Change potatoes to yams and pay attention to culinary stuff more generally.
Mess around with space engine for logistical purposes. Also Sirius A seems like a viable target.
I'm thinking the first settlement was a mining town, so some details should reflect that.
Give the ice-beasts red eyes, and make the bermtrees gold.
Cat beast --> dog beast in case I forget (best to just search for "cat")
Something at the top of the ice stair should be emitting a large amount of heat. This plus the stair:s cold would hint towards it's artificial origin.
Eternal cold, not endless cold.
Maybe replace wildcats with wolves as well.
Aphelion? That space term never comes up in the story, and most of the others are either plot-heavy or too obvious.
The Skyhome term for Cavitation should be Shrink rather than Collapsing, so the dream line is more prevalent.
Both mentions of the key artifacts where one is used should use the snake one.
Consistent capitalization in general -- a big problem in OWL too.
Turn all instances of lions into dogs, or Canids. Just makes more sense with the climax and reinforces their appearances as well.
Don't explicitly show the windworlds turning blue in the chaoa scene -- it's a better reveal later.
Auarni doesn't know that he found the heart-torch, it's dark out.
Foreshadow Avont:s character arc more -- more thinking or whatever. Obviously the increased questioning is good stuff.
The worlds at the very beginning should show red flashes with animals in them somehow.
Foreshadow the ice tunnels somehow when Six says she has to choose her words carefully. Like that is just crazy improbable otherwise.
Elena should hint a bit on how the goldroom works when introduced or during requests. And have a better reason for keeping it secret.
The backpack should be ripped away and go into the goldroom, explaining all the missing powers.
Not sure why I'm calling it the master gem now. Be careful if I make edits.
Are there beds in the goldroom? If so, Six should sit on one of those instead and Elena wouldn't need to craft something for her.
The verbatim quote, make it Stellos and stick it in that section.
Give the ice tunnels some kind of garden of forking paths reference.
That first pipe room (near the sea) can't possibly be bigger than a collosal. The Sea itself, sure.
Ink-armor, not Ink-suits, across the board.
Ditch the "I won't spoil how light works" thing via Six unless there *is* some crazy answer.
Add a dog into one of the bestiary lists -- the earlier the better. A canid specifically.
Make various djinni numbers have scientific basis -- like the goldroom revolutions are 6pi. Units of pi definitely make sense because of the dream quote
Consistent capitalization of Time-dream. And Ink-armor for that matter, and I guess anything with a dash.
The position of Stellos and Deutera doesnt make any goddamn sense. Hmm, maybe it does. Deutera should point straight up at Stellos high in the sky.
Logistics and timelines of the Void trip -- windworlds for example. Packing a backpack full of four days of wind makes no sense. Also I don't like Auarni dropping his artifacts.
Six should refer to the pipe as a creek in every single case.
Remove the bit about Elena not knowing why she's on this journey and reinforce her friendsjop with Sabrina / convincing Six to stay more
Djinn and djinni, obviously, as well as Colossal/Colossus and goldworld/goldroom. I think I'll just stick with goldroom.
And djinn pronouns need a proofread.
Put a red fog in the master gem, and perhaps the Cavitation event as well.
The ancestors need to repeat their messages until the vision ends so it helps commit it to memory. Just need one reference here.
Naga Amy and the lion should speak in meter.
The blank book catalogues the entire Library (which unbeknownst to Auarni means the doors as well), not all other books.
Mention something about the mad stair woman during the long pit journey.
The Centroid as a room from a previous world no longer makes sense -- though the asteroid is a previous world in some sense (see: dream speak) or it could just be telephone game. But better foreshadowing (and all later references) is in order I think.
Look carefully at legends/prophecies/etc too for plot hole foreshadowing. Telephony is a perfectly acceptable explanation though, maybe just color the details differently.
They should explore the ice tunnels a bit more just to see the crazy scope of them.
"I saw", not "we saw". A big problem. Also different rules with sage obviously.
How is the water stair illuminated when the goldroom breaks?
Ancestral metal, not ancestor metal.
Give the minotaur some HoL reference, possibly the phrase "strike through" somehow. I can't do red because that serves a different purpose.
*. Need to reread piranesi and insert a subtle reference there as well -- the statue room makes some amount of sense
When Auarni thinks he'll never see the enclave again, Avont should mention that humans are a hardy people.
Amy *can* eat soup every two days but doesn't prefer it.
Errant "goldbox" as well. Should be goldroom across the board.
The Cavitation is essentially the asteroid collapsing in on itself. There's a kind of centralized controllable black hole that's producing this runaway gravitation, as well as other weird effects -- mutations in the humanoid monsters or whatever, the madness of the humans. Obviously it still leans more on the magic side in a lovecraftian sense.
There's a dedicated room that can fix all of these problems, as well as create worlds and whatnot (I guess they're pocket dimensions or whatever). Again, leans more towards hard fantasy rather than soft science fiction. Still needs work.
The djinni were *clearly* genetically designed for work in space. The blue sheen is a consequence of skin that efficiently reflects UV. They're overly precise and technologically minded for a reason. Also explains the extra limbs.
I'm still not sure how the Divinators fit into this, but they feel incredibly important to the overall thrust of the story. Same deal with the Blank Book, Blade of Piercing Might, and so on.
Divinators are evidently based close to the centroid now. I have two vague ideas of what they might be. Evidently they have a town near a knoll and creek.
I have a sense that the three will need to explore the worlds within the centroid to some extent or something -- would definitely ramp up the eldritch horror here.
Something about this is related to the Veil as well -- time-wobbly stuff that allows for divination though what passes through is riddle-like and rhyming for one reason or another. Perhaps the Ancestors themselves are literally here, trapped in timeless space. This seems likely since divination doesn't work in the goldrlom
If the asteroid is on an approach to the star system it's been flung towards, then maintaining the course would be pretty important, whether the Divinators know it or not.
The Divinators are some kind of third race designed to keep the path intact via visions obtained from the centroid, though like obviously the centroid is leaking and causing all kinds of weird eldritch issues. They can remote project into doors via hand-wavy sci-fi/fantasy.
The artifacts are *incredibly* important to solving the centroid -- I'm not sure how just yet. They're like scattered key fragments or something.
The centroid is perhaps also referred to as the "dreamer". Sabrina uses it as a "Time-dream".
Need one of these before I can even construct some kind of outline.
The vent is full of machinery, and is kind of a mixture of a natural volcano and an exhaust vent for ion thrust. It's very hot obviously. I'm thinking the various peaks fire in sequence and the activity might literally be seismic in nature, or utilize it. So that would imply that they narrowly miss an eruption, with some kind of caldera leading to something more like an *actual* pit.
The pit itself goes through gems that have formed under pressure, and sort of manmade as well -- that's why they're "the latest". and lots and lots of general machinery. It has two sets of staircases going down with occasional landings, and these look out through a glass into where the eruptions come from.
The centroid is "leaking", causing cavitation, madness, etc but also adding a red sheen to the volcanic thrust which is literally just deuterium (so there's no need to change that section). The shifting red fog from the centroid causes spatial disturbances which allowed for finding the road, as well as the mountains tesseracting back more generally.
The Divinator area has its own giant cluster of rooms though there's a lot more machinery. These rooms are isolated and have walls made of the same substance as the rectangle/blade. There's a knoll and creek in here.
I'm thinking the tan pools are coolant tanks -- gigantic megastructures that run perfectly straight for miles. And the giant engine would be present as well with tanks of coolant and deuterium running towards it -- Five would describe a lot of this if I can find something to rhyme with "deuterium".
The centroid can just stay this mysterious eldritch thing that's neither magic nor science and freely abuses both.
The centroid was originally a controllable black hole that gave the asteroid earthlike gravity. Experimenting with additional spatial/temporal stuff, however, caused it to take on a life of its own and leak out in various ways -- the fragile gravity being enough to collapse rooms and shrink others, fucking with spatiality at the red mountain, giving the cleft an impenetrable barrier, etc. also causing madness and mutations.
Both the Ancestors and Divinators are a third race created to utilize the spatial/temporal effects of the centroid, but they've been swallowed up by it instead, losing corporality altogether and speaking largely in dream-speak. Similar things happened to the monsters, and ice beasts were once dogs or something. Sort of a spiritual successor to OWL I guess. They can be corporeal for limited amounts of time.
This race has been tugging on temporal and spatial threads to bring gold/black/blue where they need to go and this is how the Staff works as well. The weird names are just dialectical differences, hinted at via the "Vase" stuff in the split part of the world.
The Nine Means form a key that tugs on centroid threads -- the fact that there's a snake and lion included isn't an accident -- those exact scenes are revisited, along with henrooms and Order of Nullity and Elena stuff -- I'm not sure exactly how this plays out. The heart torch forms an energy source that pairs to the holder of the key themselves, the blank book discerns the Dream, the living rope has that vaguely sentient component kin to ancestors/seers, the vase has a spatial connection and the orb a means of controlling it, the lathe just pierces through various eldritch barriers. The staff is temporal.
I think there should be something like an epic poem when they enter the centroid since dream-speak is a literal phenomenon associated with the centroid. No need to rhyme every other syllable though.
It takes eight hands to hold the Key -- covered by gold, black and blue. One for each artifact with the center being the orb or whatever. Two on each spatial axis and two on the temporal one. I guess the two temporal artifacts would be along that axis -- perhaps the book and definitely the staff. Gold is temporal, blue orthogonal and black vertical. There's some indicator of this visually, possibly in an eldritch tesseracting way that sees all four axises at once. I could edit the artifacts to have their respective colors earlier in the book. The blank book would represent the past and the staff the future.
The artifacts, all three people and writs both old and new (dream speak or whatever) merge into a single centroidian entity.
What looked like the pit is instead the walls of the caldera of an active volcano, which has been *heavily* set up with machinery to concentrate deuterium thrust, though the centroid messes with this a bit and makes it appear red and have other eldritch effects.
Out in the area of molten rock sits a kind of tube that passes down (the pit) with twin staircases for man and djinn and a glasslike enclosure for the occasional thrust, which is powerful enough to create lava and form gems over time. There's air present down here thankfully.
This long staircase has occasional landings with mysterious machinery where they make camp, as well as the occasional golden elevator. It goes down pretty deep, requiring multiple days of travel.
At the base is an engine supplied deuterium and tannish coolant.
Some runes inserted into the blank book describe this whole process (Five) and how the mountains fire in a cycle and tell the travelers to follow the coolant.
After a rather long journey, it splits off in two directions-- a creek and whatever other chemicals are added to the coolant, which form a knoll. There's also a town here.
The town is where the Divinators and Ancestors used to live, so there's a lot of lore around how they disappeared into the centroid, probably given by Six who's been stuck in their fleshy form for some time.
Six leads them to the Lake which has the occasonal red popping here and there.
This whole area is gigantic and framed by an ice chunk, which is related somehow to the dangerous rooms, explaining their coldness and also how they're expanding while the others are shrinking.
The centroid itself is at the very bottom of the lake, powering it and everything else as well, but it's leaking.
There is another kind of pit that goes to it -- another glasslike enclosure. Along the way they'll see red popping which shows rain going into rooms and same deal with wind for air bubbles. As they descend the red popping becomes more numerous, though this takes a while.
Near the ice layer, the way is flooded and they have to find a way to use the machinery here to move it out, and encounter giant dangerous fish in the process, nearly injuring one of them, but damaging the goldroom instead -- it sort of reveals how it works, or Elena finally does. I'm thinking maybe the fish are attracted to the spatial disturbance because they feed on the ones outside, growing larger. Red pops had cracked the glass of the pit or something.
Deeper down, they encounter something similar with the ice layer -- persistent red portals to rooms of eternal ice, a pack of ice beasts and the pit kind of part of these icy areas. More injuries, this time almost fatal.
Deeper still, light itself begins to fail and something about this area explains both the rooms of dark/the abysses and the world-bearing plants. Perhaps they're so close to the centroid that worlds are forming on their own, or *negative* worlds (abysses) and they're both going into the dark. These various processes are also causing the Cavitation, which I'm fuzzy on how that works but maybe it doesn't matter -- the portals to dangerous rooms are definitely leaks though.
Centroid stuff
I'm still quite fuzzy on the appearance of the thing, but red is definitely involved somewhere and it has black hole vibes as well since that was its original purpose. It's also ostensibly a master gem in itself, though quite large. Perhaps there's gems around it that are half molten and red pulses shoot back up or something and circle it in the way black holes have a ring, but then arc out in unpredictable ways. Regardless it should be quite spectacular. Gloom and madness emanating from it as well, which explains a few things.
They can hear the Seers and Ancestors directly here -- they've become trapped within the centroid and can only materialize briefly or in Divination, and are stuck in the dream-speak it causes them to make.
Entering it requires the Artifact key and all three people -- I've described this at length. Not sure on the details.
At this point, when the three and the Means fuse into Sage (the color! But I like the pun) and enter the centroid, the book gets quite crazy and instead of description, narrative and dialogue it turns into a long epic poem.
Dream Stuff
Sage is sort of timeless in here and sees things like the breeding of the djinn, setting the asteroid/generation ship on its path, as well as future events like the asteroid slowing down on its approach to a new planet, etc.
They also control the Divinators and set them on their own journey in various ways, carving a permanent library and whatnot.
Obviously the goal is to control the centroid and get it to stop its Cavitation and other effects. I'm not sure how they accomplish this -- I'll have more details when I get here.
Ending
Things are made right, monsters become human again, ice beasts turn back into dogs, the Ancestors and Seers are free, etc.
They visit their old parts of the world and whatnot (new master gems set up to link the centroid to their respective areas) and it probably ends with the asteroid around the new planet and everyone going to it and stuff.
As mentioned, this whole segment is written in the form of an epic poem -- some internal rhyme but ending rhymes are more important so I can actually write the same thing.
It starts out by describing the past and future. The past is earth and capturing the asteroid as a kind of generation ship, breeding djinni for external maintenance or whatever (resisting the UV light of Stellos)
The plumes accelerate in one direction and then decelerate the other way. They're still a few hundred years out from their destination, but the clear future is a new world around a blue sun.
The centroid itself is a black hole and this gets revealed somehow -- useful for normal gravity in an asteroid, but it gets pretty weird in an eldritch way and both ancestors and their bred Divinators in particular learn to work with it and its temporal effects.
The other doom is shown -- the centroid leaks getting *worse* and the asteroid fragmenting apart.
Sage reaches through time and changes small things to fix its malicious leaks somehow. Not sure on all the details here. All the doors open up, break apart, water is distributed, whatever -- maybe the goal is to create a new version of the world (which would be pretty neat since it fits into the whole "make new worlds" thing), but the overall end result of this would be terminating the centroid and all the magic of the world, which frees the ancestors and monsters and whatnot too.
Ending
They're still hundreds of years out from the destination, so the new world isn't the ending, however the inside of the asteroid has *fundamentally* changed, and the ancestors/etc are now free, as well as Sabrina/etc so this book might actually have a proper ending.
Obviously without the centroid, Sage splits back into physical items (no magic) and Auarni/Avont/Elena so they get separate sendoffs. Idk what any of their endings are.
I like the idea of a bookends ending where Six/Amy discusses soup at the eatery or whatever.
It feels like there's a much deeper section here even beyond the Cavitation and the future doom. I'm going to try to figure out what the hell it is. The other plot threads for the climax/ending should be solid however.
My first thought is that Sage hasn't fully entered it. Even with Dream-speak and time movement, things are *way* too normal. So the explanation there is that the Ancestors don't want to cross all the way into dream because of the doom it spells. Instead, this whole thing has been about getting Sage in there around the periphery to help them.
Obviously, the Avont side of Sage is going to come out the most here. And Auarni's primary goal here as well and his conflict between following the Ancestors out of faith and joining Avont's side. And Elena's for that matter, with Sabrina and Six.
This thing is eldritch as shit -- that's been consistently established. The Ancestors and Divinators are *using* it but they don't have control over it, and it *wants* to be born.
