Three continents. A world built on what it half-remembers — languages that no longer hold their meanings, ruins no one can explain, and a civilization that survived only in stone.
The five books move deliberately across the known world, from civilization toward origin. Each continent is a different relationship to what was lost.
The western continent — the largest, the most politically complex, and where everything begins.
Valdenmoor stretches from the warm southern coasts where the Wrenvale Isles cluster to the cold northeastern edges where the Karath Range rises into permanent cloud. Its interior is dominated by the Aldenmere Empire. To the northeast sits Vel Tharun, the seat of elvish scholarship and the Grand Linguistic Archive. The Karath Range occupies the far north — older than any other geological feature on the continent, permanently cloud-capped, warm at depths where mountains are not, responsive to speech in ways that suggest presence rather than passivity.
The void is distant here at the start of the series. Not absent. Distant. The things it touches first are the things that carry memory — mourning songs losing their verses, festival customs continuing without the words that gave them meaning. The world does not notice. It has been doing this for three thousand years.
A quiet market town in the Low Marches. Where a stone tablet surfaces in a flooded basement and everything begins.
Three days north of Ashfen. Where Thessaly Vorn teaches basic elvish grammar to merchants' children and waits to be wrong again.
The Grand Linguistic Archive. Nine hundred years of institutional authority. Four centuries of elegant mistranslation.
The northern mountains. Older than any geological record. Where Vorrath has been waiting, indistinguishable from stone, for three thousand years.
The dominant human political power. Not a dark empire. A careful one — which is more dangerous.
Southwest of the continent. The Wrenfolk homeland. Their warm stones at the low-tide mark have had a children's rhyme sung about them since before the Common Reckoning.
The body of water separating Valdenmoor from Thurak. Wider than it was in the First Age. Its name dates to the aftermath of the Collapse — not named for what it separates, but for what it marked when the world came apart.
The eastern continent — older in character, its coastlines more eroded, its interior drier and colder than Valdenmoor.
Thurak is the continent of stone records and long memory. The three great dwarven stonehalls occupy its southern regions. The orc steppes extend across the eastern interior. Everything here is older and heavier than Valdenmoor — the architecture, the silences, the things that have been known for a long time and not yet said.
The void is visible here in ways it is not in Valdenmoor. The orc shamans have been tracking it for years. The dwarves have been filing it under the wrong category for generations. The landscape carries a weight the western continent does not.
The largest of the three great stonehalls. The Hall Council. Sixty years of a name in the record with no corresponding body attached to it.
The deep-ruin capital. Below its lowest surveyed level, older Drevari ruins lie with kallite veins still faintly active. The dwarves have lived above them for centuries without knowing what they were.
The southernmost stonehall. Breck's home. The deep vaults. Where everything that has been kept too long finally becomes impossible to keep.
Mara's homeland. The shamans who were right about the void a century before anyone believed them. A half-buried Drevari ruin that Vorrath recognises immediately.
The body of water separating Thurak from Solenthar. It has a different quality to the Sunderwater — older, quieter, and crossed by far fewer ships. Most navigators who attempt it without knowing where they are going do not find the other side. The name is old enough that no one remembers who gave it.
The forgotten continent — south of both Valdenmoor and Thurak. No mortal map shows its interior.
Solenthar is not lost. It is simply not on any map that any mortal cartographer has been able to produce. The interior has been crossed — by civilizations the world forgot, by things older than the Collapse — but no surviving record describes it accurately. The company crosses it following Vorrath, who navigates by memory of a world that no longer exists in the form he remembers it.
The further south the company travels, the older and stranger everything becomes. Some ruins they pass have no architecture recognizable to any member of the company. Vorrath walks past them without slowing. He has stories about all of them. He tells none of them.
The last functioning city the company encounters before the deep interior. A reckoning point. The mid-book turn of Book IV.
Civilizations the world forgot. Some predate the Collapse. Some predate the Drevari's earliest records. Vorrath does not explain them.
The southern tip. The great origin-stone. The world at its most itself, in the place where it first became itself. Where everything has been pointing since the flooded basement.
Every piece of Drevari-built stone on all three continents is a node. Valdenmoor. Thurak. Solenthar. When the Vel-Kel is placed at Vel Andurath, every node activates simultaneously.
No mortal maps show its interior. This is not an oversight. Vel Andurath is the one place in the world that cannot be approached by anyone who does not already know how to reach it — which means, in practice, that only Vorrath can navigate to it. He does so from memory of a world that no longer exists.— Companion Volume · The Known World