I. How to read Cross
A single continent, shaped like an oblong pear, broader in the north, pinched at the waist by an inland sea, tapering south into a volcanic peninsula. Two thousand five hundred kilometres from the far north to the far south; fifteen hundred east to west on the mainland. To the west, across a hundred and fifty kilometres of water, an archipelago.
Three strokes organise it, and whoever holds them in their head knows the whole continent.
1. The spine — the mountain axis
It runs north to south, end to end. From the Kal'arn Massif in the ice of the far north, down through the Solar Range, across the alpine heart, ending in the Southern Range beneath the volcano.
The Seven Seals are cut into it. The mountain is not scenery: it is the prison. That is why the ranges of Cross are military borders, and why mining is an act of war.
2. The cut — the Sea of the Choir
It runs east to west, across the middle of the continent. Four hundred kilometres at its narrowest, nine hundred at its widest. It divides the world into a northern half and a southern one, and it is the road every trade takes.
Its south-eastern portion is the Tenebrum Sea, poisoned since 1780. The same water, with thirty years of difference between one shore and the other.
Stone one way, water the other. The continent's name comes from this — and the three irreconcilable explanations of why are in Why it is called Cross.
3. The line — the Limbus Mundi
It runs north to south, in the far east. It is not geology: it is the trail of the Archangels' wave, frozen where it was stopped in 1786.
Everything west of it is the world. Everything east of it is what was not saved.
II. Who sits where — the walk from north to south
Coming down the spine, from ice to lava:
| Where | Who | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| WhereFar north, above 62° | WhoThe Belless Land | What it istundra with nobody on it |
| WhereDeep north, fjords and taiga | WhoKÖNIGSMARK — capital Königsburg | What it isKingdom. The Kal'arn Massif is Seal V |
| WhereAlpine heart, 800-1,800 m | WhoKANTONAL CONFEDERATION — Bernkanton | What it isRepublic. 17 cantons. Every pass |
| WhereCentre-north, pre-alpine | WhoFerrum Alpina · Schola Coronata | What it isThe Order — the forge and the university |
| WhereCentre, plain and hill | WhoAURUM ROMA · Vallia Sacra | What it isThe Order — the seat of the world |
| WhereMid-sea, islands in a lagoon | WhoSERENISSIMA VELINIA | What it isRepublic. In the middle of the Sea of the Choir |
| WhereCentre-south, coast | WhoMaritima Coronata — capital Coronata | What it isThe Order — the fleet and the Chrism |
| WhereSouth, volcanic peninsula | WhoMERIDIA — capital Stromakra | What it isKingdom. The Volkar is Seal III |
III. The walk from west to east
Crossing the continent at its width, from ocean to Hell:
| Where | Who | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| WhereWestern archipelago | WhoBRYTONIA — capital Brithon | What it isKingdom. The Highlands of Caer'n are Seal VI |
| WhereThe Insular Channel, 150 km | Who— | What it isthe water no army has crossed |
| WhereWestern continental coast | Whomarches of the Order | What it isrock and haze |
| WhereCentre | Whothe Clerical Order | What it isseven States |
| WhereEast-central, plateau | WhoVYKHRADIA — capital Vykhrad | What it isKingdom. The Twilight Range is Seal II |
| WhereEast, range and valley | WhoSal Pradelica · Limes Orientalis | What it isThe Order — the front |
| WhereTHE LINE | WhoLimbus Mundi | What it isthe trail of the wave |
| WhereDeep east, steppe | WhoPACT HEPTARCHY — Karzhar | What it isseven cities, seven Princes. The Range of the Wrathful is Seal VII |
| WhereThe edge of the map | WhoPandæmonium | What it isno coordinate, and it stays that way |
IV. The seven Seals, placed
| Seal | Where | Whose ground it is |
|---|---|---|
| SealI — Solar Range | Wherecentre-north | Whose ground it isThe Order (bordering Kantonal) |
| SealII — Twilight Range | Whereeast-central | Whose ground it isVykhradia |
| SealIII — Southern Range | Wheresouth | Whose ground it isMeridia — the Volkar |
| SealIV — Open Sea | Wherebeneath the Sea of the Choir | Whose ground it isundersea. Nobody's |
| SealV — Septentrional Massif | Wheredeep north | Whose ground it isKönigsmark — schismatic |
| SealVI — Insular Archipelago | Wherethe Highlands of Caer'n | Whose ground it isBrytonia — schismatic |
| SealVII — Deep East | Wherethe deep east | Whose ground it islost. The Heptarchy |
Four of the seven sit on clerical or allied ground. Two sit on schismatic ground — and that is why the Houses of the Cold and the Insular are political fictions. One is lost, and it is the epicentre.
V. The map, era by era
1780, the eve — the world that was
The map nobody drew, because nobody thought it needed drawing.
- The east is the centre of the world. Vehrannon — the whole continent is called that — holds at its eastern edge the kingdom of Veheran, the leading power in the world, and its capital Ivandir, with six hundred thousand people: the largest city that has ever existed.
- Vladigrad, Aurinopolis and Magnaport are prosperous eastern cities, not ruins.
- There is no Limbus Mundi. There is no eastern border, because east of the east there is more world.
- Aurum Roma is an important religious capital and the centre of nothing.
- Two hundred and twenty million people. The east holds forty-eight million, nearly a quarter.
1780-1786 — the cascade
The Seals break one a year, east to west, and the map comes apart in the same direction.
VII (1780) beneath Ivandir → II (1781) → V (1782) → III (1783) → I (1784) → IV (1785) → VI (1786).
- East: no warning at all. Ivandir dies in a night. Vladigrad, Aurinopolis and Magnaport fall in three weeks — not to Seals of their own, but to the spreading outbreak of the Seventh.
- Centre: four years of warning. The Order evacuates the alpine valleys before the fissure opens. The heart of the Order is never occupied.
- West: six years of warning and less than twelve months of exposure. Brytonia suffers no land invasion at all.
The whole geopolitics of 1890 lives in these six years. Whoever got the warning is whoever rules today.
1786 — the Intervention. The Archangels come down, the wave kills everything within its radius, and where the wave stops, the line stays. Vladigrad, Aurinopolis and Magnaport are left on the wrong side, with whoever was in them.
1815, end of the Age of Ash — the new map
The first map that had to be drawn from nothing.
| What changed | How |
|---|---|
| What changedThe name | Howthe continent becomes Cross. Vehrannon stops being available |
| What changedThe centre | Howshifts from the east to Aurum Roma |
| What changedThe east | HowVeheran is extinguished by stages: Vehr Major in 1798, South-Vehr in 1813, and the crown surrendered in 1815 |
| What changedThe border | Howthe Limbus Mundi is born, and with it the doctrine that there is ground beyond the line where one does not fight |
| What changedThe seven States | HowAurelianus I defines the Order as we know it |
| What changedThe sky | Howthe High Ash cools the whole continent. −1.5 to −2 °C in summer. Red dusks for a decade |
| What changedThe population | How220 → 180 million. The east falls from 48 to 17 |
Where there was a kingdom, there is now a Heptarchy. Seven pact cities on Veherenic ruins.
1837, end of the Black Crusades — the fortified map
The drawing is the same. What changes is what was built on top of it.
- Fortress-churches rise along every mountain front. The line stops being an idea and becomes masonry.
- The Kantonal Confederation formalises itself — the Federal Pact of 1817, seventeen cantons.
- The first railway on the continent is insular, not continental: the Caer'n branch line, 1825.
- Königsmark drifts without breaking: the Council of Kronmünster of 1836 abandons obedience by disuse.
- The climate normalises. Twenty-two years of full harvests, and it is that which makes the refounding possible.
- 180 → 210 million.
1860, end of the Age of the Forge — the map that moves
The only era in which the line moves.
- Cherniwicz, 1859: the first fully industrial army arrives by rail in nine days and pushes the line two hundred kilometres east. The only permanent territorial gain in the entire canon.
- Sanctified rail covers the continent — but not Vykhradia, which refuses passage in writing that same year.
- The Cables of the Curia link Rome to every front within hours. The map begins to be read in real time, from one place.
- Soot enters the map. Manchaster, Brithon, Ferrumkar and Ferrum Alpina acquire a sky of their own.
- 210 → 250 million.
1880, end of the Age of Empire — the map at full extent
The world reaches the greatest extent it will ever have.
- The Tenebrum Sea inverts: 63% pact-held in 1860, 82% clerical by 1878, after the Fleet of the Seven Lighthouses and the Red Sails.
- Armed missions on the marches and the archipelagos — client colonies of Brytonia in the west, volcanic islands in the south, steppe in the east. Forty-eight thousand Christian dead between 1862 and 1880, and an uncounted number on the other side.
- Brytonia formalises the Schism in 1864 and Rome does not answer, because Rome depends on insular shipping.
- 250 → 296 million, and that is the peak.
1890, the Stagnation — the map that will not move
The map of 1859 is the map of 1890. Thirty-one years without a metre of change in any direction. It is the single fact that best describes the era — more than any battle, more than any conclave.
And against that, two minute and terrible alterations:
- 1887, the Retreat from Pradel: the line falls back twenty-two kilometres and nine villages are evacuated — not through combat, but because the diocese can no longer garrison the sector with purifiers. The first loss of ground to the attrition of faith.
- 1878, the last new street in Aurum Roma. The capital of the world has, in 1890, the street plan of 1878.
The cities all stop at the same time: Aurum Roma at eight hundred thousand, Manchaster at a hundred and eighty thousand, Karzhar at two hundred thousand. 296 → 300 million, and it stops.
VI. What does not change in a hundred and ten years
- The spine and the cut. Mountains north to south, the Sea of the Choir east to west. The cross of stone and water has been there since before there was anyone to see it.
- The seven Seals. Not one has been closed. Not one will be.
- The heart of the Order is never occupied — it had four years of warning and used them.
- Brytonia suffers no land invasion. A hundred and fifty kilometres of water.
- The Confederation is never invaded. The passes cost more than they are worth.
- The east is the only bloc with fewer people in 1890 than in 1780. 48 → 40 million, with a floor of 17.
- Pandæmonium has no coordinate. Three expeditions, three incompatible maps, and a cartographer of the Curia charged since 1857 with reconciling them.
VII. Seven sentences that describe the map to someone who has never seen it
- An oblong pear with a cross drawn over it: mountain from north to south, sea from east to west.
- The mountains are prisons, and that is why the borders of this world are geological.
- Hell comes up, not down — so mining is an act of war and the underground is a front.
- In the east there is a line that is not geology: it is where a salvation stopped.
- The centre of the world changed address in 1815, and the continent's name changed with it.
- In 1859 the line moved two hundred kilometres, and it has not moved since.
- Everything west of the line is the world. Everything east of it is what was not saved.