Chương 110: Emberveil

Okay everyone, before we jump into the next book I wanted to talk about a few things. First off, we've officially finished Book Three of Live at the Forum. Zeke managed to survive the biggest fight that he's been in so far (thanks almost purely to luck… if that actually is a stat) and he is hanging with the Pale Regiment in the Dead Corridor. He's taking a breather, practicing his music, reading the books he traded for, eating some food, and getting ready to head back to The MIZ with Jackie and Elnor.

Book Four is going to begin there. Actually, it will start with an interlude, but once that's finished it will start with The MIZ and with Zeke still in Frontiers. That said, the forum has been harping on him for a while now. They are trying to push him out of Frontiers because everything has become so much more dangerous. Zeke's managed to make an impressive number of enemies from the Black Teeth to the Shard Choir to the Eaters and more.

The Pale Regiment probably want to recruit him (or at least stick him in a lab somewhere and do a whole bunch of tests) and the gangs of The MIZ are going to have a few things to say about him. Even if every major faction came out of the Dead Corridor a whole lot weaker than they went in, sticking around the Deadlands feels pretty stupid.

The options for the forum are Tech Reign so he can pick up some of that John Woo gun-fu, Null Protocol so he can upgrade his equipment, or Emberveil so he can start learning about magic and maybe not being such an idiot with his class. I'm going to spoil this right now and say that Zeke is going to be headed to Emberveil. That's just where the story is taking him. He's going to meet Sophia. He's going to meet the bounty hunter who is tracking down all the people who left her for dead.

He's going to be meeting an entomologist with a unique skill set. And over the next couple of books he's going to finally start putting together a crew that can actually help him survive. BUT, before we get to all that, I need to explain a couple things. The first is that, a few weeks ago, my computer finally crapped out on me. I'd been using an old Google Chromebook from the early 2000s and it survived for way longer than it should have.

But then it decided to just shut down one day and I needed to go and get a new one. The problem was that all my notes and everything were on that computer. I'd written a BUNCH of stuff about both Emberveil and the other games in the series. The good news is that I still have a bunch of the story in my head so nothing really changed. But the bad news is that I had a ton of stuff written down and now I've got to retrace my steps and try to remember where I was going with the story.

I've mostly filled in all the holes, but I'm still doing some work. The second thing is something that I've been thinking about for a while. When I first came up with the idea for Live at the Forum, what most excited me was the idea of telling the story entirely through the lens of the forum. The best part about it was that readers who commented would effectively become characters in the story. It was supposed to give you all a sense of ownership in the story.

If I was reading something like this, I'd absolutely want to throw my own theories and terrible advice into the comments in hopes that it would get used. For the most part, that's worked out better than expected. A lot of comments have been used in the story (almost entirely verbatim) and I've had people arguing with each other and pushing back or agreeing and all that. There have even been a few comments where people came up with something that later on became an idea in the story.

I've been able to shape the story based on everyone's feedback. Reading everyone's theorycrafting has been one of my favorite parts about writing all this. At the same time, there are a couple places where I kinda fumbled stuff. There are a few times where my ideas haven't played out exactly as I hoped. The biggest one was the Guest and Binary storyline. The broad outline of the story was always going to be that way. Binary was always going to try and get Zeke trapped.

Foppery was always going to "discover" that Corva actually was a body-hopping mad man. The Blooming Witch and the Eaters were always going to be tied together through the concept of weight. All that was pretty good - if I may toot my own horn. But with Binary, I remember thinking that it might be interesting if someone eventually found a forgotten tablet that Zeke interacted with and then they'd have a man on the forum who hated Zeke and they could get information about the games.

They'd be an "inside man" for Binary to work through. Someone who could completely mess up Zeke's story. I remember writing the Guest thing, sitting back and feeling inordinately pleased with myself, going outside to have a cigarette and let my mind wander, and a question popped up in my mind. If Binary didn't actually believe that Zeke had been isekai'd into the Fracture-verse… then why would he spend his time helping someone sabotage what he thinks is just a work of fiction? More than that…

how could he actually sabotage the story. There is no way that Guest would be able to just jump into Zeke's story and be like "oh no… here's a bunch of soldiers that you didn't plan for." From Binary's perspective, the much more reasonable explanation for who Guest is is… Zeke. Once I started asking myself that question, that whole subplot kinda collapsed. I never found an answer for it that I was happy with, so it mostly faded into the background and never really emerged again. In short, I fumbled it.

The second fumble is a little… different. And it's something that I kinda want to fix moving forward. One of the goals of the story has always been to give all of you the sense that you're actually part of the forum. You're who Zeke is talking to. You're the ones suggesting ideas and arguing about why he isn't being more of a badass and pointing out inconsistencies with his story and making fun of him for screwing up so often. But there's a problem with that too. This isn't an actual fanfic.

It's an original story that is masquerading as a fanfic. If this were Cyberpunk 2077, one of you guys could tell Zeke to head over to the warehouse across from the All Food where the Maelstrom are hanging out, punch in the code 0214, and he gets a free Tyger Claws bike. You could have him head out into the Badlands and wipe out the Raffen out there and get himself Murkman's car hidden in that small overcropping.

If this were Skyrim, you could send him to a bunch of different quests, walk him through it, and boost him to obscene levels. You could have him grab some ridiculously overpowered gear, because there are easy ways to become stronger in Skyrim. If this were Legends of the Wild, you could get him to launch himself up to (spoiler) and pull out the Master Sword. But none of you can offer those suggestions because this isn't a fanfic. All the Fracture-verse games only exist inside my head.

Thus, you are all limited in the kinds of advice that you could give to Zeke because you don't know the world the way that actual players would. And that is something that I'm hoping to change. One of the ideas that I had about this story was that a commenter would eventually be able to fill the role of Primary for one of Zeke's adventures. That would have been awesome. But I can't exactly figure out how that would work.

It's hard to give you all the information since the setting only exists in my notes - that got wiped out by my computer. We're going to fix that today with me giving you enough information that maybe you all can start suggesting adventures for Zeke. I'm going to give you a broad overview of Emberveil. Obviously I have to hold some stuff back because I don't want to give anyone too many spoilers.

But I will tell you enough about the setting so that you guys can do what real fans would do, which is to argue about factions, debate questlines, come up with terrible build ideas, and tell Zeke to go somewhere I hadn't considered because you think that there's something useful hidden there. I'll point out that one of the earliest comments I got on Royal Road suggested putting an immortal phoenix in charge of a town.

At the time, I knew that Zeke would eventually make it to Emberveil and I could work that into the story. But that was three books ago and I'm not sure if they're still following this story. So, what I'm going to do is give you a basic rundown of some of the factions and some of the quests and some of what the setting is like.

My next posting date will be filled with me working through the Emberveil books and organizing the overarching story for Zeke - while also working on another project that I've got - and then we're going to start with Book Four. Below is a little bit about Emberveil. I'm going to have to keep a few things a little vague where I need to avoid spoilers, but hopefully I'll be able to give you all a bunch of info about the kind of world Zeke is entering.

Hopefully, you'll all be able to read it and know enough about the setting that you'll start arguing like you've been playing Emberveil for the past ten years. (FYI, some of it will be in note form. These things are either going to be huge set pieces that already are going to make it into the books and I don't want to give too much away, or they are things that are just background info and that you can all fill out with your own ideas. I'm not going to tell you which is which because, again, spoilers.) (Actually… I will say right now that the Whale Fall is going to be a big set piece.) Emberveil Okay, the biggest difference between Frontiers and Emberveil is the state of the world. Frontiers takes place after civilization has already collapsed. The Deadlands have been dead for YEARS and everyone knows it and the whole story of Frontiers is about how your character survives among the ruins of the previous world. Emberveil is the opposite. Civilization is still standing. Governments still exist. Kinda.

Cities still have electricity. Business still open and schools still teach and people still complain about traffic and life continues because everyone desperately wants to believe that things are normal. At least… that's what Emberveil was like in the games. Here's the thing. Nobody knows when Zeke is going to get there. Is he going to get there at the beginning of the game where the Fracture had happened recently and things were just starting to collapse?

Is he going there after the whole of Emberveil where there was a new normal that everyone was trying to come to terms with? That's a big question that the forum is going to be arguing about. In the original Emberveil, the Fracture happened and magic started to creep back into the world. * New things were happening. A neighborhood woke up to discover that one of the young children could start fires with their mind. An apartment complex developed a floor that wasn't there yesterday.

It was all incredibly creepy and unsettling for EVERYONE. *The Fracture in Emberveil was caused by the death of three brothers who were "immortal." I haven't decided yet whether the forum is going to give Zeke all the answers or not. Just know that three brothers died and that's what set off the Fracture and had magic creeping back into the world. At the start of the game, nobody could agree on what was happening.

Governments blamed it on weird storms, scientists kept throwing out complicated science jargony words, religious groups started calling it the end of days, and conspiracy nuts started braying about how they were right all along. Nobody wanted to say that it was magic. But it was magic. Let's be honest. Magic was a thing now. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

The Hearth This was one of the central mysteries of the game, and one that hasn't been completely solved yet. The game starts with your player character heading to The Hearth for a job interview. Think of The Hearth as something akin to "The Oldest House" from Control. Nobody knows who built the Hearth because, as far as history is concerned, nobody ever did. It just exists. It has always existed. It will always exist. There are paintings you can find in the game from thousands of years ago that depict The Hearth.

It's been a palace, a monastery, an orphanage, a merchant house, a fortress, a noble estate, a Royal Exchange, and several other things. Currently (or at least at the start of Emberveil) it is posing as an old apartment building with a greenhouse at the very top. It is somewhat similar to the House of Seasons in that it is a structure that is much more magical than it appears. Nobody has ever successfully mapped it. Rooms move and hallways relocate and staircases lead off to random areas.

Doors sometimes open up into different parts of the map (which is the game's version of fast travel.) The Hearth isn't haunted and it isn't cursed… it's just the Hearth. Player characters have a strange relationship with the building. The Hearth doesn't really mess with them, and it serves as somewhat of a base where they can hang around and solve a few of its mysteries. The question for the forum is going to be: is Zeke a player character? Should he try to head into the Hearth? It's dangerous.

The Player Character doesn't get lost in The Hearth. It's like it has chosen him. But has it chosen Zeke? If he heads into The Hearth, there is the possibility that it lets him walk its halls for what feels like an hour and then he just doesn't come out until three years have passed. The important thing with The Hearth is: magic existed inside The Hearth long before the Fracture. Magic This is why people are pushing for Zeke to head to Emberveil. It is the setting with the most magic.

I think that I've written this elsewhere, but I will reiterate it now. There are rules to magic. Let's use mana just as a place word. Every person has a set amount of mana. For humans, it's something like 10 mana. That's all the mana that is in their body. If a human wanted to throw a fireball at someone, that is a spell that costs 10 mana. You'd think "perfect, I've got 10 mana in my body and I can throw a fireball at someone." You'd be wrong and you'd be dead. A body needs mana.

If a human threw 10 mana, then their body would shrivel up and die before the fire left their hands. But what about someone who isn't human? A fairy might have something like 100 mana. They could throw a ton of fireballs at people, because they are inherently magical. The best way to think about it is mana batteries and mana conductors. A human is garbage as a mana battery. They just don't hold enough. A fairy is AMAZING as a mana battery and they hold a ton of it. So then how does a Human use magic?

While they are horrible batteries, they are absolutely amazing at pulling mana from their surroundings. Let's say that a human was in the middle of the forest and they wanted to use the mana from the forest to create a fireball. They would need something like 11 or 12 mana total (because it's ambient mana there's always going to be some loss when pulling from that instead of your own body) and they would shape that mana into a fireball and throw it.

A fairy, meanwhile, is absolutely horrible at shaping ambient mana. A fairy could throw something like 8 fireballs without becoming weakened. But if they tried to shape the ambient mana from a forest, they would need 18 or 19 mana for the same spell. So, the biggest limitation for Humans wielding magic is mana. They just don't produce very much of it, so early magical research is dominated by one question: how do we get more. The answers people come up with range from ingenious to absolutely horrifying.

Some researchers develop intricate brass puzzle boxes that slowly absorb the mental effort spent solving them. Every twist and turn and failed attempt and breakthrough leaves behind a tiny reserve of mana that soaks into the box. You work it long enough, and you get about 15 mana points in that puzzle box that you can use at a later date. Or how about magic wands?

You find a piece of wood, you start storing a bit of mana in it (small bits) and you carve glyphs into it and BOOM, you've got a single use stick that fires off lightning or flames or light. Other people choose a much darker path and this is where I'm not going to go into too much detail because I have a really interesting part of the story here. I'm just going to say that… fairy's have a lot of mana in their bones. The World and Creatures You've already seen what Sophia has been dealing with.

She's currently in Emberveil. When magic leaked back into the world it changed everything, not just humans. One of the earliest regions that players can go to is a forest that became self-aware. It didn't happen overnight. At first, the forest only influenced a handful of animals that wandered into one particular clearing. Predators and prey all started acting weirdly in the forest, and whatever entity that was there started learning from them.

Its consciousness spread throughout the roots, the streams, the fungi, and the entirety of the ecosystem until it became aware of everything that was happening within its borders. It watched logging crews cut down ancient trees. It watched hunters kill its animals. It watched roads being carved through its body. And it decided to defend itself. There are magical creatures. There are urban legends. There are fairies and minotaurs and demons and a whole host of animals that have become warped by the return of magic.

Zeke is going to have to deal with these. Vampires and Necromancers I will say that Vampires are very real in Emberveil but they aren't exactly what you're thinking. They're blood mages who discovered that mana can be stored inside living tissue. Remember how I said the main question about magic was "how do we get more mana?" Well… vampires have solved that. They strengthen themselves by stealing blood from other spellcasters, increasing the amount of magical energy their own bodies can contain.

Naturally, this hasn't made them very popular. Necromancy - not animancy - is another form of magic that is popular in Emberveil. Animancy was about moving the soul to other vessels. Necromancy is about reanimating dead flesh. A big thing that early necromancers are obsessed with is residual mana left inside dead creatures. I don't want to get too deep into necromancy because that's going to be a thing in the story. I will just say "Bear Witness!"

And there is a necromancer called Alan Hush who is going to play a part in the story. He's got a laboratory, a bunch of alligators, and a black ooze that creeps along the ground and latches onto victims and pours itself into every orifice and wraps itself around the body of its victim, strangling and choking them until they die. And it then puppets the body back to Alan so he can use the decomposing body in his experiments. Godsbone Reef Speaking about Alan Hush… he's the owner of Godsbone Reef.

It's an enormous magical whale that died and its corpse ended up on the coastline where it slowly began to decompose. Instead of fading away, the immense amount of mana trapped inside the carcass pooled together and created an expanding region of corrupted magical growth. Creatures fed upon the corpse and they changed and… I'm not going to say anything more. Living Stories These are some of my favorite things in Emberveil and, again, I don't want to really tell you everything.

I'm just going to say that when magic leaked back into the world, it didn't just morph people and animals. It also, somehow, grafted onto urban legends. Ghost stories became real because enough people believed them. Every culture accidentally created monsters over the centuries, and now those stories have somewhere to exist. These are the Living Stories and they are some of the most memorable encounters in the game. Somewhat similar to the Living Stories are the Houseborn.

I told you about the fact that The Hearth had magic before the Fracture caused magic to come back to the world. Which meant they had creatures that existed because of magic. And when the Fracture happened, things wandered from The Hearth out into the larger world. Some of the quests that you can take from The Hearth are to track down the Houseborn and either kill them or bring them back to The Hearth where they are locked up again.

Factions There are several different factions - just like the Shard Choir and the Black Teeth and the like. You've got Parliament which is a bunch of ancient noble families - all wealthy and good breeding - who see magic as dangerous to their social positions. If there are magic users who can suddenly wipe out entire nations, then what does that mean for their families who have been in power across generations? The Open Hand is an organization that is more democratic in their approach. Democratic and anarchic.

They believe that magic belongs to everyone. They're volunteer mages, teachers, researchers, and idealists who freely share their discoveries with the public. They're also responsible for roughly half the magical accidents in the setting. There are bounty hunter guilds, magical universities that are trying to treat magic like a science, independent researchers, monster hunters, artifact collectors, occult corporations, and enough competing interests that no single group can keep control for very long.

The Between Bazaar This is an actual set piece that is going to be home to a few quests. Deep in a valley that is snug between two ridges, there is an old stone wall and a creek and an unpaved road. Pilgrims visit the valley in the days leading up to a full moon. They gather around and set up tents and prepare, because as soon as the full moon rises… a bazaar appears.

Think the old school Turkish bazaar where everything is half covered and there are spices and strange artifacts and magical lamps being sold by dodgy traders. Nobody has successfully mapped the Between Bazaar because its streets rearrange themselves. At its center sits an ancient stone well where a silent figure answers exactly ONE question for anyone willing to ask. Obviously, the forum is going to try and get him to speak with the man. There is a quest in the games about a merchant who specializes in moths.

This is another one of those quests that nobody has ever really figured out the true answer to. Is the guy just selling legit moths? Are the moths magical? He does send the player out to find one specific, completely unremarkable moth. And when players come back with it, the merchant pays an inordinate amount of money to the player. Nobody knows if it is an elaborate joke or one of the deepest secrets in the game. There's also the Lost and Found auction where abandoned possessions are sold to the highest bidder.

The possessions are abandoned because, if you stay in the bazaar past the time the moon sets, it disappears and you disappear with it. Mourne Hall and the Harrodean Inheritance I'm not going to say much about this place except that I already have the song picked out for the chapter. https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=x3G1I_9DPf4&list=PLRX3mfsNNbMchjIj3AncrVZzWFp818d4h The Main Story The overall story of Emberveil is about deciding which vision of the future deserves to survive.

There are monsters and creatures and factions and cities and towns and they're all trying to survive and they're all trying to shape the future. Everybody offers a different answer to the same question: now that magic has returned, what should humanity become? The player character gets to strengthen some groups and weaken others and permanently reshape the political landscape around The Hearth. Eventually, you start to uncover the truth behind the Fracture and how magic started coming back into the world.

I'm a little iffy about whether I should actually tell you all that or save it. I will say that there were three "immortal" brothers who weren't as immortal as they thought. I will also say that the canonical ending of the game - which fans have been arguing about for years - has the player becoming the new Caretaker of The Hearth.

Rather than saving the world in the traditional sense, you inherit responsibility for the single strangest place in the setting, and spend the entirety of the game balancing the ambitions of every magical faction that suddenly wants your attention. The Cipher This is the mystery in Emberveil. While Zeke discovered the House of Seasons pacifist ending and he learned about Corva, and he uncovered the Rank 11 Skill for Pathfinding, those were mysteries that nobody even knew existed. The Cipher is NOT that.

It's a personal journal found in The Hearth, written in a code that nobody has managed to solve. Players have spent years trying to crack it, building spreadsheets and translating symbols and inventing incredibly ridiculous theories. Nobody has managed to figure out what it is and if Zeke somehow walks into Emberveil and manages to solve The Cipher before the forum does, he becomes a living god on the forum. So… that's about it as far as what I want to tell you all.

I will say that there's going to be some ocean vessels leading to Emberveil. There's going to be the answer of what happens when a character tries to get to Emberveil from Frontiers. There's going to be kaiju and urban legends and creepy monsters and a whole bunch of magic. There are going to be people freaked out that magic is returning to the world, and they're going to look at a man who can change things through the power of music and they're going to be even more terrified/concerned/violent towards him.

What do you all think?