Glossary
The language of the world, kept honest.
This glossary is a record of the language we use. In pre-production, words carry weight — a term that drifts in one document will pull the others with it. These are the terms that survive.
Terms
- Anchor / Reed / Mid-Point
- The three settings of the single body-shape slider that determines a Mote's presence. The Anchor is broad, stout, and low of center — the weight-bearing end of the spectrum. The Reed is slender, tapered, and rigidly upright. Mid-Point is the balanced default. It is the same body at every setting; only the distribution of weight changes. All three share the same faceted glass construction, and the internal light of Heart and Mind reads consistently across the range.
- Dawnwash
- The in-world phenomenon of the emberline crossing a region at dawn. Honey-gold light washes horizon to horizon as night yields and the lanterns of a settlement extinguish one by one. Dawnwash is the quieter of the two terminator events — the world returning to its daylit faceted clarity, the Veil receding, the sky resolving from indigo to parchment. Its timing at any latitude is derived from the World Clock, so every player who arrives at a region at its dawn sees the same light.
- Duskfall
- The reverse of Dawnwash. The emberline carries night across a region, and the Lanternchain kindles in its wake. From altitude, an observer can watch Duskfall roll across a continent as a moving band of ignition — every hearth, roadside lantern, and watchpost brazier lighting in sequence as the terminator reaches it. Duskfall is where the game's night loop begins: the moment after which what moves across the land is not always what you want to meet.
- Emberline
- The planet’s terminator — the seam between day and night — rendered as a slow, continuous line of ember-colored light that sweeps forever across the surface. Sunrise on the eastern edge of a continent, sunset on the western coast, always somewhere, always moving. The Emberline is the game’s signature visual and the rhythm the world runs on. Its position is derived from the World Clock, not from a local simulation, so every player sees the same dawn reaching the same longitude at the same moment.
- Heart
- A Mote's Lineage, expressed as a glow in the chest carried forward from the Mote’s origin. Three Hearts: Hearth-born (Ember Orange), Tide-born (Aqua Glow), Veil-born (Amethyst Smoke). The Heart is one half of every Mote's identity — paired with a Mind, it forms the visible character of the player. The chest glow reads through the faceted glass of the body from a distance, which is how players recognize Lineage in play.
- Lanternchain
- The visible network of settlement and roadside lanterns that lights at Duskfall and holds through the night. Viewed from altitude, civilization reads as a second, brighter emberline across the dark hemisphere of the planet. The Lanternchain is the second emberline — the line humanity holds after the first one leaves. Every lit point is a choice someone made to settle a stretch of ground and keep it lit through dark hours.
- Mind
- A Mote's Vocation, expressed as a glow in the head. Three Minds: Mason (Heavy, Lantern Gold), Sentinel (Caster, Pale Silver), Strider (Agile, Forest Green). Where the Heart carries origin, the Mind carries calling. Heart and Mind blend smoothly from crown to sternum on each Mote, forming a two-color gradient that is the whole of identity — one gradient, two colors, lit from within.
- Moon-gates
- Ritual structures that only activate during specific lunar phases. A moon-gate is dormant most nights; on the correct phase, its sacred geometry comes alive and the gate opens — or reveals — what it is carved to show. Moon-gates are where the World Clock's astronomical simulation becomes a gameplay surface: players who read the calendar arrive on the right night, and the rest arrive later or not at all.
- Mote
- A player character. A universal humanoid carved from faceted, semi-translucent frosted dark glass. Featureless. Lit from within by two colors — a Heart in the chest, a Mind at the crown — that blend smoothly between them. Identity is a Heart × Mind matrix: three Hearts, three Minds, nine visible combinations. The head, hands, and feet are solid blocks; the body's proportions move along a single slider between the Anchor and the Reed.
- Sacred geometry
- The latent mathematical pattern of the world. It is most visible in ruins, around relics, in moonlight, and in night fog — the world revealing a little of its underlying math only at certain times, from certain angles, under certain weather. Expressed through radial symmetry, concentric rings, and polygonal ornament carved into stone. The ceremonial architecture of the civilizations who came before is where sacred geometry reads most clearly.
- Veil
- The night-fog geometry that resolves only in moonlight. The Veil is invisible during the day and intangible at most hours of the night; under the right lunar phase it becomes visible as a spectral layer of geometry laid over the landscape. Veil-born Motes trace their origin to a moment when the Veil opened where they were — a moon-gate activating, a canyon filling with geometric fog, a ruin interior catching spectral light.
- World Clock
- The one authoritative UTC clock shared across every player. It drives sun angle, moon phase, tide height, terminator position, and lantern state. There are no local instances and no regional offsets — time is a singular, universal constant. This is what makes the single-shard claim real: when it is dusk where you are and dawn on the other side of the continent, other players are waking up there, on the same clock as you.