greater multiverse, the worldskein will have it.

Which segues back to the actual point here: what’s the power to be gained here? Dragon cultivation is an obvious candidate, but I planned for there to be a broader magic system (dragons weren’t intended to be the only denizens of the ’skein), but how broad? I never established. There are spellgems you can breath mana into to trigger magical effects, those would at least make good loot.

6: Cometverse (Aurora Moonrise)

You find it almost familiar here. Temperate trees dot a land that stretches unbroken to the horizon. Clouds and only clouds hang in a sky with a single moon and a single sun.

This comfort lasts until a beast with rock for flesh and gems for eyes clambers out from a pit, stone legs scraping forth and heavy limbs swinging an attack. A gemfiend! But to your defense comes a chimera, anatomy borrowed and scrambled from deer, lizard, and bird, with the face of a fair woman, blasting the thing away with transcendent light. A spirit!

The Kingdom of Extola is plain in a way that stands out on this list. It’s a world of knights and nobles and monsters to slay. The magic involves no mutation, no gruesome and costly rituals, and indeed no esoteric caveat.^note Reading back over this, I realize this makes less sense if this is your first exposure to my work. It certainly doesn’t feel exceptional compared to what came before it. Trust me, I guess?^endnote

To perform enchanting, you simply express your will. Take up a tool and use it until it feels to be an extension of yourself. That’s it.

Further, in the Cometverse, everything is enchanting. The world is panpsychic: every rock and gust of air has a subjective will, and all of physics is but whim and consensus. What goes up comes down because the planet itself wills that things should fall. A human can never truly challenge a will like that, but the earth indulges some exceptions.

Advanced enchanters will develop unique “cantos,” expressions of their personality. Examples:

• The swordswoman Tressa could perform [True Sundering Slash], allowing her sword to cut a target at any distance, even through objects. She could cut down a man standing behind a hostage, leaving them unharmed.
• The friar Oleto had a scapegoating canto; attacks targeting him would instead affect his enchanted staff, which could then offload the previously‍-​redirected attack by striking another target.
  
• Prince Lucien had an enchanted ring that allowed him, whenever he has the means to cast another enchantment, defer‍-​negate its effect twice, and on the third time, it takes effect with several times the power.

And so on; that should give you a sense.

If there’s one thing unique about this setting, it’s the spirits. The magic of nature and weather spirits is different entirely from that of men. Where enchanters gain power from blood and toil, spirits frolic and sparkle. Notably, for all the endless variation in their bodies, no spirit has ever possessed hands. They are incapable of working.

Spirits are embodied light, and mostly this cashes out into their magic having a slightly different approach to its effects. Instead of enchantments centered around tools, spirits are much more able to just cast spells. And by that same token, there’s an inevitable impermanence to what they do.

No, the real character of spirits is that they are a exercise in cosmic wonder. Nature spirits are ontologically beautiful. Simply witnessing the true light of their being will transfix and enthrall you. You shall love them, and their will shall become yours. Enchanters, deriving their power from their innate will, have the capacity to resist this, but resistance comes at a cost‍ ‍—‍ “beauty‍-​scorching” will mark your flesh, like prismatic burn scars.

Any conflict you’ll encounter in the setting will likely center around the spirits. A loose sketch of the setting’s history is that for unwritten millennia, ancestral humans were nothing more than joyful slaves to spirits. Then meteoric iron fell from the sky, and bearing iron tools, men were finally able to wound spirits. They tried to war with the spirits, but the spirits retreated to secret groves. One day a man fell in love with a spirit, siring a half‍-​human, half‍-​nature spririt “dryad.” The spirit‍-​hating humans burnt down the grove and exiled the man leading eventually to his death. The dryad grew up misanthropic and led the spirits into a new war against men. Other men followed the examples of the tree‍-​fucking martyr, and a new generation of dryads were born only to be drafted into the war.

I explain all of this, because it’s a history with a few twists and turns, several distinct eras I think would make for interesting thresholding destinations. Except I’m not done‍ ‍—‍ I hit pause on the exposition right before something big. Because this setting isn’t named after enchanters or spirits or dryads, is it?

What is a comet?

Comet spirit are eldritch beings from beyond the stars. Where nature spirits flourish in the rays of the warm sun, comet spirits are born from the faint radiation of distant stars in the cold void of space.

When a comet falls to earth, it’s an outside context problem. It’s boots stomping on an anthill. Enchanters stand no chance, nature spirits stand no chance. The only mercy is exactly what makes them so dangerous: comets don’t care about you.

It is the nature of comets to dazzle and destroy. They just want a challenge, a battle where they can burn up in a blaze of glory. It’s something that humans cannot offer, so kingdoms are at best collateral damage to them. The vastest of the gemfiends could entertain a comet for a time, but the only real match for a comet is another comet.

Comets never fall to earth alone; they come in pairs, or in waves. Planets are arenas for their cosmic battles, as they seek to win the blessing and power of the planets cratered beneath them, like gladiators vying for an emperor’s thumbs up.

And doesn’t that sound familiar.

Aurora Moonrise, after all, is recent enough in my bibliography to have been directly influenced by Thresholder. And comets really are just miniature thresholders; they roam the galaxy, finding interesting planets to fight each on. The song of the spheres is their grand spell.

Which is the real thing I want to pick at when discussing this setting. It’s the Worldskein all over again‍ ‍—‍ it seems ungainly to have this very thresholder‍-​shaped universe nested within a greater thresholding multiverse. Occam’s Razor says do not multiply entities beyond necessity.^note It’s why I’ve always hated multiverses, personally‍ ‍—‍ so untidy.^endnote

Would it not be more elegant to suppose comets are already thresholders, and some of those other planets they’ve fallen upon were in fact other settings? There’s plenty of room to fit the Squiggleverse within a tiny fraction of a single galaxy.

Still, there’s also a compelling plot point in the possibility that the cometverse leg of a thresholder’s journey culminates in a frantic effort to at all costs prevent a comet from flying through a portal and ravaging a multiverse unprepared for them.

But I digress. You can tell I haven’t been holding these mini write‍-​ups to a quota or limit, but I’ve definitely spilled too much ink on this one. Worse, cometverse more than any so far, is a world where there’s more I haven’t touched on. Enchanting is not my deepest system, but surely moonbinding or gemsinging or gravitas loci merit mention.

Hell, I haven’t talked about wasteblight, a withering affliction of the will that affects anyone but especially cripples enchanters and spirits. Blighted wastelands still linger across the land from the worse days of that plague, more numerous than the battlefield‍-​craters of comets.

Nor have I detailed how the conflict between humans spirits evolved, how nowadays there’s a church that genders spirits, expecting them to marry men and birth dryads, binding them with marriage contracts.

But there’s still so many other worlds to mention. Fortunately, I can run through the next few pretty quick. They’re a few notches above outright filler.

7: Emul’s Fall (Thy Wretched Mask)

TWM, due to its origin as an Ironsworn game, cleaves to an unimaginative fantasy aesthetic. If anything might stand out to you, it’d be the absence of even middle age technology^note Personally, I’m quite fond of the industrial revolution, give or take a century, whereas this world might be early iron age.^endnote Cosmologically, it might be fun to make this setting geocentric, or even flat earth.

There are elves, and a race called “spirefolk” I imagine as creatures of angles and distorted light, like a cubist interpretation of men. There were dragons, and it’s a plot point that a kingdom slayed them, which implies things about how widespread civilization is.^note Otherwise, I’d want to make it especially scarce, a land uninhabited save a few villages.^endnote

This seems to be the only world where I don’t have my notes saved to this computer. The magic system was based on three primary elements, with combinations/inversions that resulted in 6–12 secondaries.^note Iron was primary, but I’m not sure of the two others. Probably water and maybe light? Or was it air or fire? Or were those secondary elements?^endnote

One character was a cannibalistic skin‍-​walker but lived ignorant of her nature due to repressing the urges. Another was an alchemist brewing potions to transform themselves into a dragon and take vicarious revenge against the dragonslayer kingdom. Another was a boy with a pet thunderbird.

But the “draw” of the world, to me, is the soul‍-​fungus. It was created to spread and devour the material plane. After an incubation period, the fungus can possess its host. It gains a keen sense of souls in a certain radius and can communicate telepathetically with other hosts.

A consequence of how this fungus comes into the main plot is that it fails to fully subsume the protagonist and it must learn to cooperate and share a brain with their prey. Mostly, I just think a psychic fungus copilot would make for a funny Marchard parallel.

More importantly, the secret of this soul‍-​fungus is its connection to the astral rot, a desolate demiplane or mindscape where the souls of the fungus’s victims are digested.

What interests me is the possibility of an infected thresholder maintaining a connection to the astral rot, or carrying a fragment of the plane alongside them as they enter a new world. It would make for a weird twist on Jeff’s ring.

Imagine a thresholder who rips out the soul of their allies, ferrying them into each new world and incarnating them through infection of that world’s denizens with a strain of the fungus sporulating beneath their skin.

8: The Scars on God’s Flesh (Running Out of Skin & Time)

I’m going to start to shift gears, now that we’re getting into worlds that exist as ideas rather than execution. There’s less to describe, and more importantly, we’re almost 5k words into this article and the amount of ground I haven’t covered frightens me.

You’ll meet two kinds of magic users in this world. Each has flesh glowing with marks of power, only some are the elegant curves of a tattoo, while others have the jagged, gruesome quality of scars.

If you arrive anywhere near a city, though, you’re in for a shock. Which would startle you more? Throngs of stitched zombies laboring like fleshy machines, or a portal bound in flayed human skin, tanned like leather?

In this world, people have a soul conjoined to their flesh by a thread of divine nerve. This nerve is severed when they die, and then it drags their soul off to an unknown afterlife. The spot where the nerve joins flesh‍ ‍—‍ theorized but undetectable in practice‍ ‍—‍ is known as the birthmark.

Something special happens if an injury ever hits your birthmark. This severs your divine nerve. Does this kill you? Sometimes! But if you truly desire to live, your soul can cling so tightly to your flesh that the divine nerve retracts without it. Unable to remain separate, your soul can only persist by merging with your skin, transmuting into metaflesh.

For a short time, you’ll regenerate so energetically that even if burning alive, even if crushed under tons of rocks, even if drowning in vitriolic acid, you would not die.

Your metaflesh will be marked by a cicatrix, and according to the nature of your birthmark and the injury that struck it, it will grant you magical power. The cicatrix glows whenever you use its power, and it grows to cover more and more of you as you advance in power.

Tattoos are a related system. People have devised means to deliberately sever the divine nerve, but this won’t grant a cicatrix. However, by carefully imitating the visual design of cicatrices, similar powers can be granted to anyone.

It’s an expensive procedure, and tattoos are invariably less flexible than organic cicatrixes. Worse, chosing to get a tattoo means you’ll never unlock a cicatrix. (Even though it’s vanishingly unlikely that you’ll ever happen to have an injury that intersects perfectly with your birthmark anyway.)

Cicatrixes, as a rule, have powers that center around flesh. Idiomatically, this worlds’ powers are either “striker” powers that affect things the user touches, “shifter” powers that transform or reconfigure the nature of the skin, or otherwise take effect whenever the user is damaged.

It’s exceptionally rare to encounter more conventional powers based on line of sight or otherwise acting at a distance. No telekinetics or psychics here.

A mechanic worth mention‍ ‍—‍ in particular, something that would motivate a thresholder to get a scar or tattoo as soon as they can‍ ‍—‍ is the paresthesia effect.

Paresthesia is a variation of the “Manton limit” popularized by Worm, where, for instance, telekinetics can’t stop your heart because their telekinesis is “Manton‍-​limited” and thus can’t affect any living thing.

If you’re targeted by a cicatrix meant to target nonliving things, then the effect is negated by your metaflesh, and you only feel a tingling sensation, a shiver down your spine. That’s paresthesia.

Powerful cicatrix users can overload your resistance, and of course some cicatrices are supposed to target living things. Ultimately, paresthesia as simple resistance is very unbalanced in favor of offense‍ ‍—‍ anyone can resist a novice, but it takes a master to resist an adept. But a master could not resist another master, and even a grandmaster could not resist a master.

That’s where counterscarring comes into the equation, if they’re skilled enough to have developed one. Any time you target a counterscar user, the counterscar is triggered. A simple example: imagine someone has a cicatrix that lets them ignite their oily skin. Their counterscar might automatically inflict burns as if their attacker had touched a raging fire.

Notably, this is an example of a world whose power is better outside of it‍ ‍—‍ many cicatrices become so much more powerful without paresthesia and the counterscar metagame limiting them.

Likewise, with how often mutation and body horror crops up in the powers of other worlds, there should be no shortage of synergy opportunities.

One last thing worth remarking on about the power system is the power curve peaks and then slumps at a certain point, based on an analogy with scars. A scar is hardest when it’s had some time to heal, but not completely. Give it more time, and it just becomes soft flesh once more. Cicatrix users are not the most powerful at the end of the career‍ ‍—‍ unless, of course, they grow cancerous.

Anyway, let’s talk plot. The central conflict of this setting revolves around the Hellwara clan. Each member bears the same cicatrix, where any opening in their flesh is a portal to an inner space where they can store tools or goods.

After a bloody history defined by people hunting and exploiting the power of the Hellwara clan, the current hegemony grants them sovereignty. Their protection comes at the cost that, at the end of their life, their elders will have their skin flayed and their inner spaces woven into an ever‍-​growing network of portals used to transport goods across the continent.

Hellwara members are scarce‍ ‍—‍ which towns will have the honor of hosting the next hellgate? What havoc could be wreaked if a malicious actor seized control of one of the hellgates? What happens if a Hellwara member doesn’t want to be sacrificed?

There are plenty of plots a thresholder would be poised to get wrapped up in.

Quick sidenote: Running Out of Skin & Time was planned as a time loop story. It’s tempting to include that as part of the pitch here. Imagine thresholders fighting each other and it amounts to nothing until they work together to escape the timeloop. The problem with that is… First, let’s digress.

Apnoe, the main character, has a modal power: she’s either a corpse or a ghost. As a corpse, she has no paresthesia resistance‍ ‍—‍ for all intents and purposes, she is just an object. When damaged, she reflexively exhales her last breath, and lives on as a ghost composed of that breath. Her ghost form is considered to be metaflesh and has a paresthesia response, but her ability to affect the world consists of talking or blowing like a gentle wind. When her paresthesia is triggered, she is sucked back into her corpse to reanimate it. The cycle repeats.

In short, she’s able to physically affect the world with a negligible magical presence, or affect the world magically with a negligible physical presence.

In Worth the Candle, there’s a character named Valencia with a rare birth defect: she lacks a soul. Entire classes of magical items are off‍-​limits to her, because their operation assumes the user has a soul. Essentially, for a magical item to work on her, it ought to work on a sack of potatoes. Late into the story, she gains a special armor with a convenient double standard. The rules of its magical protection work on a sack of potatoes. But its power comes with a drawback‍ ‍—‍ except that drawback assumes a soul, so it doesn’t affect her. Convenient!

The time loop is that sort of double standard: Apnoe started the loop off in corpse mode. Her body is reset to the start like a sack of potatoes, and since she’s immune to effects that target living things, the time loop’s memory‍-​wipe ignores her. A glitch in the effect‍ ‍—‍ or, if you will, a loophole.

Point is, it’ll be impossible for thresholders to partake in the loop without being able to replicate that very specific interaction. That being said, there is something compelling to imagining a time looper recruiting a thresholder to help them overcome the loop. But it’s also just difficult to write a time loop from the outside.

9: The Gnawing Dark (Rotting Body, Fruiting Soul)

A planet, knocked from its sun’s orbit, was plunged in freezing darkness. Surface life was forced underground. That was millennia ago, long enough to be remembered in myth and ruin and little else.

This is an underdark world. There’s dark elves, ratfolk, aranea,^note Thanks, Mother of Learning.^endnote myconids,^note I have a uniquely modular take on them, but this margin is too small to contain it.^endnote and various other cave monsters. Mindflayers in particular would be a central threat across the Gnawing Dark.^note In general, much influence would be taken from OSR‍ ‍—‍ I love the concept of olms, for instance, and expect there to be plenty to lift from the Veins of the Earth supplement.^endnote

The logistics of an underground society is something that wouldn’t be quite as handwaved as it normally is.^note No using fungi farms to pull calories out of a hat.^endnote Where do you get food? How do you avoid cave‍-​ins? Even something as easily taken for granted as air would be a resourced to carefully plan for.

Still, you do need certain kinds of magic to make it work. The food chain is, at its core, based on radioactive metals and autotrophs metabolizing energy from it. Most of the tunnels that crisscross the underdark were dug by a kind of giant worm that mines for radioactive material, collecting them into one place as it weaves a cocoon. An ecosystem springs up in the caves around its chrysalis. Then, after centuries, a godmoth emerges and flies, ghosting through stone to reach the frozen surface to mate.

Notably, both the worms and the moths have innate dimensional magic, which solves some of the problem of caverns (where do you put the stone you dig out?)

Like so many of my worlds, the Gnawing Dark has general purpose magic capable of implementing most “standard” spells. It’s very likely that you’ll walk out of this world with a whole suit of survival utility spells‍ ‍—‍ for light, for detecting bad air, for exploring caves. Darkvision is a mechanic here, but it’s unclear if it would work on other worlds. It’s a consequence of how local mana interacts with light.

But the real comparative advantage might be psychic powers; mind magic is a big thing I wanted to explore with this setting. Mindflayers are the big bad, and then there’s the aranea expies. Indeed, the core mechanics of the wider magic involves mana “imprinting” and “reenacting” physical effects‍ ‍—‍ so a mind mage who can imprint their thought process on a spell is one of the most dangerous things in the Gnawing Dark.

But even aside from spellcasting, mind‍-​reading and telepathy would have a utility comparable Perry’s universal translation: an even more powerful means to cross the communication barriers that would otherwise litter any character’s attempt to threshold these worlds.

But let’s talk some more about the mana here. Its quirk is that it siphons energy. It’s called the Gnawing Dark because any sort of light or heat will attract microspells that siphon away the excess energy. Every torch needs to be prayed over and warded with its own spells that block the ravenous light‍-​eating magic. A soul is one such ward, otherwise the dark would eat your metabolism.

This is a good prompt to discuss one of the open questions of the “grand spell” that brings thresholders into new worlds.^note Something I’ve had burning in my chest for a while is that I kind of hate the name “grand spell”? It’s so generic. I have a general principle that major worldbuilding terms should be “branded.” Part of it’s just a sense of density and poetics (it’s good when terms convey information, and “grand spell” could be anything from a big fireball to a rousing speech), but it seems ideal if, say, a fan could mention the term and you either instantly recognize what franchise they’re talking about if you know, or you can google it and get useful results if you don’t. At the very least, it should at least meaningfully tie into something!^endnote Or rather, the intelligence or guiding principle‍ ‍—‍ we can call it the guardian‍ ‍—‍ that drives the spell.

In Cometverse, you can learn enchanting. If you then take a portal to Godscars, enchanting doesn’t exist (people would have noticed!). Therefore, the grand spell quietly expands the underlying physics of the world, introducing a magic system that wasn’t there before. Thresholders carry a piece of each universe with them, so they always have access to the powers they’ve gained.

A recurring feature in my worlds is that each one has a different answer to what a soul is and what it does. In Godscars, your soul is bound by divine light that magic users severed themselves from, sucking their soul into bodies (does metaflesh count as soul?); in the Gnawing Dark, the soul is a parasite‍-​turned‍-​mutualist symbiont that is necessary to survive.

We can look to canon for guidance, but it’s difficult to exegete, with how many open questions about the grand spell remain. In Book Two, Perry comes to a world where humans are, rarely, blessed with a “spirit root” that allows them to learn to cultivate magical power. Perry and another thresholder, Maya, happen to have spirit roots and can learn this magic.

Spirit roots do not occur elsewhere in the multiverse; humans on other worlds don’t have them. So what gives?

One interpretation is that the grand spell had put a thumb on the scale, and gifted them a spirit root so they wouldn’t miss out on what they’re “supposed” to get out of the world. When I suggested this in a chatroom for the series, another theory was offered: both Perry and Maya already had magical abilities, so in the process of reconciling their personal physics with the physics of the new world, they were “reinterpreted” as having spirit roots.

It’s an elegant theory‍ ‍—‍ in retrospect, it would seem “unfair” or at least out of character if the spell had automatically gave them abilities they haven’t earned.

But I digress. If a thresholder arrives in the Gnawing Dark, will they have a soul? I can think of four schools of thought.

• Conservative: the grand spell only does what it needs to. If you don’t have one, you don’t gain a soul for worlds that need them any more than you’d gain a coat when going to an ice world.
• Anthropic: the grand spell won’t let you die. If the nature of the world would kill you without a soul, you’ll be given a soul.
• Integrative: the grand spell does what it needs for you to fit in the world. If you are human, and humans usually have souls, you’ll be given a soul as if you were born here.
• Inverted: more of a frame challenge; the grand spell doesn’t give souls, the soul‍-​giver does, and what the soul‍-​giver does depends on the world and its physics, no the grand spell.

I don’t like the anthropic lens‍ ‍—‍ it’s level scaling, a weak thresholder would get a privilege that a strong thresholder won’t, should they have a workaround somewhere in their toolbox. And it’s also unnecessary, given that the spell already intelligently selects worlds (if the world would kill you, you won’t go there lol).

Conservative–integrative would be a spectrum, and both extremes seem at odds with the evidence. A simple, unsatisfying resolution, is that the spell does whatever makes for an interesting story.

10: QT‍-​273b IV (Circuits of Ice and Iron)

Something you may have noticed by now is that I’m a fan of fantasy settings. Eight worlds and we’ve yet to see a tech level higher than late medieval.^note In fairness, at least half of these settings don’t actually depend on low tech, they just assume it. It would be pretty interesting to reframe them as having 18th‍-​21st century tech in addition to their magic. Or just have the thresholders arrive a few centuries after the main plot wraps up.^endnote Whether the exomoon QT‍-​273b IV represents an exception to this is best answered with “mu”.

This exomoon is probably the first world I’d consider an “end game” thresholder world. It would be one thing if the surface was merely inhospitably cold. It orbits a gas giant with at least two other moons of note. Together, they exist in the Laplace Resonance familiar as the configuration of our system’s Ganymede, Europa, and Io.

The moon is thus highly volcanically active, and its orbit intersects with the magnetic field of the gas giant in such a way that it’s periodically showered in cosmic radiation that lights up the sky with aurorae. The air is all toxic gas and the oceans are acid.

Suffice it to say, there is no life here. But there is magic of a sort.

Specifically, a special substance called “quintice”.^note I love my “magic” that’s really just convenient alt‍-​physics.^endnote This crystal is highly interactive with the electromagnetic field, altering its structure in response to currents. That structure in turn creates ripples in the field. It’s capable of complex feedback cascades that we can oversimply and call evolution.

But this isn’t magic crystal RNA, and it’s not viable for these entities to organize themselves into “cells” or nanomachine handwavium or anything recognizably organic. No, instead imagine quintice as a sort of software and circuitry suited to operating simple motors.

Where the simplest form of life is microscopic, proteins self‍-​catalyzing, the simplest form of quintice is visible to the naked eye, iron fillings coursing with ambient static and sweeping themselves into ever‍-​quining circuits. Where DNA can synthesize myriad molecules, quintice is chemically impotent, and its best means of constructing the means of securing its propagation‍ ‍—‍ that is, a body‍ ‍—‍ is not by growing it, but by manufacturing it.^note There’s a funny angle where the billion‍-​year arc of life has been getting larger, but the arc of quintice is that familiar push for smaller and smaller circuitry. Really, though, it would push in both directions.^endnote

The core premise of quintice is a world of autonomous automata, constructs without creators. A lifeless moon populated by bootstrapped robots.

So there’s solar panels everywhere, turbines littering the seas drawing power from the massive tides, and it’s all lit by the shine of multiple moons and the bright, striped face of planet.

But what is it actually about? This is difficult to answer, because the world’s undergone serious transformation as the setting took shape. Initially it was far more fantasy fare‍ ‍—‍ a conflict between “earth‍-​hearts” and “ice‍-​hearts” endowed with conventional superpowers.

Even without that, there’s no shortage of low stakes plots. Skirmishes over who controls which field of panels or turbines, robots scavenging and cannibalizing each other for parts, hackers and viruses. It doesn’t feel like enough to me.

I have it down in my notes to explore the idea of the moon having superconductors‍ ‍—‍ SMES seems like it’d be good for long‍-​lived robots‍ ‍—‍ and there’s this compelling image of one group of robots getting that superconductor breakthrough and imperializing the rest with their advanced tech. That’d be cool.^note Shaking my head as I write about imperialism so my readers know I don’t condone the practice.^endnote

One of the ideas I was rotating before I stopped working on this setting was some manner of threat looming over all. A self‍-​improving AI collective, perhaps, or a strange entity that reaches out to the robots through the electromagnetic field.^note I considered the possibility that “lifeless” isn’t quite true, and there’s something dwelling deep down in the oceans or beneath the crust, but it’s hard to turn that into more than a curiosity.^endnote

Contextualizing this as a thresholder arena helps, actually‍ ‍—‍ why have the thresholder show up on the moon at all? You can imagine there’s an empire of humans or aliens that discover the moon, and they land there hoping to harvest the quintice or the superconductors, inevitably coming into conflict with the locals.

You could do a funny Avatar pastiche, only instead of blue aliens, it’s killer robots.

Worlds 11‍-​15

Let’s quickly run through the more half‍-​baked worlds. I don’t know if I’d count them all as filler, but I’m running out of will and energy to devote to sprawling exposition.^note To the relief of any remaining readers, I imagine.^endnote

• 11: Copper‍-​9 (Corrupt Combustion). It’s Murder Drones x Jujutsu Kaisen, with the cursed energy of negative emotions subbed in for the corrupt data of software errors. A lot of my magic systems are species‍-​specific, but this one is basically unusable unless you’re a robot‍ ‍—‍ though there’s a single case of a human gaining a corruption driver.^note I have quite a lot to say about this one‍ ‍—‍ I have said quite a lot already, it ranks among the settings I’ve written the most posted about‍ ‍—‍ but a lot of it is plot recaps, or the grunt work of reflavoring either side of the crossover to fit together in an admittedly satisfying way‍ ‍—‍ that is, if you’re already invested in it. I assume good chunk of the people here don’t care about either.^endnote
• 12: Draconym (Cold Haze of Dragonflame). Another dragon world, but here they’re ontologically important; the world fundamentally revolves around them.
  • Spirits and monsters are elemental, with magical air, water, earth, and fire all being the result of dragon’s roars, blood, bones, and firebreath respectively. There’s something of a true name system.^note If you’ve played skyrim, you have a touchstone.^endnote Dragons can do magic because they roar in the langauge of the world, and likewise their claws can scratch out glyphs in that language.
    
  • More practically, dragons each get unique breath weapons only they can use (because it would no longer be “true” if repeated by another dragon), and power up by hoarding a certain type of object. Hoards have a deadly autokill effect that basically make dragon lairs unassailable to mortals.
  • Except one day, humans develop flamecloaks, a magical effect that shields them from the hoard autokill, letting them stand a chance against dragons. the modern era is considered to have begun when John Wyrmslayer^note Or as I call him, Wyrmguy.^endnote vanquished the one of the big five godwyrms, and generations of dragonslayers have followed his example. There are only three godwyrms left, and the storm god is thought to have the fewest days numbered, only protected by a dilemma created by his hoard’s inheritance mechanic.
  • But a new development is on the horizons: even as the number of dragons decline, among the new generation spreads a practice of ‘devoured hoards’‍ ‍—‍ draconic domain expansions. Flamecloaks require careful preparation, tailored to whichever dragon the slayer is facing. Devoured hoards allow altering the parameters of the lair effect at the time of casting, preventing flamecloaks from pre‍-​adapting to it.
• 13: Whalemoon (Xenodemonic). Magic is abundant in the world, surging out from a crystalline moon.
  • Clouds of mana‍-​plankton and mana‍-​jellyfish fill the air, with a whole food chain stacked on top. There’s flying snakes and sky‍-​mantas, and floating islands formed by coral reefs collectively casting levitation spells. Mana is densest beneath the moon, so the islands and the sky‍-​ecology tend to drift around the world. Whales have learned to astrally project their souls, which have almost diverged into their own distinct species of magical fauna.
  • Humans have souls that create glowing imagery across their skin, which is a core part of their body language. Human souls have “wings” that can be unfurled by rotating the soul transdimensionally like a tessaract. A core part of agriculture is the cultivation of mana‍-​crystals from which your soul can draw a portion of your caloric needs.
  • Being so dense in calories, souls are vulnerable to infection, so part of why the marks and wings exist is as a fitness display. A thresholder who doesn’t have a soul, or one that works differently, will immediately look out of place. Suspiciously so, because–
  • The worst magical disease is the infection of demons, a kind of soul‍-​parasite that thrives in the foul waste mana generated by soul‍-​viruses. Demons are eusocial; an imp infecting a human could be viewed as like a bee collecting nectar form a flower, or a parasitoid wasp grub devouring its host. Once a human vessel has served its function, a demon queen will come reaping to return her fattened children to her pandemonium, where gestates a new brood of imps to infect the next human she encounters.
  • Magic is very difficult: most spells blow up,^note For an analogy, consider how most source file inputs produce compiler errors.^endnote and as a result life avoids magic, aside from a few simple, evolutionarily‍-​conserved spells like turning sugars to soulflesh. The immune system reacts aggressively to attempts to cast “mutant” spells, a sign of disease if not demonic influence.
  • Demons, having little regard for their hosts, are far more able to experiment with magic, and thus have a repetoire of powerful dark magic, often with gruesome biological mechanics.
  • In terms of thresholder power, it’s not very accessible. The magic for countering demons and other societally useful tricks is time‍-​consuming and ritual‍-​based. (Lacking the wild abandon of demonic evolution, holy magic is instead very, very careful.)
  • I have vague ideas for ghosts or wild magic, but nothing really pinned down. Early on, I conceived of objects enchanted with extruded bits of soul, that risks becoming ‘cursed’ by ambient mana the same way food goes to rot. Anyway, learning astral projection from the whales is probably the most solid lead.
  • It’s not a conventional “power”, but amusingly, grabbing the crop and recipe for crystal‍-​bread might genuinely be the best boon to walk out of this world with.
  • Another knock‍-​on benefit of this world is that it would make a great transitional world. There’s so much ambient mana that powers from more magic‍-​scarce world could be advanced in unprecedented ways.
  • I’m of course skipping over a big one‍ ‍—‍ hosting a pandemonium and transforming into a xenodemon queen would be a pretty big powerup. It’s just, becoming a draconic‍-​insectoid broodmother constantly driven by biological urges to perform soul‍-​corrupting human sacrifice is the sort of run‍-​defining build decision you don’t make lightly.
• 14: Runic Rifts (Telechiral) Post‍-​revolutionary fantasy, rifts to mysterious dungeon manifest throughout the world.
  • If you have a soul, you can engrave one of six known runes upon your soul, selecting one and only magic system to learn. Each has very different mechanics despite an overlapping class of spell effect. The core idea is that the user cannot cast spells, there must be an intermediary.
    • Toolchanters gain an implement that can be imbued with mana to enhance its power and manifest new abilities; this is the oldest system.
    • Giftreapers can plant seeds in the souls of others, granting them magical powers which grow stronger with use until harvested. Harvested flesh can be used like a magic item to cast the power at its final strength
    • Bloodscribes could write truth in blood. This allows them to detect lies and make binding assertions.
    • Shadesplitten are incomplete souls; the other half of their soul lies in a creature they must journey to find. Once found, their minds become linked, and the other half gains magical powers.
    • Orblords can craft orbs, imbuing them with spells and manipulating them. Industrial processes have made this previously‍-​academic school so much more powerful; despite the name, orblords are why the revolution was successful.
    • Telechirals gain supernumary soul‍-​limbs that can manipulate the world and other souls. These limbs can only be created by imbuing them with a desire. Once created, that limb will pursue that desire for as long as you live. Telechirals were experimental living weapons created by the fallen empire that proved too difficult to control.
  • Each of these schools offers a means of reproduction. After the revolution, society recognizes the personhood of: awakened tools, living contracts, shadekin, and orb collectives.
  • The randomly spawning dungeons are full of soul‍-​empowering magical energy and assorted cool loot, but the dungeons are carefully balanced to be deadly to most who dive into them. They feed on the soul of failed adventurers, but adventures only come given a real chance of success. Thus explains the prevalence of monsters, traps, puzzle, etc.
  • The plot for this one was meant to take place in a magic death academy, a dungeon designed like a school. The mana‍-​rich pocket dimension allows the students rapid magical advancement, but the school always kills a portion of the student body, though it has been “tamed” so that it feeds on failing students and rule‍-​breakers.
• 15: Seven Spheres (Ars Longa). A world beneath an ocean moon, where a river of souls swirl through the heavens above and nightmare brushstrokes litter the sky. Humans live alongside sapient canids, corvids, and salticids.
  • Magical advancement‍ ‍—‍ the long art of enlightenment‍ ‍—‍ is the fruit of an entire lifetime of work. Good thing you can reincarnate. The purpose of a spirit is to acquire the wisdom of seven celestial bodies and transcend the cycle of reincarnation.^note No one has actually pulled this off, and the only woman who got close racked up a Hitlerian body count in the process.^endnote
  • Most spirits are not even aware of their own existence; they are metaphorically asleep and confer no magical ability. To awake means to become aware of your spirit, to understand and believe in the supernatural.
    • Unfortunately, this is very dangerous. If you don’t know how to un‍-​awaken, you’ll burn up your energy and become a “false spirit”, a zombie that feeds on other spirits to sustain itself. A spirit that gets eaten or burns up completely no longer reincarnates.
    • For this reason, the ruling party censors information about the true nature of the world. There’s a “masquerade”, but it’s impossible to hide the work of monsters and magicians around them. Much easier to convince the world only madmen believe their lying eyes where the supernatural is concerned.
    • “Dreamscribe” is the word for someone capable of the lucid dreaming‍-​esque feat of becoming aware of the spirit without a full, mad awakening from the restful dream of mundane life.
  • A dreamscribe’s ability to wield spiritual power to redact false spirits relies on the art of sacred reading, a magic system based off of three subsystems inherited from the ancestral traditions of the main nonhuman races.
    • Canids practiced howling truth, allowing several wolves to become one packmind by resonanting their howls, even across great distance. Humans, being fond companions of the wolves, were taught this art‍ ‍—‍ it turned out they were also capable of pack‍-​resonance. How far can you push it? The greatest breakthroughs was the discovery that you could resonate with objects and thereby move them like distant limbs.
    • Corvids practiced keen‍-​scrying. Where light enters the eye, scrying leaves it, a ray of insight equal and opposite to the path of every known beam of light. Scrying allows one to probe into whatever you can see‍ ‍—‍ not forcefully, but it can reveal hidden truths, or cloak an object in illusion. The most famous feat, of course, is scrying into a pool of water, and witnessing a sight from miles away.
    • Salticids practiced spirit‍-​weaving. Silk, being a product of their body and an intimate expression of their will, is imbued with their spirit. Thus, spiders innately know how to manipulate the shape and function of the spirit‍ ‍—‍ and how to consume it, just like false spirits. At first spiders were mistaken for a race of monsters. They weren’t, but even when allowed to live, they were enslaved for their silk. This long and bloody history has progressed to a grudging concession of rights.
    • What happens if you were to master all three? If you can peer at an object, divine its true nature, then sing its true name to resonate as one with it, then reweave the nature of your spirit? This grand combination is equivalent to redefining the object itself‍ ‍—‍ they call it sacred reading, as the written word is seen, spoken, and it expresses the shape of the spirit.
  • Drafting a spell to do all the above is called composing a thesis, and if you can produce a thesis that accords with the principles of a sphere (remember those?), you gain the “heavenly mandate” of that sphere, granting you the right to channel its magical energy to enact your thesis.
  • If you had acquired a thesis in a past life, when you awaken you become able to use it again, and vice versa. An inherited thesis is called a mortal axiom.
  • Given how hard it is to develop your first mandated thesis, the odds of a thresholder having time to do it properly is negligible. This world would be even worse than the Great Arc, in terms of looking down on people taking “the short road to enlightenment”.
  • After all, false spirits can devour enlightened spirits, too, and steal their mandate‍ ‍—‍ it will then become a heretical mandate, corrupted of its truth but in practice no less powerful.
  • The only alternative to seeking a heretical mandate would be if the grand spell reinterprets one of the thresholders prior powers as effectually a mortal axiom, allowing them to derive corollary theses from it.
  • Or, more likely, the thresholder just has a power that energizes really well with one of the “primitive” systems.

4: Khitona (Black Nerve)

You emerge into a world where the sky above crawls with rippling black tendrils, spiraling out from a black orb staining the heavens. The forest around you has trees outnumbered by quasi‍-​fungal towers with shelf‍-​like outgrowths, and segmented pillars with “bark” like bug shells and “leaves” like wing membranes. At the edge of a clearing, a beetle the size of a deer startles, kicking off with long, powerful legs.

I made a blunder in the organization of this document. I had saved this world for last because I consider most of my worldbuilding efforts to be a rounding error next to the years I’ve poured into working and reworking Black Nerve. If the document you just endured was me fighting and losing a battle not to indulgently exposit annals of lore, what good can come of a setting where I already have a novel‍-​length worldbuilding bible, let alone the actual novels I’ve written?

But a gray lining of saving it for last is that, after fourteen worlds and ten thousand words, I am tired.

More practically, for all of Black Nerve’s richness as a setting, I’m not sure it has much worth discussing in the context of thresholder’s mercenary effort. Sure, the history of therids’ mark of betrayal or the euvespids’ paradise seal or the diamantids’ souleye makes for interesting background lore‍ ‍—‍ but what good is it if you aren’t a bug?

Black nerve is replete with magic systems unique to species, or that otherwise care intimately about your biology. The main polity of heartlands a semi‍-​democratic state called the Pantheca of All Kinds United. The sort of society that results when you have ten different kinds of bug with very different habit and diet (a few including other bugs). The sort that grapples with questions like, how do you bring democracy to a biologically monarchial species‍ ‍—‍ should you?

But it’s mostly a backdrop. Magical threats are dealt with by a disorganized collection of feuding militias called the vesperbane strongholds. It’s Naruto with praying mantis ninjas, and these vesperbanes conduct various covert sabotage and kung‍-​fu wizard operations against each other.

How do you become a vesperbane? You consume vespermala, an egg or chrysalis for magical entities called vespers, and they will either deem you a worthy host, or swiss cheese your brain with fungal stalks.

The exact criteria behind their judgments are cryptic: because, after a millennia of mantids doing their best to exploit the vespers, vespers have become quite strict about punishing bad actors and closing loopholes. Vespers want food, children, and to be used to cast beautiful spells. Logically, hosts benefit from getting the most magic for the fewest resources invested in the vespers, and vespers have the opposite class interest.

“Only mantids can become vesperbanes” is believed to be one of those strict rules that might have been easier to bend in the past,^note It arguably was bent in the past‍ ‍—‍ vesperbanes wield a stolen magic system originally granted to the vesper‍-​bats.^endnote but too many mantids tried fraud and ruined it for everyone.

But vesperbanes are a lot like Ars Longa’s dreamscribes in that their arts are emergent from three simpler systems. Two prompt interesting discussions in a thresholder context: enervate and bat‍-​blood.

The titular “black nerve” is another name for enervate. It has a few basic mechanics themed around absorption and extradimensional space, but its true range of abilities encompasses essentially anything that can be framed in terms of force equations parameterized by inputs like atomic number and enervate‍-​specific variables. Which, practically speaking, means most conventional magical effect that aren’t outright conceptual.

Consider elemental magic. Base enervate applies attraction and repulsion to all matter and enervate alike based on mass. But if you want to do some hydrokinesis, you need to synthesize a “molecule” of enervate where one term in the equation becomes large and positive when the body in question is an oxygen atom but fractional otherwise. This “filters” the force to only apply to a single element.

A sufficiently complicated force equation is indistinguishable from a magic that does anything.^note I once joked that that the power of enervate is putting linear algebra into the force equations. “Accio wand” is as simply as training a magical neural net to recognize the shape of a wand.^endnote But my multiverse is full of these sort of “wizard‍-​complete” magic systems. Like with Turing‍-​complete programming languages, what makes them different isn’t what they’re capable of, but what comes easily to them. And the default behavior of enervate…

It will kill you. It’s cold black corruption that sucks up energy and tears apart the structure of matter. In‍-​universe, it’s considered a danger, but it’s also deeply integrated into ecosystems and biology. Khitona’s bugs are far from immune to it; but you’re far from immune to disease, yet you boast complex systems for rebuffing it.

Imagine if a creature was so profoundly weak to water that exposure to any microscopic drops of it would damage their body. They come from a universe with no water all. So if they portalled to a more conventional world, they’d be in trouble should they step into a puddle or whenever it rains, sure‍ ‍—‍ but all air has humidity, tiny bits of gaseous water dispersed throughout it. Just existing in the atmosphere would erode them.

The enervate in Khitona’s atmosphere is mostly impotent to interact with matter, but motes of it are still going to lace the things you touch, everything you eat or drink.

This ties back to our earlier discussion of conservative versus integrative models of the grand spell, but the problem here is even more profound. Animals on Khitona have entirely new metabolic pathways for safely processing enervate. “Integrating” someone from another world would entail rewriting every cell in their body.

I think this suggests a different, and more profound, possibility for how portals work. You don’t go to another universe. You go into inter‍-​universal space, and you’re then reconstituted into a form fit for your next universe. Most of the time, it’s identical, baring inane philosophical questions of whether “you” surviving having every atom replaced.

But consider the fact that the Cometverse, being panpsychic, quite possibly doesn’t even have atoms. So what really happens if you enter or leave a world like that?

Well, what happens if you take a program from one operating system and try to run it on another? You can copy the bits, and if it’s a x86_64 Windows to x86_64 Linux, then all the instructions are the same, you just need to translate the system calls from one interface to another. Programs like Wine or Proton can do this on the fly.

If it’s x86 to ARM like exists in many phones, then you’d going to have to translate the binary into entirely different language. You can count on there being a mul instruction, with a slightly different op code, but some differences are sweeping.^note The sure‍-​fire way to accomplish this is through emulation. Emulation is famously slow‍ ‍—‍ but possibility of a power system being ‘emulated’ by the grand spell, and consequently weirdly nerfed in a new world, interests me.^endnote

But I’m getting lost in the weeds.

The point is, if the grand spell recompiles you, then it breaks you down conceptually, then builds you back up with reference to what’s idiomatic in the new universe. Okay, you’re human, but what does being human mean in this world? Well, humans have souls, so you’ll have a soul. Or if there’s no humans, then it has to back up to higher principles. Are there mammals? Are there muscles, and how do they work here?

This feels like a fruitful and elegant interpretation of how portals work. In fact, I’m disappointed by its power as an explanation‍ ‍—‍ it would certainly have pleased me if the thing I’m proudest of was a nightmare difficulty world where thresholders are constantly repairing their body from the assault of its fundamental physics.

Another question enervate raises is the recompilation of “mana.” There are a number of incompatible takes on how magical energy exists and functions. Most have a basic mechanics where bodies generate mana by burning calories, so we can expect that to keep working even if they hop to world with no magic at all.

Enervate is different. It’s a substance external to those who wield it, it must be absorbed from the environment, usually through a kind of respiration that condenses it from the aforementioned atmospheric enervate, though it’s more efficient to find “liquid” enervate in the environment.

This means that if a bug reliant on enervate portals to another world, we must ask: how they can acquire enervate if it’s not native to the universe?

It’s reasonable, I think, for the recompilation‍-​translation layer to extend physics in a way that essentially treats enervate as a special form of the magic latent to that world. So a vesperbane in Whalemoon world would be able to condense mana as if it were atmospheric enervate, albeit no doubt with conversion inefficiencies.

This does lead to a funny interaction where an enervate user, taken to any world where they would gain a soul, would probably also gain a roundabout enervate‍-​generation system. I don’t like that, personally, but I suppose it’s similar to how Perry gained the ability to trigger his own werewolf transformation through moon magic. It defeats the point, but those exploits are the joy of Thresholder.

Incidentally, enervate reminds me a lot of effulgence, in the sense of an “invasive” magical substance that could seriously fuck up a world it’s carelessly introduced to.

But I digress. The other interesting magic system in Khitona is the blood of vesper‍-​bats. It’s liquid mutation, a domesticated cancer that symbiotically empowers its host, diverse cell growth granting a powerful healing factor.

If enervate doesn’t kill you, bat blood might. It can mutate into a plague form to infect new hosts, and mammals and far more susceptible than any other kind of creature.

But something that can mutate to infect new creatures? That can create any sort of cell it desires?

In a multiverse full of so many different nonhuman races, it took until here to finally find a system geared toward transformation. Proper shapeshifting is a tall ask, hell, simply getting the cancer to do what you want instead of randomly (or worse, maliciously) mutating is a tall ask, just consult any vesperbane.

But the possibility is there.

The last thing worth general remark in Black Nerve is nouetics. Part of the justification for why there are so many races of giant insect with similar intelligence level is that there’s a class of seminerve neurotransmitter that can usefully accelerate cognition.

Evolving to use it hits a wall in a similar place every time, because pushing any further than human intelligence exponentially increases the risk of brain damage. Of course, you can take the risk and push it, this is how you get psychics.

Telenoia is a means of leveraging subtle enervate forces to perceive and slightly influence seminerve bodies, such as insect brains. One of the significance ramifications of this is that every insect has a baseline capacity for telenoia‍ ‍—‍ projecting intent through their eyes. It’s another communication barrier you have to work around.

(And it’s another tricky area of recompilation, because how does this interact with Gnawing Dark telepathy, or Cometverse will mechanics? Better yet, will learning telenoia be any use in a world without enervate and seminerve neurochemistry? I suppose the answer is extending enervate physics to interact with other forms of mana.)

I normally round out discussion of a world by point out the sort of conflicts a thresholder might find themselves wrapped up in. I’ve touched on the vesperbane strongholds, and any thresholder will likely be wrapped in their war games. You can imagine this world could feature a three or more thresholder in a big free‍-​for‍-​all, each aligning themselves with a different stronghold or non‍-​vesperbane/non‍-​mantis faction.

But, now that we’re at the last world, it’s worth asking the question of where thresholder stories end.

Fittingly, Black Nerve is the only setting where I’ve thought for long enough to decide a “true final boss” and a plot that gets there‍ ‍—‍ eventually!

Past or future, a long enough inquiry into Khitona and its systems will be gravitationally drawn into the machinations of the Tenebra Resonance, an entity emergent from the enervate of the moon.^note Yep, it’s a modern fantasy setting with a fucked up moon. Take a shot.^endnote

It’s worth appreciating how big moons are. Our moon is on the order of 10²² kg. If only .01% of that were enervate,^note A bit less, proportionally, than water’s mass on Earth.^endnote it’s still a ridiculous exponent when, say, vesperbanes are casting all their spells with single or double digit kilograms of enervate‍-​mass.

Even if only a tiny fraction of that is usable and ripe for things like spellcasting or computation, it’s hard to overstate the scale of entity that results.

Tenebra is the origin of all enervate on Khitona.^note The sun causes surface enervate to evaporate, the expanding cloud is drawn toward all the enervate in the atmosphere and crust of Khitona, there’s a whole geological cycle to it.^endnote The first astronomers noticed that the “song” of instruments resonating with the moon had a particular correlation with the weather, as if predicting it. “Lunar divination” of this sort was the very first magic system on Khitona‍ ‍—‍ you had to wonder what else could the Tenebra resonance predict. Or rather, why does it predict what it does?

But I digress. In broad strokes, you’ve seen it before.^note Really, I just want to play coy with the details.^endnote “Planetbusting superbeing” is the carcinzation of speculative fiction, the thing we all converge on when figuring out the ultimate escalation of stakes.

Black Nerve, for all that it’s “the bug world”, is my closest work to being a kitchen sink. There’s an uneasy balance of sticking to the core premise, and stapling on every cool idea I encounter. Mostly, I reinterpret the core premise so that the cool ideas kinda fit.^note Enervate itself slowly transformed from being just energy attenuation to arbitrary force equations, every step of the way mostly making sense.^endnote There’s an amusing parallel with the grand spell’s reconciliation process‍ ‍—‍ Black Nerve is the result of so much reconciliation.

But I’m going somewhere with this. Khitona has exclusion zones,^note Apologies to the handful of you reading this with no idea about Worth the Candle, one of my favorite stories of all time. I think reading the preface to the exclusion doc is your best bet for getting up to speed on what an EZ is.^endnote places where (often because a powerful spell went terribly awry), physics itself has been rewritten to “exclude” the out‍-​of‍-​control effect.

Imagine if finding an item duplication bug in a video game meant the devs patched it so that you could keep those items, you could even keep duplicating them, but now you can only do the duplication bug in the part of the map you first discovered the glitch, and maybe the duplicated items can’t even be taken out of that region. That’s an exclusion zone.

Worth the Candle can have exclusion zones because there’s gods and game layers and a certain amount of metaphysical fiat is just the nature of the beast. Black Nerve doesn’t have any of that‍ ‍—‍ it still cleaves to this pretense that there’s nothing but atoms and the void. I don’t like gods, and I generally prefer to minimize the power of my outcome pumps.

So, Khitona has “confinement zones,” “crepuscular interdicts,” and legally recognized “exclusion zones.” Which are defined by different processes that don’t all overlap. Formal EZ are like real‍-​life EZs (think Cherynobl), crepuscular interdicts stop the explanatory buck at vespers and their aforemention strict rule‍-​enforcement against munchkins.

Confinement zones, though, rely on that aforementioned mechanic of enervate where the force equations can be arbitrarily complicated. What is gravity but a force equation? If you have a large enough body of enervate, then it can exert planet‍-​wide influence.^note We can’t get into it, but Khitona has plenty of large enervate bodies hidden away in extradimensional space‍ ‍—‍ these are the elemental planes.^endnote

Most Worth the Candle exclusion zones exclude magic, but Blue Fields famously excluded nuclear weapons. And this is possible in Black Nerve‍ ‍—‍ simply write an equation targeting uranium that yanks it into phase space under certain conditions.

“Confinement Zones” are just equation defining a volume such that certain objects have forces applied to them at the boundary. Inside the volume, a coefficient flips sign and an otherwise suppressive equation no longer applies.

In this way, it’s possible to rewrite the physics of the world.^note Give me a large enough enervate body, and my spell will move the earth.^endnote

The reason I explained all of this, is that I think I can bring this all together to confabulate explain why enervate is particularly dangerous magic system. Remember how we proposed enervate users would work in other worlds? That physics would be extended in such a way that they could turn mana into enervate?

Except enervate allows for force equation injection. You could write an equation that catalyzes further enervate synthesis. On a world like Whalemoon, it could blanket the planet.

(And why stop there? Multiversal travel is a part of physics‍ ‍—‍ could you not inject that into the enervate equations, especially once the grand spell has opened a portal to serve as reference model?)

This, I think, suffices to portray a fitting endgame.

If a thresholder travels the multiverse, collecting magic systems, then would the final boss of thresholding not be an entity capable of traveling the multiverse under its own power, stealing, consuming or outright destroying worlds and their magic systems? Only by using everything the thresholder has collected can they stand against a threat to all existence.