I have watched this world since before it had a name, and I will tell you what it is.

Chane is one world, closed on every side, and almost all of its life is gathered into a single country: the Vale of Fingers, a broad green basin held between the cold peaks they call the Fingers and the red wastes of the south. To those born here it is not one nation among many. It is the world entire, and they are not wrong by much.

At its heart stands Crownhold, the great city on the shore of Hallowglass Lake. Its oldest quarter was raised in the Age of Song, before the breaking, and it looks like nothing built since: pale and organic, grown rather than cut, like bone coaxed into arch and vault. Those halls still hum faintly to anyone who listens, and the people say it is threadlight, caught in the stone and never let go. From that high old centre the Concordate rules, a sealed crown set beside them as a reminder of the kings who came before. But that ancient centre is only the heart of it. Crownhold long ago spilled past its old walls and spread for miles around, street on street of market and workshop and home, and into that sprawl the whole world has come. Thousands upon thousands of every people there is live here shoulder to shoulder, in the noise and trade and press of an ordinary day.

Outward the Vale runs on into farm and forest and moor, through cities and rival ports and small strange towns, down to the soldiers' forts that hold the southern passes against the Ashlands. Past its borders the world thins. It grows wider, and emptier, and stranger, and fewer and fewer go looking. I could tell you what waits in the dark out there, in places like Bandit Bay on the long road to the Lands Beyond. You would not thank me for it.

Threadlight runs through all of it, seen and unseen. A rare few can take it up and bend the world to their will; most never will, and live their whole lives certain it touches them anyway, in a harvest that holds, in a fall that should have killed and somehow did not. They are not entirely wrong about that.

The Vale looks stable, and for most it is. Crops come in. Bells ring. But the roads are less safe than they were; raiders press the south and bolder bandits the dark places, and the old comfortable certainty has begun to thin. And beneath all of it, older than any raider, there is a feeling this world has never shaken: that something is coming, that every life here is bent toward a purpose, and that no one has yet been told what it is.

I have watched a long time. I think they are right to be uneasy.

Thirteen peoples are numerous enough here that you will meet them in any town, and there are rarer ones I have not troubled to count. I have set down each of the thirteen as their neighbours know them, on Inhabitants of Chane.

There are ten ways a hero comes to exert power on this world, and only one of them owes nothing to the supernatural. What each of them is, and what it asks of the one who takes it up, is on Adventurers and Heroes.

Ten gods, real and distant, who do not answer and are heard all the same, through signs and through the Saints who carry their power down into the world. I knew them when they were nearer. Their domains and their teachings are on Gods of Chane.

Each region in its own right, and Crownhold with them, I have set down on Regions of the Vale.

The Vale counts its years from the day it set aside its king, and it counts them carefully; what came before the count it remembers less well. The count is on Timeline, and the year itself, the tenday and the holy days, on The Calendar of Chane.