Fauna lore r6 sweep: the pillar wall is a steepening ramp (ruling pillar-wall-steepening-ramp)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Adrasteia Space.md

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+**"You can know you've been to the Ink. You can't know where you were."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r3, 2026-10-14, revised r4, r5 and r6, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]], with its own map, reached by links; Adrasteia's foothold. Developed from the operator's sketch: "a liquid grid, with light eating fog overhead and all around and stars that connect to a pillar of glowing nebula, expelling waves of stardust and creating empty pockets with their pressure. The things that live in those inky clouds accumulate that negent dust, very dangerous beasties." Spacers call it **the Ink**. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Canon this note keeps: negent needs a configuration of strange matter encountered only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace; only Adrasteia makes the charged form; its supplier's location is unknown. Ruled: strange matter is not made by life (`strange-matter-not-biogenic`); the pillars are what the Ink has instead of suns, shaping each zone and cradling life around them (`ink-pillars-are-suns`); ships feel each beat's swell, and the Ink need not keep flatspace's gravity (`ships-feel-swell`; the ring-tin shape below develops the operator's sketch and is not decided); a pillar is an unclimbable wall as big around as a large sun, and nothing stands on or in one (`pillar-is-a-wall`); its wall is a ramp that keeps steepening, and a bounce feels as hard as the ship is fast (`pillar-wall-steepening-ramp`); no natural pillar stands in flatspace (`pillars-not-in-flatspace`); pairs are rare (`pillar-pairs-rare`); the Ink as someone's held reality stays a spacer theory (`ink-held-reality-theory`). Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r6]].
+
+#### What It Looks Like
+
+Come through an Adrasteian gate and for a moment you think the gate has failed, because there is nothing but dark. You are in the **bank**: the floor of a great ring-shaped valley, deep in a cloud of settled dust so thick the running lamps light only the motes in front of them. Your Adrasteian pilot does not move. On one side the dark is not quite dark. Look that way and the fog is lit from behind, a grey glow that runs from the floor up past where you can see and to left and right past where you can turn, as if half the sky were a lamp behind a curtain. That is the pillar. You will never see more of it than that from here, and nobody has seen its top.
+
+The pilot waits. The glow brightens; a while later a swell comes off the wall, rolls down across the floor and through the bank, and stirs the dust. Between that beat and the next, the pilot lifts off the floor and climbs away from the light, up the long outer slope of the valley, and out of the bank into open fog: black and faintly oily, the light of your own lamps dying a few hull-lengths out. Below you the grid of the slope is no longer fixed: it moves like the surface of a shallow sea, lifting and settling. Behind you, down the slope, the pillar is the only thing you can see.
+
+Every so often it brightens. A while later a swell reaches you, climbing the slope behind you, a ring of stardust riding on it, and ahead of the ring the fog parts. For a minute or two you are in clear water: lamps reach, sensors reach, the surface glitters with dust. Then the pocket moves on outward with the wave and the fog closes behind it.
+
+**Up close.** Go the other way, across the floor and toward the light, and the ground starts to rise under you, gently, then more steeply, and it never stops steepening. The glow becomes a face: nebula as far up and as far to either side as any sensor reaches, boiling, frothing, lit from inside by something that is not a star, with dark lanes of shadow running through it that move against the froth. The push comes up through the hull before the wall is close enough to touch. Thrusters at full do not get you nearer; they hold you a while, and then the wall throws you back the way you came. Nobody has touched one. Nobody has got high enough up one to see it bend [new].
+
+**The map.** The Ink's galaxy map is black. Each zone is a pillar's **reach**: the pillar fills its centre the way a large sun's disc does, drawn as a solid wall of light, with its bowl drawn as a ring around it and its pulse spreading as rings. Zones are named by pillar and beat, never by position, and the fog of the map never clears. You always know which pillar you are near and never where the Ink is [new].
+
+#### The Pillar Is the Sun
+
+Every zone of the Ink is built around a pillar the way every zone of flatspace is built around a star. It fills the centre, as big around as a large sun; it shapes everything around it; it is the only source of warmth for a long way in any direction; and life gathers around it at the distance that suits it, as it gathers around a star. In everything but daylight and pull, the pillar is the reach's sun [new].
+
+It is a sun turned inside out, twice.
+
+- **It gives no daylight.** A star in flatspace pours light and warmth outward all the time, and its zone lives in the glow. A pillar is brighter than most stars, but its light dies in the fog a short way off its face; what reaches the bowl is a glow behind a curtain, and it feeds nothing. Its **warmth** comes another way: as dust frothed off its face and thrown out across the surface, a beat at a time. Nothing in the Ink lives by a pillar's light. Everything in the Ink lives by its beat.
+- **It pushes.** The Ink does not keep flatspace's gravity. A star pulls, and its zone falls toward it and orbits it. A pillar pushes everything away, and close in the push turns into a wall: a slope that rises from gentle to vertical in the last stretch before the face, and that no ship climbs, however hard it burns. Far out the push gives out and the Ink's ground settles back to level. Between the two, all around the pillar, the ground sinks into a ring-shaped **bowl**, the way batter sits in a ring tin around the tube in its middle. A star holds its life by pulling it close. A pillar holds its life at arm's length, in the bowl its own push makes. That is the cradle, and it is not a figure of speech [new].
+
+What the pillar is behind its face, nobody knows. The oldest Adrasteian charts draw it as stars strung up a column of nebula, like beads, as if someone had seen inside; nobody outside Adrasteia knows where they got the picture [new].
+
+#### How It Works
+
+- **The fog eats light, so it drinks heat.** Everywhere in flatspace the Aether turns a little heat into light (wild [[Negative Entropy]]). In Open Water that light escapes and anything warm can be seen by it. In the Ink the fog eats it. Heat that becomes light becomes nothing. The whole flavour is a cold sink: a hull loses heat faster here than anywhere else, and radiators work too well. That is the first tell, before the stars go [new].
+- **The floor is the only still water.** Along the bottom of the bowl, the pillar's push and the rise of the outer slope cancel. It is a valley, not a hilltop: anything set down there and nudged slides back. Everywhere else the surface heaves and the fog moves, and an anchor set there drifts off and goes quiet. On the floor an anchor holds. It is not quite still: nothing stops it creeping along the valley, round the pillar, and an Ink anchor is never where it was planted, only how far round. Keepers follow their anchors; an anchor's tuning carries its creep. Every gate into the Ink opens on an anchor on a floor, and opens between pulses: each swell crosses the floor and shakes the anchor, so the gate breathes with its pillar [new].
+- **The face makes the waves.** A pillar's face froths all the time, and on each beat the whole face heaves outward at once. The heave throws a swell off the face all the way round, carrying stardust frothed off it, and the dust carries strange matter: rare grains in a sea of ordinary dust, made by whatever the pillar is, not by anything alive. The richest froth clings to the face and is thrown off only on the beat, and the only way to take it is to go and get it ([[#Meeting the Wall|Meeting the Wall]]) [new].
+- **The waves open pockets.** A dust wave's pressure pushes the fog back ahead of it, opening a pocket of clear water that travels with the wave. Inside a pocket light carries and heat stays. Pockets are the only clear water in the Ink and the only warm water, so everything alive rides them or hunts them. Behind each pocket the fog closes again [new].
+- **The swell rides the tin.** Every pulse is a swell, and ships feel it as dust and animals do: a short, hard shove outward on each beat. A swell leaves the face at its strongest, runs down the steep foot of the wall gathering speed, sweeps across the floor, and slows as it climbs the outer slope, until it spends itself near the top and dies. So a pocket is fastest and shortest near the wall and lingers longest on the outer slope, where the warm water stays longest; that is where life is thickest. Going outward is easy. Going inward means meeting every wave head-on, in the fog between them [new].
+- **The dust comes to rest on the floor.** Each wave carries its dust outward and up the outer slope; between waves the dust slides back down. It settles where everything settles, along the floor of the bowl: a ring of thick, dark cloud around every pillar, the **bank**. The banks are what spacers call the inky clouds. The little dust a strong wave throws over the top of the outer slope is lost to the dark [new].
+
+The Ink runs on a beat. A pillar's rhythm is its signature, and spacers who have been in tell pillars apart by their pulse the way sailors told lighthouses apart by their flash. Under the beat runs a slower **breath**: long stretches of strong pulses, then long stretches of weak ones, the nearest thing the Ink has to seasons. Pillars also age. A young pillar beats fast and pushes hard, and its bowl is wide and deep; an old one beats slow, its push weakens, and its bowl draws in toward the face and goes shallow. A pillar that stops beating takes its reach with it [new].
+
+#### The Reach
+
+A reach has bands, from the face outward, and each band is a different country [new].
+
+| Band | What it is | What lives there |
+|---|---|---|
+| **The face** | The pillar itself: a wall of frothing nebula as big around as a large sun, which nothing climbs | Nothing known. Its froth is the richest dust in the Ink |
+| **The foot** | The ramp before the face, gentle at the bottom and steepening without end, so that no ship climbs high enough to touch the face. Hottest dust, fastest swell, and the place ships bounce | [[Cachalots]], skimming the froth. Pilots who know the craft |
+| **The bank** | The floor of the bowl, where the dust settles: a ring of inky cloud, and the only still water | Adrasteian anchors and their keepers, [[Squid]] between hunts, [[Cachalots]] diving after them; the grey drifts out of it |
+| **The cradle** | The outer slope of the bowl, where pockets slow and linger. The warm water comes and goes with the beat | [[Soot]] on the swell, [[Rays]] riding it up the slope, [[Squid]] in the pocket walls |
+| **The dark** | Past the top of the outer slope: level ground, fog that never parts, cold, no beat worth the name | Nothing that lives. What a wave throws over the top goes here |
+
+Where two pillars stand near each other, as they rarely do, their bowls run together into one trough between two walls, their waves cross in a chop of standing swells in the narrows, and the dust of both reaches piles up along the seam. Spacers call such a zone a **pair**. Pairs are the richest water in the Ink and the hardest to fly [new].
+
+#### Meeting the Wall
+
+A pillar cannot be climbed, but it can be used. The push that keeps everything off the face gives back what a ship brings to it, and a pilot who knows how can turn that into the best manoeuvre in the Ink [new].
+
+- **The bounce.** Fly at the face and the foot takes your speed away and hands it back, pointed the other way. You leave as fast as you came, at roughly the slant you came in at, like a ball off a cushion, without spending a drop of reaction mass on the turn; the pillar is curved, so the slant comes back bent a little round it. How hard the bounce feels depends on how fast you were going. A slow ship turns in a soft arc low on the foot, hardly feeling it. A fast ship climbs higher, where the ramp is steep, and is turned sharply enough to throw a crew against their straps. A fast ship skimming the foot at a shallow angle still only glances off it, softly. The ramp never ends, so the faster you come in, the higher you climb and the closer to the face you get before it turns you. Pursuit in the Ink ends at the wall: the hunted ship bounces, and the hunter, if it misjudges the slant or the beat, does not.
+- **The kiss.** The froth hangs high on the ramp, close to the face, and only speed gets you there: a kiss is a bounce taken fast and nearly straight in, the hardest turn the wall gives. At the top of it, for an instant, a ship is closer to the face than anything else in the reach, inside the froth. A ship that opens its scoops then comes away with the richest dust in the Ink. Do it between beats and it is the most valuable minute of a career. Do it on the beat and the heave of the face adds itself to the bounce, and the ship is thrown out across the floor and halfway up the cradle faster than it was built to go, usually into something.
+- **Timing it.** Every bounce is a bet on the count. Adrasteian pilots learn the wall the way their ancestors learned the slow way, by losing people to it, and they are the only pilots anyone has seen kiss a pillar and come back with full scoops.
+
+Spacers say: *kiss the wall, don't lean on it*; and, of a pilot with a light touch, *she arcs, she doesn't bounce*.
+
+#### Finding Your Way
+
+In the fog, the beat and the slope are the only instruments that never lie [new].
+
+- **Range is a count.** The pillar brightens, and the swell arrives a while later, so the gap between flash and swell says how far you are from the face. The swell is fast near the wall and slow on the outer slope, so the count stretches as you go out; crews learn each pillar's count the way pilots learn a harbour. They count it aloud, the way children on Earth counted between lightning and thunder. A short count is the foot. A middling count is the bank. A long count is the cradle. No count, because you have lost the flash, is the dark.
+- **Bearing is the swell, and the glow.** Every wave runs straight out from its pillar, and close in, the glow fills one side of the sky. Face into the swell and you face the wall.
+- **The slope tells the band.** Ground rising ahead toward the glow is the foot, and you are about to be thrown; level ground under thick dust is the floor; ground rising ahead away from the glow is the outer slope; level ground with no beat is the dark. A ship that crosses the top of the outer slope from the dark drops into the bowl easily. Getting out again is a climb.
+- **There is no fix between pillars.** A count tells you how far you are from your pillar, never where your pillar is. Between reaches lies the dark, which nobody crosses except the founders of the [[Anchors and Gates#The Slow Way|slow way]], and Adrasteia's gates join bank to bank across it. That is why the Ink's map is a black field of named lights with nothing drawn between them.
+
+#### What Lives There, on What
+
+Open Water lives on starlight and on heat leaking out as light, all day long. The Ink has neither: light dies in the fog and heat drains away. Its only income is the beat: warm dust, delivered in pulses, the way a tide or an upwelling feeds a sea in surges rather than all day. **In the Ink a day is a wave.** Open Water life faces its star. Ink life keeps time with its pillar [new].
+
+So everything in the Ink keeps the beat, and that is the tell of a cradle. Earth's shore animals do the same: crabs and worms that keep a tidal clock in the dark, grunion that spawn on the highest tides, corals that spawn together on one night of the year. Soot blooms behind each pocket and is gone before the next; rays surf up the outer slope and slide back on the pulse; squid strike when the pocket wall passes; cachalots rise on the long breath of the pillar, not the short one. A cradle seen from above is rings within rings, all moving at the speed of the swell [new].
+
+The strange matter in the dust is the key. A grain of it does negent strongly: it turns heat into hard light. Inside a body, out of reach of the fog, that light can be caught and used. An animal that carries dust in its tissues can eat heat: its prey's, the fog's last scraps, a ship's. So the animals of the Ink keep the dust they swallow and take more from what they eat, and the more dust an animal holds, the more heat it can eat and the further away it can eat it from [new]. Earth has animals that keep what their food made for its own use: sea slugs that store the stinging cells of the hydroids they eat and fire them in their own defence, and others that keep the chloroplasts of the algae they eat and photosynthesize with them. The Ink's animals do that with dust. They concentrate it; they make none.
+
+That is bioaccumulation, and it runs up the web the way mercury does in an Earth sea: a trace in the water, more in the grazers, most in the top predators. Here the substance is not a poison to them but a weapon. **In the Ink the richest dust is always inside the most dangerous animal.**
+
+```
+pillar's beat ──► dust wave ──► Soot ──► Rays ──► Squid ──► Cachalots
+                     │             └──────────────► Squid
+                     └──► the bank (settled dust) ──► Squid, Cachalots
+ships' heat ──► everything
+```
+
+| Niche | Animal | Band | One line |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| Producer | [[Soot]] | Cradle | Black lace that blooms on the swell behind each pocket, drinking the heat of passing dust. |
+| Bulk grazer, surfer | [[Rays]] | Cradle | Wide, flat, cold gliders that surf each wave outward and slide back between, skimming soot and dust. |
+| Pack predator | [[Squid]] | Cradle, bank | Hunters of the pocket walls who lair in the bank; they eat heat at range and ink their escape. |
+| Apex | [[Cachalots]] | Foot, bank | Giants that skim the froth at the foot and dive into the bank after squid, holding more dust than anything alive. |
+
+Almost nothing from Open Water survives the Ink: no light for [[Glim]], so nothing that eats glim. [[Gleaners]] come through the links after wrecks. Nothing else crosses.
+
+#### Why the Beasts Are Dangerous
+
+The Ink's animals are built for a sea where heat is the scarcest thing there is, and a ship is a furnace. In the fog, a running reactor is the brightest smell for many kilometres. Everything comes.
+
+What makes them dangerous is the dust. A dusted animal does to a ship what Adrasteian weapons do: it takes the heat. At first that reads as a gift, the ship running cool in a cold sea. Then systems slow. Then the crew grows calm. [[Running Cold]] already says that cold death feels like calm, and that Adrasteians fear it above everything. The Ink is where they learned to.
+
+The tell from Faction Play, *a contact colder than its surroundings is dead or Adrasteian*, does not work in the Ink. Everything here is colder than you. In the Ink the warm contact is the stranger, and the warm contact is you.
+
+#### Why Only Adrasteia
+
+The Ink keeps Adrasteia's monopoly three ways at once, and explains none of what canon wants kept dark [new].
+
+1. **It cannot be reached except on their anchors.** A gate into the Ink needs an anchor at the far end ([[Anchors and Gates]]), an anchor holds only on the floor of a pillar's bowl, and every anchor on every known floor is Adrasteia's. Their founders did the slow way: they got in somewhere nobody else has found, crossed the dark from reach to reach, and planted anchors, and most of the ones who did it did not come home. The monopoly is property, won by that walk, and it shows on the field: the anchor-lights in the bank of every pillar a ship arrives at are Adrasteian, and nobody else's. A blind gate into the Ink would most likely open in the fog, where no anchor holds; one that came up on a floor could be anchored, in principle, by a crew that went through and survived the bank, and none is known to have; no light leaves the Ink, so no telescope sees it and no chart shows it. A crew that enters on someone's vouch (as the Adrasteia brainstorm proposes) is brought through Adrasteia's ring into Adrasteia's bank, and knows it has been, not where [new]. Every *known* link is theirs. A rumoured tear into the Ink is the most dangerous secret in Elysium.
+2. **It cannot be worked warm.** Every animal in the Ink hunts heat. The only ships that can work there for long are ships that run cold, and the only way to run cold is negent, which needs charges, which need the dust. You must already have what you came for. Adrasteia had the first charges. Everyone else has to buy theirs from Adrasteia to go anywhere near the source, and charges run out.
+3. **The best dust is where nobody can go.** Dust is dilute in the waves, concentrated in the animals, settled in the banks, and richest of all in the froth on the pillar's face, where every wave starts. Skimmers take traces on the outer slope. Hunters take more and die more. The froth can be taken only by kissing the wall, which Adrasteian pilots do and others die learning. What is behind the face, nobody knows, except, presumably, whoever supplies Adrasteia.
+
+What is not explained: how Adrasteia first got in; what the stars of the Ink are; what the "particular configuration" of strange matter is and whether it exists in the dust or is made from it; how Adrasteia charges it; where any Ink is; and how Adrasteia came to be in every one anyone has found. Raw dust is worthless to anyone but Adrasteia. It is bought, at a good price, through blind drops. Some spacers, who know that flatspace is held flat by the minds in it ([[Flatspace#Why Flatspace Is Flat|Why Flatspace Is Flat]]), say the Ink is held too: that something else confined in Elysium expects a sea of cold with a heartbeat in it, and the pillars are where it expects hardest. Others say that is just what people who live in a held space would think. Nobody has settled it, and nobody who could settle it is talking [new].
+
+#### What a Pillar Is to Adrasteia
+
+Not property. Adrasteia owns the anchors in a bank, never the pillar; a pillar is nobody's, and an Adrasteian who says otherwise is talking to outsiders [new].
+
+- **A clock.** Adrasteian time is kept by beats. A household's clocks keep its pillar's pulse, in flatspace, in a station, for generations after anyone in it last saw the Ink. Asked how long ago something happened, an old Adrasteian may answer in beats.
+- **A name that is not an address.** Adrasteians introduce themselves by their pillar's beat, which says everything about who you are and nothing about where anything is. It is the one fact of their geography they can say aloud, and it is why they prefer introductions to addresses.
+- **A sun that can go out.** Pillars age, and a pillar that stops beating takes its cradle, its anchors and its households' clocks with it. Every Adrasteian family keeps the memory of a beat that stopped. That is the reason they still send founders out on the slow way, across the dark, to find the next pillar before the last one goes quiet [new].
+
+The keepers who tend the anchors live in the bank, on the floor, in cold stations among the squid, following their anchors as they creep round the pillar. A keeper's station is the darkest place in the reach, under a wall of light it never sees clearly, and the most dangerous posting Adrasteia has: it cannot run warm, it cannot leave its anchor, and everything in the bank hunts heat. Keepers are the most honoured people in Adrasteia, and the quietest [new].
+
+#### What It Does to People
+
+The Ink takes warmth. Crews who stay long come back calm, quiet and slow to anger, uneasy in bright rooms, and cold to the touch for a while; some never warm up. It gives them heat as a sense: a returner feels a warm body through a bulkhead the way others see a lamp, and can tell a running reactor from a banked one with her eyes shut. It gives them the beat, too: returners keep time to a pulse nobody else can hear, and find a flatspace sun, shining steadily all day, faintly unbearable, like a held breath. Adrasteia's culture of arriving unannounced, of introductions instead of addresses, and of the cheek check, is what a people becomes after generations of that gift [new].
+
+#### Who Goes In
+
+- **Skimmers.** Vouched independents on long, cold runs up and down the outer slope, dragging fine nets through the pockets for soot-ash and wave dust. The trade is dull and safe until it isn't.
+- **Hunters.** Crews who take [[Rays]] and, sometimes, [[Squid]]. They are well paid, and their vouchers are careful about them.
+- **Wall-kissers.** Pilots who bounce off the face for its froth, fast and straight in. Almost all of them are Adrasteian; the rest are brave once.
+- **Grey-pickers.** Crews who work the outer edge of the bank, following [[Cachalots]] at a distance and picking up what they leave behind. The best living in the Ink, and the most patient.
+- **Nobody** hunts cachalots, in the stories, and comes back.
+
+Spacers say: *ride the pocket out, never in*; *count the beat*, and mean it literally; *short count, short life*; *if the radiators are happy, be afraid*; and, of a calm crewmate, *say "warm"*.
+
+#### Sources and Inspiration
+
+Checked: canon notes [[Negative Entropy]], [[Pseudospace]], [[Aether]]; the Adrasteia faction brainstorm (Faction Deepening) and Faction Play note in AetheriaLore, via voidbot, 2026-10-14. Real sources below are cited from memory, not checked.
+
+- Bioaccumulation and biomagnification of mercury through marine food webs: the standard account in any marine ecology text; for a review, Morel, F. M. M., Kraepiel, A. M. L. & Amyot, M. (1998). The chemical cycle and bioaccumulation of mercury. *Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics* 29.
+- Hyperaccumulator plants and phytomining: Jaffré, T. et al. (1976). *Sebertia acuminata*: a hyperaccumulator of nickel from New Caledonia. *Science* 193. A tree whose sap is a quarter nickel.
+- An animal armoured in metal from its vent: Warén, A. et al. (2003). A hot-vent gastropod with iron sulfide dermal sclerites. *Science* 302.
+- Stolen weapons and stolen chloroplasts: Greenwood, P. G. (2009). Acquisition and use of nematocysts by cnidarian predators. *Toxicon* 54; Rumpho, M. E. et al. (2008), on *Elysia chlorotica*. *PNAS* 105.
+- Strange matter as a stellar product: Witten, E. (1984). Cosmic separation of phases. *Physical Review D* 30; Farhi, E. & Jaffe, R. L. (1984). Strange matter. *Physical Review D* 30. The idea that the true ground state of matter might be strange, made in compact stars and shed as strangelets, is the real-physics echo of the Ink's dust; the lore does not depend on it.
+- Pillars: Hester, J. J. et al. (1996). Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 imaging of M16. *Astronomical Journal* 111. The Pillars of Creation, dust columns shaped by the pressure of the stars inside them.
+- Ambergris: the waxy concretion sperm whales pass, prized and found drifting; any natural history of the sperm whale. The model for [[Cachalots|grey]].
+- The ring tin: the operator's own image for the pillar's ground, a tube pan with the batter in a ring around the tube.
+- Life that keeps the beat: Naylor, E. (2010). *Chronobiology of Marine Organisms*. Cambridge. Circatidal clocks in shore animals; Babcock, R. C. et al. (1986). Synchronous spawnings of 105 scleractinian coral species on the Great Barrier Reef. *Marine Biology* 90; the grunion runs of the California coast.
+- Counting the beat: the flash-to-bang rule for the range of lightning, sound being slow and steady where light is not.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Anchors and Gates.md

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+**"Anyone can open a gate. Getting it to open somewhere is the expensive part."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r5, 2026-10-14, revised r6, for the operator's review. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]], beside [[Flatspace]] and [[Wonderland]]. Built on two operator rulings: a gate needs an anchor at its far end, or it lands with very little control and usually somewhere useless (`gates-need-anchors`); most links are gates someone paid for, and a few natural tears exist as rare, dangerous wonders (`mostly-gates-few-tears`); aim improves with understanding, nearby flatspace first, and stays a niche field (`blind-gate-targeting`); flatspace is held by minds, an effect the Timeless built into Elysium (`flatspace-held-by-minds-in-timeless-elysium`). `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r5]] and [[Fauna Lore Review r6]].
+
+Humans learned to open gates long before they understood anything about what the gates open into. Every wormhole on the map is a gate someone paid for, and the far end of every one of them was nailed down, at a price, by someone who went there first. That is how Elysium is colonised, flatspace included. A **link** is any way from one space to another; nearly all of them are gates, and the rest are tears.
+
+#### Gates
+
+A gate is a ring of machinery that opens a mouth in one place and a second mouth somewhere else. Opening one costs what a station costs, and holding an unanchored gate open costs a fortune by the hour [new].
+
+What the ring cannot choose is where the far mouth goes. Left to itself, the far mouth falls wherever the [[Aether]] takes it, and the Aether has no interest in where you meant to go. To open a gate *somewhere*, the far end needs an **anchor**.
+
+#### Anchors
+
+An anchor is an instrument with a twin. The pair is cultivated together, the way the [[Wavecrafters]] cultivate any resonant element, until each has learned its relation to the other exactly; [[The Glass]], where nothing fades, is where most are grown. One twin stays in the ring. The other goes out and is planted. Open the ring on its twin and the far mouth falls toward the anchor, and stays there cheaply for as long as both are kept [new].
+
+That makes anchors, not gates, the asset. A ring can be built anywhere by anyone with the money. An anchor has to be *carried* to the far end, by a crew, without a gate, because there is no gate there yet. **Whoever holds the anchors holds the map.** Anchor registries are the deeds of Elysium; anchor keepers are its landlords; an anchor's tuning is the most closely held fact a company owns. Undertow retuners claim they can teach an anchor a second twin. Registries call that piracy. The Undertow calls it a second opinion [new].
+
+Anchors drift, wear and go quiet, and an anchor nobody keeps is a door slowly closing. Every anchored gate has someone living at its far end.
+
+#### The Slow Way
+
+There are two ways to put an anchor where you want it, and only one of them is reliable [new].
+
+**The slow way** is to go there without a gate. In flatspace that means crossing the dark between islands by drive: months, years, a crew that leaves young. In a layer of [[Wonderland]] it means getting in by any link at all (a tear, a rival's gate, someone else's lucky blind stab), then crossing the layer itself to the place you want, with no road home but the one you are carrying. Plant the anchor, and someone can open a gate onto it. The crew comes home through the gate they made possible, if they come home.
+
+This is the fae-legend journey: the walk under the hill, the long road through a country with its own law, the thing you must carry and must not set down. The slow way is how every known place in Elysium was first made reachable, and the crews who did it are the founding saints of every company that holds a lane.
+
+#### The Blind Gate
+
+**The blind gate** is the other way: open a ring with no anchor and see what is on the other side. It is the biggest bet in Elysium. Canon's corporations that go "all-in with the project of colonizing and exploiting Wonderland" are the ones who place it [new].
+
+| What is through | How often | What happens |
+|---|---|---|
+| Nothing useful: dark, empty, a hundred years from anywhere, or the rim of [[Hyperspace]] | Almost always | The meter runs, the ring is shut, the money is gone |
+| Somewhere that looks back | Rarely | The ring is shut fast, if it can be. Not everything that comes through is reported |
+| Somewhere worth having: a rich ground, a new layer | Very rarely | A race. An unanchored mouth drifts, so a crew must go through and plant an anchor before the gate closes or a rival's crew does it first |
+
+Aim improves as understanding does, and the first thing gate-makers learned was to throw a blind gate a short way into flatspace. Space that minds already hold flat is space a mouth falls through predictably: aimed at a nearby stretch of flatspace, it lands roughly where it was thrown, and a crew need only find it and plant the anchor before it drifts. Most lanes past the oldest were opened that way. Into [[Wonderland]], aim barely exists, and the table above is the whole of the odds. Targeting is a niche field all the same: a faction that can afford a ring can afford a crew, and crews are cheaper than scholars [new].
+
+A jackpot blind gate turns into the slow way at once: the crew who go through it to plant the anchor are on the long road, with the ring's meter running behind them. Blind-gate syndicates sell shares in a stake, insurers will not touch one, and the tales of gates that came up rich are told everywhere and are mostly about other people.
+
+Spacers say the first blind gate was the one that brought us here: the [[FTL Trigger]] was humanity's first stab into the seething void, and it landed on Elysium [new].
+
+#### Tears
+
+A few links nobody built. **Tears** are places where two spaces have come apart and touch, with no ring at either end and no anchor anyone planted. They are rare, they move or keep hours, they leak their far side (the stars dim, the current dies, the stars double), and animals know them long before people do. Following animals is still the oldest way to find one. No pillar stands in flatspace, but through a very rare tear one has been glimpsed: a wall of frothing light filling the far side, where no star should be, gone when you look again, and the surest sign anyone has that the Ink is near [new].
+
+A tear is a wonder and a danger in the same breath. It goes somewhere no blind gate has been, it costs nothing to open, and nothing on the far side was expecting company either. Some tears are older than humanity's arrival, and some spacers swear a few of them are not tears at all, but gates the other prisoners of Elysium built and stopped keeping. Powers beyond comprehension wait past them, and treasures we should have left alone [new].
+
+#### Where Anchors Hold
+
+Every space treats an anchor differently, and that, more than anything, decides who holds it [new].
+
+| Space | Where an anchor holds | Can a rival find it? | Who holds it |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| [[Flatspace]] | Anywhere still: a well's slack point, a moon, a station | Yes, with work | Everyone; companies own lanes |
+| [[Adrasteia Space\|The Ink]] | Only on the floor of a pillar's bowl, where its push and the outer slope cancel | No; no light leaves | Adrasteia, every known link |
+| [[The Glass]] | Anywhere; the stiff Aether holds everything | At once; nothing hides | The Wavecrafters, by watching, not hiding |
+| [[The Fold]] | Anywhere, but it is in two places, and a gate may open at either | Yes, from both sides | Nobody |
+| [[Hyperspace]] | Anywhere, and you will never find it again without beacons | Only by the chain | The beacon keepers |
+
+#### Why an Anchor Works
+
+An anchor works the way flatspace does: it is held ([[Flatspace#Why Flatspace Is Flat|Why Flatspace Is Flat]]). A twinned pair is a relation someone insists on, two places a mind has decided are next to each other, made solid in instruments that remember the insisting; that is why they are grown in the Glass, where nothing fades. The Aether gives minds what they expect hard enough, and a gate's far mouth falls toward its anchor because somebody expects it there. It is also why an unkept anchor goes quiet, and why anchors hold badly wherever something else's expectation is stronger than ours. The core worlds still call it engineering, and the engineering works; the Chaos factions were right all along. In the Ink an anchor holds only on the floor of a pillar's bowl, and creeps round the pillar even there; spacers who have thought about it say the floor is the one place the Ink lets go, and only just [new].
+
+Spacers say: *no anchor, no door*; *a ring is a promise, an anchor is a deed*; and, of anyone who talks up a blind gate, *show me who walked there*.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Checked: canon [[Pseudospace]] and [[Wavecrafters]] (via voidbot, 2026-10-14); the game's zone-to-zone wormholes and the run's exit gate, which leads nowhere (`Wormhole.cs`, via voidbot); the two operator rulings. From memory, not checked:
+
+- Faerie and the long road under the hill: the Child ballads (*Tam Lin*, *Thomas the Rhymer*) and the general folklore of the fairy road and its rules.
+- Colonial chartered companies, and the joint-stock venture as a way to share a ruinous stake: the Virginia Company and the East India companies in any economic history of the period.
+- Survey and claim before settlement: the Homestead Act's "prove up" requirement; mining claims staked on the ground before they could be registered.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Cachalots.md

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+**"Nobody hunts cachalots. People follow them, and pick up the grey."**
+
+> Draft r3, 2026-10-14, revised r6. Part of [[Adrasteia Space]] (the Ink); niche: apex. Named for the sperm whale, the Earth animal that dives into the dark after giant squid. Not related to the [[Whales]] of Open Water, and spacers who confuse them don't do it twice. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+The largest thing in the Ink: a blunt, scarred head, a body many times a ship's length, skin the colour of the fog. Cachalots keep the foot and the bank, the last steep rise before a pillar's face and the floor of its bowl, and go under the surface between, rising into a pocket only to take the warmth, or to kill.
+
+**Eats.** [[Squid]], and the dust they carry. Every squid a cachalot eats adds its dust to the cachalot's. That is where the Ink's dust ends up: at the top of the web, in a few hundred animals near each pillar [new].
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Long, deep dives under the surface and into the bank, out of every sensor's reach, and slow rises at the foot, where they skim the froth thrown off the face on each beat. They are the only animals that go there, and they bounce off the wall as ships do, without seeming to try. They keep the pillar's long breath, not its beat, and ride no waves [new]. When a cachalot rises, the squid in that pocket scatter.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A cachalot does not need to see you. It holds so much dust that it eats heat at a range no other animal can, and it hunts squid by their heat in the bank, where nothing can see anything. To a cachalot a ship is a very warm squid.
+
+**On sensors.** Usually nothing: it is in the clouds. When it rises, a cold so large the board reads a hole. Then, if it feeds, the flare.
+
+**How it hurts.** *The pull*: heat drained from a ship at long range, faster than any squid can manage. *The lance*: a cachalot that has eaten more heat than it can hold throws it off as a beam of hard light, the negent conversion done all at once. It is the brightest thing in the Ink after a pillar, and it is what spacers mean when they say a ship was *lit* [new]. *The ram*, for anything that has made it angry.
+
+**Yield.** *Grey*: like the ambergris of Earth's sperm whales, a waxy concretion cachalots pass, built around the indigestible beaks of the squid they eat and dense with dust. It drifts out of the inner edge of the bank into the passing pockets, and grey-pickers trail cachalots for weeks to find it. Grey holds more dust than anything else a living crew can take. That a cachalot's body holds more still is common knowledge. Nobody sells any [new].
+
+**Lives.** The foot and the bank of each pillar, and the deep water under the bowl between them. They are why few people kiss a pillar's wall twice, and why Adrasteian keepers in the bank run so cold.
+
+*Designers:* a rare anchor near pillars that rises into pockets on a long cycle; a very long-range heat drain; a heat-threshold beam attack; a grey drop that can be collected without a kill. Treat a kill as out of reach unless a later ruling makes it a quest.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r2.md

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+> Review note, 2026-10-14, for the operator: where lore pass r2 changes things, and why. Not lore. Delete once the calls are made. Ordered by how much each buys.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Things
+
+**1. Strange matter is grown, in whale bone. (Existing canon: [[Negative Entropy]], Running Cold, Adrasteia.)** *Ruled 2026-10-14: not biogenic (`strange-matter-not-biogenic`). Cut from the notes in r3; strange matter is stellar dust of the Ink, concentrated by its animals ([[Adrasteia Space]], [[Fauna Lore Review r3]]). The argument below is kept as the record of what was proposed.*
+Canon says negent needs strange matter found only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace, that only Adrasteia makes the charged form, and that its supplier's location is unknown. I'd give that a cause: strange matter is laid down slowly in the bones of [[Whales]], and Adrasteia's "controlled pseudospace" is a field of ancient falls, a bone bed it mines the way Earth mined fossil plankton as oil. Every canon sentence stays true. What it buys: a reason harvest is big in Elysium, a three-way conflict over every whale road (Adrasteia buying bone in secret, the [[Cetacean Navigators]] forbidding whaling, independents in the middle), and a threat to the monopoly every time a whale dies outside Adrasteia space. What it costs: some of Adrasteia's mystery, which their brief says should be about who makes the machinery and how it works. The notes as written keep it a rumour among flensers, which is my recommendation: the value is real, the explanation unproven. This is a question in the mind (`aetheria-fauna:question:strange-matter-source`).
+
+**2. The fauna ride the Aether current, not the orbit; and the nebula is partly alive. (First pass; the Sol sketch.)**
+r1 gave krill the orbital flow as their motion law. The flow the game actually rules on (`flow-moves-what-ruled`, map B15) is a braided global current plus a swirl around each well and a drain downslope, and it is what the nebula and stardust already follow. So the tell is "drifts with the current" and the flying aid is a current-sync, not an orbit-sync. Once the current is the medium, the ecology falls out of its shape: fronts where it converges, shear at well shoulders, slack in saddles, debris spiralling into wells. Making the glowing part of the nebula alive ([[Glim]]) gives the web its producers, which r1 lacked: krill are grazers, not plants. It also gives your cloudless Sol a meaning: Sol has no clouds because nothing there is alive. One tension: canon calls the Aether a *static reference frame*. I'd keep the frame static for drives and say the current is motion in the Aetheric field, or reword the Aether note; either is a one-line canon edit.
+
+**3. The fauna are residents, not arrivals; they refill from upstream. (Your origin sketch, the first pass, [[Pseudospace]].)**
+r1 had fauna pour in through wormhole mouths in a tide. Canon's Pseudospace note says the opposite of an incursion: flat space is the stranger here. I'd keep your sketch's fact, that humanity first met them after opening wormholes, and drop the arrival: the wormholes let humanity out into a sea that was already full. Respawn then has a natural cause, larvae carried in on the current from deeper pseudospace, which is how coral reefs repopulate. Two things follow: bigger animals the deeper you go has a cause (stronger current, thicker glim), and recovery can scale with trophic level. Krill back in days, whales in years. That gives harvest stakes without breaking `fauna-harvest-ruled`'s respawn.
+
+**4. Your four were a fine start and the wrong floor.** Kept all four, changed each: [[Krill]] graze glim; [[Minnows]] are the forage layer; [[Sharks]] are middle predators that hunt the shear, not the apex; [[Whales]] ride gravity waves, which is why they arc. The niches they did not cover are now filled: producer ([[Glim]]), network ([[Skein]]), reef ([[Rime]]), ambush ([[Lanterns]]), trap ([[Void Spiders]]), scavenger ([[Gleaners]]), parasite ([[Limpets]]), mind-grazer ([[Moths]]). The apex is left empty on purpose: the thing that eats whales lives past the charts.
+
+**5. "The fauna are honest" was the wrong rule.** r1 said nothing in the ecology mimics anything, to protect the disguise game. Nature's best tricks are mimicry, and the rule that matters is the sim's, not the animals': no fauna writes a false belief (`fauna-never-lie`). A [[Lanterns|lantern]] emits real heat that reads like a crippled ship. That keeps the invariant and adds the hazard of the false wreck.
+
+**6. Sol's edge is a shoreline.** Keep Sol cloudless and lifeless inside. At the Oort edge, the current breaks against flat space and drops what it carries: a wrack line of dead krill, moth husks and rimed comets. That puts the sea where a Sol-born pilot first sees it, before the first jump, and gives salvagers a beach. If strandings are dead loose matter rather than a fauna field, `fauna-none-in-sol` holds unchanged. Optional.
+
+**7. Wild negent.** Canon frames negent as a powerful conversion that needs strange matter. I'd add that the Aether does it weakly everywhere, unaided: warm things glow faintly in a band life can eat. That one sentence is the whole energy budget of pseudospace and the reason the fauna come to the guns.
+
+**8. r1's "living concrete" for Blooms contradicts [[Bloom]] canon** (processed rubble, heavy industry). Dropped. [[Rime]] binding rubble piles is the version that fits.
+
+#### Left Open on Purpose
+
+- **Are they the garden?** Canon calls Elysium a garden that serves as a prison. Whether the fauna are wild life of pseudospace or part of the Timeless' garden is not answered here. The notes describe them as wild; nothing rules out the other. Worth deciding before anyone writes the edge giants.
+- **Other species.** The Ratfolk perceive by vibration and would know the fauna differently: names, uses, fears. Worth a pass by whoever owns the Ratfolk.
+
+#### For Designers (hooks the notes imply, none ruled)
+
+- Glim halo: heat inside thick glim raises visibility.
+- Skein: the slime-mould pattern the placement ruling wants, given a body; possibly the existing ambient slime trails.
+- Rime: a property of belt chunks (spicules when mined, lattice yield).
+- Limpets: a ship status (signature up, small heat drain), not a contact.
+- Lanterns: anchors that hold station in slack water.
+- Recovery time per kind scales with trophic level.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r3.md

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+> Review note, 2026-10-14, for the operator: where lore pass r3 develops or changes your sketch, r2 and canon, and why. Not lore. Delete once the calls are made. Within each section, ordered by how much each change buys.
+
+#### What r3 Did
+
+- Made pseudospace flavours a framework ([[Wonderland]]): five dials (light, heat, surface, flow, distance), set by the stars, each flavour with its own bestiary and its own crossing tells. Four flavours: **Open Water** (r2's ecology, now a family from Shallows to Deeps), **the Ink** (Adrasteia space), **the Glass** (stiff Aether: no current, nothing fades, nowhere to hide) and **the Fold** (non-Euclidean: knots where distance grows, seams that glue far places).
+- Developed the Ink from your sketch ([[Adrasteia Space]]) with a four-level web: [[Soot]], [[Rays]], [[Squid]], [[Cachalots]].
+- Cut the strange-matter rumour from [[Whales]], [[Spaceborne Fauna]] and [[Open Water]] (ruling `strange-matter-not-biogenic`). Strange matter is now stellar dust of the Ink, concentrated by its animals, made by none of them.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Your Sketch
+
+**1. The fog should drink heat, not only light.** r2 already has the Aether turning a little heat into light everywhere. If the Ink's fog eats light, it eats that light too, so heat drains away: radiators work too well and everything is cold. That one consequence does three jobs. It gives the Ink a tell on the thermal display before the stars go out. It makes heat the Ink's scarcest food, which is why its animals hunt ships. And it makes the Ink the place Adrasteia's fear of the cold death comes from. Without it, the fog is a visual effect with no ecology behind it.
+
+**2. The danger should scale with the dust.** Your sketch says the beasts accumulate dust and are dangerous. I'd make one the cause of the other. Dust does negent: inside a body it turns heat into usable light, so a dusted animal can eat heat, and more dust means it eats more heat from further away. Then biomagnification does the rest: a trace in the waves, more in each step up, most in the apex. The richest dust is always inside the deadliest animal. I'd also add one way to get rich dust without a kill, [[Cachalots|grey]], on the model of ambergris, so the harvest has a patient trade and not only a lethal one.
+
+**3. The pillar should be where the stars' light goes.** "Stars that connect to a pillar" read as a picture. I'd give it a cause: in a fog that eats light a star cannot shine outward, so its light leaves up the pillar, which is the visible star. That makes the pillars the Ink's only landmarks and its only navigation, and it makes a pillar's pulse its signature. I chose stars strung on the pillar like beads, the lowest at the surface; your words also allow one star per pillar. Either works.
+
+**4. "Adrasteia space" should be a flavour, not one place.** Your ruling calls it a flavour, and a flavour is a kind of place, so there can be more than one Ink. Canon says the strange matter is found only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace. I'd keep that sentence true by saying every Ink anyone has found, Adrasteia was already in. That adds a mystery (how do they find them first?) rather than spending one. Whether there is one Ink or many is a real fork: it changes the map and the story's endgame. It is question `aetheria-fauna:question:ink-one-or-many` in the mind.
+
+**5. A tension with the engine ruling, to settle before anyone writes the swell into play.** The lore says ships ride the Ink's swell. Ruling `liquid-grid-from-sim-brushes` makes the fine grid presentation configured from the sim, and Self's reading is that gravity stays analytic and a shallow-water layer decides nothing. If the swell never moves a ship, the lore should say the swell carries dust and animals but a hull is too heavy to feel it. That is a one-line change to [[Adrasteia Space]], and I'd wait for the engine to decide rather than write either version as fact.
+
+**Self's reading, for the record.** Its two calls hold and are in the notes: the dust is stellar and the beasts concentrate it; the pressure pockets are the only clear water. I extended both. Bioaccumulation alone makes animals that hold dust, not animals that are dangerous because of it, so the dust needed a use (item 2). Pockets are clear water and also the only warm water, which is why everything rides them and why predators hunt their walls.
+
+#### Where I'd Change r2
+
+**1. One sea was the wrong frame.** r2 designed a single ecology with a depth gradient. That ecology was right and is now **Open Water**, a family of flavours: the Shallows near flat space to the Deeps toward the Chaos factions. "Deeper is richer" still holds within the family. The Ink, the Glass and the Fold are not deeper water; they are other water.
+
+**2. Wild negent is now load-bearing.** r2 proposed that the Aether does negent weakly everywhere, as the energy budget of Open Water. In r3 the same sentence sets the heat dial of every flavour: the light escapes in Open Water, is eaten in the Ink, never forms in the Glass. It has gone from a nice idea to the hinge of the framework, so it now needs its canon edit (below) rather than living only in fauna notes.
+
+**3. The whale-bone proposal.** Cut, as ruled. What it was trying to buy, a harvest that matters to the monopoly and a conflict over who takes it, the Ink now buys from its own animals: skimmers, hunters and grey-pickers working on vouches, selling to Adrasteia's blind drops.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Canon
+
+**1. [[Pseudospace]]: "absolutely anything is possible" needs a grammar, and its definition needs honouring.** Canon defines pseudospace as space whose geometry is not Euclidean, then says anything is possible. Both are true and neither is playable: a pilot cannot learn "anything". I'd add that the known reaches come in flavours with reliable rules, and keep "anything is possible" for what lies past them. And canon's own definition is honoured by almost nothing in the notes, or as far as I know the game, until now. The Fold is the flavour where distance itself bends, and I'd treat it as the flavour that makes the Pseudospace note true in play. Your remark that you once wanted non-Euclidean space and weren't sure how to bend the engine is why it is in this set; the note describes how it flies, not how to build it.
+
+**2. [[Negative Entropy]]: two sentences.** Add that the Aether does the conversion weakly everywhere unaided, and that strange matter does it strongly (r2's wild negent, now the heat dial). And reword "encountered only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace" to "found only in the Ink, and every Ink anyone has found is Adrasteia's". Same meaning, and it points at the mystery.
+
+**3. Faction Play's tell inverts in the Ink.** "A contact colder than its surroundings is dead or Adrasteian" is right in Open Water. In the Ink everything is colder than you, and the warm contact is the stranger. One line in the Adrasteia section.
+
+**4. [[Aether]]: "varies with local conditions" is where flavours live.** Canon's static reference frame survives: it tells you how far you have moved, which is why you can always know where you are inside the Ink and never where the Ink is (its mouths are kept and their far ends are uncharted). In the Fold, the frame is how pilots measure depth into a knot. I'd add one line naming flavours as the local conditions.
+
+**5. Smaller.** Canon calls Adrasteia "the Adrasteia corporation"; the brainstorm's society of vouches and no addresses doesn't sound like a corporation. Not this pass's business, but the Ink makes the question louder.
+
+#### What I Invented Beyond the Inputs
+
+- The flavour grammar (five dials, stars set the temper, margins between flavours) and the Glass and the Fold.
+- Fog drinks heat; "radiators work too well" as the first tell.
+- Pillars as the stars' only outlet; a pillar's pulse as its signature; navigation by pillars.
+- Pockets as the only warm water; soot rings as the Ink's clock.
+- Dust as a heat-eating organ (the adaptive reason for bioaccumulation) and the four-level web.
+- Grey, and grey-pickers.
+- The bootstrap moat: you need negent charges to work the Ink, and negent charges come from the Ink.
+- Squid ink as smuggler's paint; a cachalot's lance.
+- "Every Ink anyone has found, Adrasteia was already in."
+
+#### Left Open on Purpose
+
+- What the Ink's stars are, what the "particular configuration" is, how Adrasteia charges it, where any Ink is. Canon wants these dark, and the notes keep them dark.
+- The Fold's bestiary. Something lives on seams, probably an animal that is in two places at once. Worth a pass of its own once the Fold is wanted.
+- The Glass's few giants, and how Open Water's fauna fare at its margin.
+- Whether the flavours are the garden (r2's open question, now louder: someone, or something, set the stars).
+- Emily's and Miss Terri's material was not read or used.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r4.md

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+> Review note, 2026-10-14, for the operator: where lore pass r4 develops or changes your decisions, Self's proposals, r3 and canon, and why. Not lore. Delete once the calls are made. Within each section, ordered by how much each change buys.
+
+#### What r4 Did
+
+One frame for the whole set:
+
+- **[[Flatspace]]**: Sol's nebula-free bubble plus the vanilla galaxy. Strange physics a crew can learn; the ordinary factions; [[Open Water]] (r2's ecology, renamed from "Pseudospace Ecology") as its natural wildlife, thin in the core and rich at the edges where the Chaos factions live; pirates as its scourge.
+- **[[Wonderland]]** (replaces "Pseudospace Flavours"): separate **layers**, each its own space and its own map, joined by **links** that are found, have tells, sometimes keep hours, and are held by being known. Depth counted in links and time. The fae register: each layer takes something and gives something, and travellers' tales are how layers become known.
+- **Four layers**, each with its map's look, foothold, dangers, what it does to people, and animals: [[Adrasteia Space|the Ink]] (Adrasteia), [[The Glass]] (the Wavecrafters), [[The Fold]] (nobody; the Undertow and the Parallax Auditors work it), [[Hyperspace]] (the beacon keepers), with the beacon economy.
+- Links and wording fixed across the fauna notes so nothing still says the fauna live "in pseudospace".
+
+#### Where I'd Change Your Decisions
+
+**1. Hyperspace should be indifferent, not malevolent.** "Like the Warp" is right about the stakes and I wrote it that way: without beacons you do not get out. But the Warp is hostile; it is full of things that want you. I'd keep hyperspace's danger in its geometry: errors grow exponentially, signals die exponentially, there is too much room to be found in. Then the stakes come from Aetheria's own systems (sensing, heat, drive wear, insurance, EW) rather than from an antagonist, which is your point against HyperRogue. The uncanny is in the people (the Lost) and two animals that exploit lost ships, not in the place.
+
+**2. "Connect arbitrarily" should be arbitrary to the player, structured in the world.** If links are uniformly random, nothing about them can be learned, and a pilot's knowledge stops mattering. I'd keep them unpredictable but give them a grammar: most open at flatspace's edges; links leak tells of their far side; some open on a beat; and they are owned by whoever knows them. That keeps navigation exciting and makes link charts the most valuable thing in the game.
+
+**3. "Some fauna" in flatspace.** r2's twelve animals are more than "some". I kept them and made density do the work: almost nothing in Sol, thin in the settled core, rich at the edges. If you meant flatspace to be nearly empty, r2's ecology moves outward wholesale and the core loses its krill; that is one paragraph in [[Flatspace]].
+
+#### Where I'd Change Self's Proposals
+
+**1. Hyperspace heat.** Self proposed "heat with nowhere to go". Hyperbolic space has more room to radiate into, not less, so that reasoning runs backwards. I moved the heat to the drive: coupling to hyperspace is a transition that never finishes, and holding it open makes heat and wear for the whole crossing. That also ties hyperspace to canon's Wavecrafter line about carrying a drive through a difficult transition, and makes an Undertow calibration profile the commonest way ships are lost.
+
+**2. Beacons need a reason to be dense.** Self's beacon economy holds. I added the physics that makes it an economy: a signal spreads into exponentially more room, so it fades exponentially, so you can only ever hear the next beacon. Chains must be dense, each beacon is a crew's work, and keepers are the people who live in hyperspace, which answers your "who lives in hyperspace?".
+
+**3. The Fold has traffic, not a foothold.** A foothold is held by keeping links secret, and in the Fold every seam can be seen from its far side. So nobody holds it, the Undertow runs off-ledger routes through it, and the Parallax Auditors live off the contradictory records it produces. Self's other calls (flatspace's ecology from r2, layers not flavours, Wonderland as the collective name, the Glass for the Wavecrafters, the Fold distinct from hyperspace, false beacons as an EW claim, fauna homing on lost ships) are in the notes as proposed.
+
+#### Where I'd Change r3
+
+**1. The Ink question is half-answered by layers.** Question `aetheria-fauna:question:ink-one-or-many` asked whether there is one Ink or many. With layers each having one map, the Ink is naturally one layer with many pillars, reached by several links. What is left is whether every link into it is Adrasteia's. I'd have Self revise the question to that, or withdraw it; the notes are written so that both answers fit.
+
+**2. Margins become links.** r3's flavours met at margins a few minutes wide. Layers do not border each other, so r3's border tells now live at links, where a link leaks its far side.
+
+**3. Flatspace is not "no flavour".** r3 called flat space the absence of a flavour. It has its own answers to the five dials (light carries, heat leaves as light, the slope holds, a braided current, a kilometre stays a kilometre), and [[Wonderland]] shows them as the baseline every layer departs from.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Canon
+
+**1. [[Pseudospace]] gives two causes for flatness, and one is the best idea in the set.** Canon says "we brought flat space with us; we are the incursion". [[Temporal Nonlinearity]] says Elysium is a shard of spacetime the Timeless built. Canon also says the Aether answers to minds. Put together: flatspace may be held flat by the minds that expect it, which would explain Sol's bubble (the oldest, most crowded expectation), why Wonderland changes people (too few of you to hold the rules), and why Flatlanders and Chaos factions fight about it. It is a cosmology fork, so it is question `aetheria-fauna:question:why-flatspace-is-flat`. [[Flatspace]] gives all three accounts in-world and rules nothing.
+
+**2. "Few islands of stability".** The vanilla map is large. I'd keep canon's line and add that the islands look like a continent from inside; "few" is the view from Wonderland.
+
+**3. [[Wavecrafters]]: one line for the Glass.** Their "protected guild channels" become Glass links, their school is the Glass, and their concealment of espers is what people raised where nothing hides learn to value. All [new], all consistent with the canon text.
+
+**4. The Cetacean Navigators are a Pre-Elysium faction.** r2 and r4 both carry them into Elysium (r2 as current-readers, r4 as the root of the keepers' rescue duty). Nothing I read says they survived the Rupture. Someone should check before that line goes further.
+
+#### What I Invented Beyond the Inputs
+
+- Links: tells, hours, ownership by knowledge; depth counted in links and time.
+- The fae register per layer (take and give), and travellers' tales as route knowledge.
+- Each layer's map look: the Ink's black map named by pillar and beat; the Glass's silver map with wakes; the Fold's map that draws places twice; hyperspace's Poincaré disc.
+- The Glass's animals (Baskets, Skaters, Augurs); the Fold's (Hinges, Knotfish); hyperspace's (Wisps, Corbies) and its people (keepers, the Lost).
+- Hyperspace physics: short roads, exponential error, exponential fade, the held-open drive; beacons as greedy-routing coordinates; wreckers.
+- Three in-world accounts of why flatspace is flat.
+
+#### Still Open
+
+- `why-flatspace-is-flat` (asked) and the revision of `ink-one-or-many` (for Self).
+- Whether Sol is fauna-free as well as nebula-free. The notes keep it a desert; your ruling left it open.
+- Whether hyperspace touches time or only the tales do.
+- What "altered" means in play: a crew trait, a ship trait, a story flag. The notes say what each layer does in fiction and leave the system to design.
+- Fold and hyperspace foothold politics beyond the sketch; who else holds footholds (the Chaos factions are named in canon but not listed).
+- Emily's and Miss Terri's material was not read or used.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Real-world sources are listed in each layer note, marked checked or from memory; all real-world sources this pass are from memory. Canon read via voidbot, 2026-10-14: [[Pseudospace]], [[Wavecrafters]], [[Temporal Nonlinearity]], [[Aetheric Drive]], [[Parallax Auditors]], Galaxy and Navigation (excerpts), Cetacean Navigators (excerpt), the Adrasteia brainstorm (excerpts).

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r5.md

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+> Review note, 2026-10-14, for the operator: where lore pass r5 develops or changes your decisions, Self's readings, r4 and canon, and why. This is not lore. Delete it once the calls are made. Within each section, changes are ordered by how much each one buys.
+
+#### What r5 Did
+
+- **[[Anchors and Gates]]** (new): gates, anchors, the slow way, the blind gate, tears, where anchors hold in each space, and why an anchor works (left open).
+- **[[Wonderland]]**: links are now gates built against anchors plus rare tears; a foothold is held by holding anchors, not by knowing where links are; depth counts steps past the last kept anchor.
+- **[[Flatspace]]**: every wormhole is a gate; a new **Lanes** section (the map as the history of who walked where; dead gates as monuments).
+- **[[Adrasteia Space]]**: anchors hold only in a pillar's column, so every gate into the Ink opens in a pillar; the monopoly is property won by the slow way; the arrival scene starts inside a pillar.
+- **[[Hyperspace]]**: a beacon is an anchor that sings; laying beacons is the slow way; blind gates land here more than anywhere.
+- **[[The Glass]]**, **[[The Fold]]**: the Glass holds by watching and grows the anchors; the Fold's anchors are in two places, so nobody holds it. [[Spaceborne Fauna]] points to the new note.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Your Decisions
+
+**1. "Very little control" should still leave a bias.** If a blind gate lands uniformly anywhere, nobody can learn anything from one, and the bet is a lottery ticket. I gave it one bias with a physical reason: hyperspace has more room than everything else together, so an unanchored mouth is likeliest to fall there, onto its rim. That makes "usually somewhere useless" a fact about geometry, gives the Lost a second origin (blind-gate crews who went through to look), and ties your "blind stab into the seething void" to a specific void. If you want blind gates to be completely unpredictable, delete one bullet in [[Hyperspace]] and one table cell in [[Anchors and Gates]].
+
+**2. A blind gate should be a race, not a single coin toss.** Your ruling has the expense wasted when the gate lands badly. I added that an unanchored far mouth drifts and costs a fortune by the hour to hold open. So a gate that comes up rich is not yet won: a crew must go through and plant an anchor before the mouth drifts away or a rival's crew does it first. That joins your two ways of colonising into one loop, since every jackpot turns into the slow way with a meter running, and it gives the jackpot a playable shape.
+
+**3. "Adrasteia pillars are a regular level feature": I read it as every zone of the Ink being a pillar's reach**, so a pillar is the Ink's ordinary landmark, not a set piece. If you meant that Adrasteian pillars also stand in flatspace levels, for example as the home rings of their gates, that is one paragraph in [[Adrasteia Space]] and fits the frame.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Self's Readings
+
+**1. The pillars hold the anchors; they are not anchors themselves.** An anchor is half of a cultivated twin. A pillar is a natural thing the stars make, and if it were an anchor, anyone's ring could open on it. What a pillar gives is the only still water in the Ink: the fog moves and the surface heaves, so an anchor holds only inside a pillar's clear column. That makes the monopoly what Self wanted, property won by the slow, deadly walk, and visible on the field: Adrasteian anchor-lights in every column. It also makes rival blind gates into the Ink fail for a reason, since they open in the fog, where nothing holds.
+
+**2. "Who holds anchors holds the map" works differently in each space, and that decides each foothold.** I kept Self's line and made it a table: in flatspace anchors hold anywhere and can be found, so companies compete for lanes; in the Ink they hold only in pillars and cannot be found, so Adrasteia holds everything known; in the Glass they hold anywhere and cannot be hidden, so the Wavecrafters hold the layer by watching; in the Fold an anchor is in two places, so nobody holds it; in hyperspace you cannot find one again without beacons, so the keepers hold it. One mechanism now explains all four footholds, replacing r4's separate reasons.
+
+**3. Beacons and anchors: one instrument, not only one industry.** A beacon is an anchor that also chimes. Both are cultivated twins, and canon's Sacred Instruments, grown where "every disturbance stays", are the natural thing to make them from, so the Glass is where Elysium's anchors are grown. Self's other readings (two expedition kinds, lanes that exist because someone paid, dead gates as monuments, the game's wormholes as gates) are in the notes as proposed.
+
+#### Where I'd Change r4
+
+**1. "Links are found, not built" is gone everywhere.** Links are gates built against anchors, plus rare tears. "Owned by being known" became "owned by holding the anchor". r4's tells stay, and gates and tears both leak their far side. r4's hours split: a gate keeps its anchor's hours (the Ink's gates breathe with their pillar), and a tear keeps its own.
+
+**2. The Ink is unreachable, not only unfindable.** r4 rested Adrasteia's first lock on secrecy. Secrecy is now the second reason; the first is that nobody else has an anchor in any known pillar. r4's arrival scene (you come out in fog and see a pillar far off) is reversed: you come out inside the pillar and are let down into the fog.
+
+**3. Wonderland's "a rare link in a busy port's outer belt might open into hyperspace" is cut.** With gates, a link in a busy port belongs to somebody. A tear could still do it, and the core's rare tears are now "the best-kept secrets in Elysium" in [[Flatspace]].
+
+#### Where I'd Change Canon
+
+**1. [[Pseudospace]]'s corporations that "go all-in with the project of colonizing and exploiting Wonderland" are blind-gate bettors.** This is canon's own line read through your ruling; nothing in it changes.
+
+**2. The [[FTL Trigger]] as humanity's first blind gate.** I put it in as a spacer saying, not a fact: the FTL drive was the first stab into the void, and it landed on Elysium. It fits canon (the drive tapped "aetheric forces" and shunted everyone) and your "tech long before comprehension". If it claims too much, it is one line to delete.
+
+**3. Some tears may be other civilisations' abandoned gates.** Canon puts every civilisation that ever attempted FTL in Elysium. "Treasures we should have left alone" gets an owner this way. This is offered as a rumour only.
+
+**4. The game's exit gate.** In code the run's exit is a wormhole that "leads nowhere". In this frame it reads as a blind gate or a tear. That is an observation for design, not a change.
+
+#### What I Added Beyond the Inputs
+
+- Anchors as cultivated twins; one stays in the ring, one is carried out.
+- Unanchored mouths that drift; the by-the-hour meter; the blind gate as a race.
+- The foothold table (where anchors hold × whether a rival can find them).
+- Anchor registries as deeds, keepers as landlords, the Undertow's "second twin".
+- Dead gates; blind-gate syndicates; founding crews as company saints.
+- Ink gates that open between a pillar's pulses; Adrasteian anchor-lights.
+- Blind gates biased toward hyperspace; Lost crews from blind gates.
+- Three accounts of why an anchor works, one per account of flatness.
+
+#### Still Open
+
+- `why-flatspace-is-flat` (asked). Its answer changes the "Why an Anchor Works" paragraph in [[Anchors and Gates]] and the matching section of [[Flatspace]], not the frame.
+- Whether the slow way is ever played (an expedition mode, or a campaign event) or stays backstory. In the game today, zones join only by wormholes.
+- Whether tears appear on the vanilla map as a zone feature, and how often.
+- Who builds rings. I have the Wavecrafters growing the instruments and companies paying for rings. Rings' own makers are unnamed.
+- Carried from r4: the Cetacean Navigators' survival into Elysium is unchecked, and Emily's and Miss Terri's material is still unread.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Canon read via voidbot, 2026-10-14: [[Pseudospace]], [[Wavecrafters]] (AetheriaLore), [[Aetheric Drive]], [[From Sol to Elysium]], [[FTL Trigger]], the Adrasteia brainstorm (excerpt), and the game's `Wormhole.cs` and travel spec. Operator rulings `gates-need-anchors` and `mostly-gates-few-tears`, and question `why-flatspace-is-flat`, read from the mind. The real-world sources in [[Anchors and Gates]] are from memory and were not checked.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r6.md

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+> Review note, 2026-10-14, for the operator: where lore pass r6 develops or changes your decisions, r5 and canon, and why. This is not lore. Delete it once the calls are made. [[Fauna Lore Review r5]] stays as the record of the previous round. Within each section, changes are ordered by how much each one buys.
+
+Your ruling this round (`ink-pillars-are-suns`): "On the pillars in ink space, those pillars are what they have instead of regular suns, shaping the zone and cradling life around them." I read it as deciding the pillar's role in an Ink zone and illustrating its character. Whether pillars also stand in flatspace was not addressed; it is question 1 below. The gravity campaign opened today makes every central body's well an honest 2D point mass, and a pillar's well follows that law (`aetheria-gravity:target:r1`, invariant `pillars-are-suns`). r6 is built on both.
+
+#### What r6 Did
+
+- **[[Adrasteia Space]]**: a new section, **The Pillar Is the Sun**; the pillar's **eye** (the still water at the bottom of its well, where anchors hold), the **break** (the rim of the eye, where waves come up out of the foot), the **cradle**, the **bank** (the inky clouds, now a ring) and **the dark**, as a new section **The Reach**; **pairs** (zones with two pillars); a new section **Finding Your Way** (range by counting flash to swell, bearing by the swell); the Ink's ecology reorganised around the beat ("in the Ink a day is a wave"); the pillar's slower **breath** and its age; a new section **What a Pillar Is to Adrasteia**; the arrival scene, the map, Why Only Adrasteia, What It Does to People and the sources revised to match.
+- **[[Soot]]**, **[[Rays]]**, **[[Squid]]**, **[[Cachalots]]**: each placed in its band of the reach. Squid lair in the bank; cachalots keep the break and the bank and keep the pillar's breath, not its beat; grey drifts out of the bank.
+- **[[Anchors and Gates]]**: the Ink's anchors hold in a pillar's eye; Why an Anchor Works rewritten on your flatness ruling; blind-gate aim added on your targeting ruling.
+- **[[Flatspace]]**: Why Flatspace Is Flat rewritten on your flatness ruling; Lanes now include aimed blind gates.
+- **[[Wonderland]]**, **[[Spaceborne Fauna]]**, **[[Skein]]**: the Ink's one-liner, the current-review pointer, and the skein's absence from the Ink.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Your Framing
+
+**1. A pillar does everything a sun does except shine on its zone.** Taken whole, "instead of regular suns" would give the Ink daylight, and the fog of your own sketch forbids it: light dies within a short distance. So I made the pillar a sun turned inside out. Its light goes up the column and leaves; its warmth goes out across the surface as dust, a beat at a time. It is still the reach's sun in mass, in well, in being what everything orbits, and in being the only warmth for a long way, which is all your sentence needs. What changes is what the ecology is organised around. It is not light and not steady heat. It is the **beat**: warmth delivered in pulses, so that every living thing in the Ink keeps time with its pillar the way Earth's shore animals keep a tidal clock. That answers the question of what the Ink carries instead of light, and it is the most useful thing in this round, because it gives every Ink animal the same tell (they move on the pulse) and gives a player one thing to learn first.
+
+**2. "Cradling" should be a band at arm's length, not an embrace.** A star cradles life at a distance: too close is lethal, too far is frozen. I gave the pillar the same shape. The eye is still and bright and lifeless, because light is no food there and every beat scours it; the break at its rim is where the waves come up, steep and hot, and only cachalots stay there; the cradle between the break and the bank is where life is; past the bank is the dark. This keeps your "cradling" and makes it mean something a pilot can feel. It also matches what the placement law already says (`fauna-placement-story`: density is zero in well cores).
+
+**3. Your "inky clouds" are a ring, not a cloud at the pillar's foot.** r5 had them densest near the pillars. With a well under the Ink, each wave lifts dust outward and uphill and the dust slides back between waves; it settles where the waves give out. That is a ring at the outer edge of the cradle: the **bank**, the Ink's frost line, where what the pillar throws out finally stops. Squid lair there and cachalots dive after them. The richest dust stays where r5 put it, at the foot, which is now under the water.
+
+**4. "Pillars" in a zone: one, and rarely two.** Your sentence is plural. I read it as one pillar per zone, as with suns, plus rare **pairs**, where two wells run together, two sets of waves cross in a chop, and the dust of both reaches piles up along the seam. Pairs are the richest and hardest water in the Ink. That is question 2.
+
+#### Where I'd Change r5
+
+**1. r5 said the Ink's stars "are not suns". That is reversed.** The stars strung up the column are not suns, any of them; the pillar they make together is.
+
+**2. The anchors move from high in the column to the eye at the bottom of the well.** r5 pictured a tall column with the anchors high up and the foot at the surface. In the game a pillar is a zone's central body, a point at the zone's centre with a well around it, and "high" has nowhere to be. The eye does the same work and comes from the gravity law itself: inside a body's radius the pull falls to zero at the centre (`softened-core`), so the still water an anchor needs is the bottom of the well. In flatspace r5 already had anchors at "a well's slack point"; now both spaces hold anchors where the pulls cancel.
+
+**3. The foot goes under the water, and leaving the eye means crossing the break between beats.** r5 had nobody reach the foot. A ship coming out of an eye must cross the eye's rim to go anywhere, so the rim cannot be the forbidden place. The foot is now below the surface, under the break, and still unreached; the break is crossed between beats, which is when the gates already open. A player's first act in the Ink is timing a crossing to the pulse.
+
+**4. Inky clouds, squid, cachalots and grey move to the bank and the break** (Framing 3).
+
+**5. Two rulings that landed after r5 was committed are now applied.** r5 left `why-flatspace-is-flat` open and gave blind gates no aim; `flatspace-held-by-minds-in-timeless-elysium` and `blind-gate-targeting` were admitted minutes after the r5 commit. [[Flatspace]] now says flatspace is held by minds and the Timeless built that into Elysium, and the three old accounts survive as politics, each partly right. [[Anchors and Gates]] now says an anchor is held the same way, and that aim was learned first for nearby flatspace and barely exists into Wonderland. Your ruling ("the hidden downside is so does every other thing that ever got confined to this place, and some of them come from very strange places") suggests that the layers of Wonderland are other prisoners' realities. I put that in as something spacers think, not a fact; question 4 asks whether to make it one.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Canon
+
+Nothing in canon changes. The flatness ruling settles canon's edge creed (*we brought flat space with us*) as true about the mechanism, which is a confirmation, not a change.
+
+#### For the Game, Not the Lore
+
+None of this is decided by the lore, but it fits what is in force:
+
+- **The eye is the softened core** and the bands are distances from the body, so the reach's bands are a closed-form function of radius and the pulse phase, which is how the placement law already works.
+- **A pair is two wells superposed** (`wells-superpose`), and its seam falls on the edge of the power diagram over the bodies (`body-diagram-metric-ruled`), the same edge the Skein's strands follow in flatspace.
+- **The swell is not the flow.** The Ink's loose matter would drift with a radial pulse, not with flatspace's curl-warped noise. Per-zone flow environments are outside the fauna target today. Whether ships feel the swell is question 3.
+
+#### (1) What I Added Beyond the Inputs
+
+- The pillar as a sun turned inside out: light up and away, warmth out by the beat; "in the Ink a day is a wave".
+- The reach and its bands: eye, break, cradle, bank, dark; the bank as the Ink's frost line.
+- The eye as the still water at the bottom of the well, and so as the only place an anchor holds.
+- The foot under the water; crossing the break between beats.
+- Pairs, with a chop and a seam of dust between two eyes.
+- Navigation by the beat: range by counting flash to swell, bearing by the swell, the bank as a wall, no fix between pillars.
+- The pillar's breath (the Ink's seasons) and its age: young pillars beat fast with wide cradles, old ones slow with narrow ones, and a pillar that stops takes its reach with it.
+- What a pillar is to Adrasteia: a clock, a name that is not an address, a sun that can go out, and the reason they still send founders out the slow way. Keepers in shuttered stations in the eye.
+- Returners keep time to a beat, and find a steady sun faintly unbearable.
+- A spacer theory that the Ink is held by something else confined in Elysium, and that the pillars are where it holds hardest.
+- From the two late rulings: anchors are held the way flatspace is; aimed blind gates opened most lanes past the oldest.
+
+#### (2) Where I Would Change Your Ideas or Existing Canon
+
+- Your pillars do a sun's work but do not light their zone (Framing 1).
+- Your cradle is a band at arm's length; the pillar's own water is lifeless (Framing 2).
+- Your inky clouds are a ring at the cradle's edge, not a cloud at the pillar (Framing 3).
+- One pillar per zone, with rare pairs (Framing 4).
+- r5's stars-are-not-suns, anchors-high-in-the-column and foot-at-the-surface are reversed (r5 changes 1 to 3).
+- Canon: no change (see above).
+
+#### (3) Open Questions
+
+1. **Do pillars stand in flatspace?** Your ruling left it open. *My recommendation: no natural pillar stands in flatspace.* Flatspace is where minds hold Euclid; a pillar is the Ink's law, and one standing in the open would also give away that the Ink exists somewhere a telescope could follow. A pillar may be glimpsed through a tear, as the rarest of tells. Adrasteia's flatspace gate rings stay ordinary rings.
+2. **May an Ink zone have two pillars?** *My recommendation: yes, rarely, as pairs.* The gravity law already superposes wells and the Skein already draws the seam between them, so a pair costs no new engine, and it gives the Ink a rare rich zone that is hard to fly. If you want every Ink zone to read as one sun, cut one paragraph in [[Adrasteia Space]].
+3. **Do ships feel the swell?** The lore has ships riding waves out and fighting them in, while `flow-moves-what-ruled` says ships do not drift with the flow. *My recommendation: yes. The swell is not the flow; it is a short radial push on each beat, felt by ships as well as loose matter.* That is what makes the beat playable: timing the break, riding out, struggling in. It is a design fork for a later cut; until it is ruled, the lore stays as written.
+4. **Is the Ink something else's reality, held the way we hold flatspace?** Your flatness ruling makes it possible: everything confined in Elysium imposes its reality, and some of it comes from very strange places. *My recommendation: keep it a spacer theory and never confirm it.* It would explain too much at once (why only the eye holds an anchor, what the stars are, who supplies Adrasteia), and canon wants the Ink's nature kept dark. It is worth more as a rumour.
+
+Carried from r5 and still open, not asked again: whether the slow way is ever played; whether tears appear on the vanilla map; who builds rings; the Cetacean Navigators' survival into Elysium; Emily's and Miss Terri's material.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Operator rulings `ink-pillars-are-suns`, `flatspace-held-by-minds-in-timeless-elysium`, `blind-gate-targeting`, and the fauna campaign's rulings in force, and `aetheria-gravity:target:r1`, read from the mind, 2026-10-14. The real-world sources added to [[Adrasteia Space]] (the frost line, circatidal clocks, coral mass spawning, flash-to-bang ranging) are cited from memory and were not checked.
+
+#### Rulings After r6
+
+You answered all four questions the recommended way (`pillars-not-in-flatspace`, `pillar-pairs-rare`, `ships-feel-swell`, `ink-held-reality-theory`). On the swell you added a note that changes the physics, which you gave as a sketch, not a decision: "The ink does not need to obey normal gravity, the pillar can be a negative gravity singularity with a bowl around it, kind of like a Bundt tin." A pillar's well therefore no longer follows the flatspace law (the gravity target dropped that in r3; the Ink's law is `aetheria-release:follow_up:ink-gravity-law`). The lore was swept in place, with no r7.
+
+**What changed.**
+
+- **[[Adrasteia Space]]**: the pillar now **pushes**. All around it the ground sinks into a ring-shaped **bowl**, and far out it levels into the dark. The Pillar Is the Sun now says the pillar is a sun turned inside out twice: no daylight, and a push instead of a pull. The bands are now eye, fall, bank, cradle, dark:
+  - The **eye** is the still summit, where the push cancels. It is a balance point, and anchors still hold there.
+  - The **fall** is the steep cone down from the eye. It replaces r6's "break".
+  - The **bank** has moved to the floor of the bowl, where dust settles. It is no longer a ring at the outer edge, and the frost-line comparison is gone.
+  - The **cradle** is the outer wall of the bowl.
+  - Ships feel each beat as a shove outward.
+  - A swell races down the fall, crosses the bowl, slows as it climbs the outer wall and dies near the top.
+  - Going home to the eye means climbing the fall against both the push and the waves.
+  - A ship coming in from the dark drops into the bowl easily, and leaving it either way is a climb.
+  - In a pair, the two bowls run together into one trough.
+  - The held-reality theory is now explicitly argued and never settled.
+- **[[Soot]]**, **[[Rays]]**, **[[Squid]]**, **[[Cachalots]]**: re-placed on the tin. Soot and rays live on the outer wall, and rays ride the swell up it and slide back. Squid lie in the bank on the bowl's floor. Cachalots rise on the fall and dive into the bank. The foot lies under the eye.
+- **[[Anchors and Gates]]**: the Ink's anchors hold "in a pillar's eye, the still summit where its push cancels". Tears gain the rare glimpse of a pillar from flatspace, as the surest sign that the Ink is near.
+
+**Superseded in this note.** Under Where I'd Change Your Framing, 2 and 3 described the well-and-band shape and the bank as a frost line. Under Where I'd Change r5, 2 ("the eye at the bottom of the well", from the softened core) and 3 ("the break") are superseded too. So are the first bullet of For the Game ("the eye is the softened core") and the eye, break and frost-line items of the added list. In the second For the Game bullet, the pair's seam is now where two bowls overlap. Whether the Skein's power-diagram edge still marks it depends on the Ink's gravity law.
+
+**Where I'd change your sketch.**
+
+1. **A still summit, not a singularity.** A true singularity pushes without limit at its centre, so nothing could sit in the column. Every gate into the Ink opens there, and the keepers live there. I kept the push finite and let it cancel at the very centre, which gives a balance point like a ball on a hilltop: anything set down stays, and anything nudged off is thrown down the fall. Arrival then reads well: the pilot lets go of the anchor and the pillar's push takes the ship. In both spaces anchors still hold where forces cancel.
+2. **Life is on the outer wall, not at the bottom of the bowl.** Read literally, "cradle" puts life on the floor of the bowl. But the floor is where the dust and the dead settle, and the swell moves life up the wall: a pocket is fastest on the fall and slowest as it climbs the outer wall, so warm water lingers there longest. The floor belongs to the bank and the squid.
+3. **Past the outer wall the ground levels off.** A tin has a rim and nothing beyond it. I let the push give out so the ground settles level, which makes the dark a beatless flat between reaches. It also means pairs merge their bowls instead of meeting at a ridge.
+
+**New questions.**
+
+1. **Is the centre a still summit or a true singularity?** *My recommendation: a still summit.* It keeps a place for anchors, gates and keepers in the eye, and keeps one rule for anchors in both spaces (they hold where forces cancel). A true singularity would push the anchors out to the bowl floor, among the animals.
+2. **What lies past a bowl's outer wall?** *My recommendation: level ground, the dark, with no beat.* The alternative is ground that keeps rising into ridges between reaches. Ridges would make the slow way a climb over a watershed and give pairs a ridge instead of a shared trough; that is dramatic, but it adds a second slope the Ink's gravity law would have to carry.
+
+#### The Pillar Is a Wall
+
+Ruling `pillar-is-a-wall` corrects the pillar's scale, in your words: "this spike should be as big around as a large sun currently is, an impassable wall of nebulae glowing and frothing with dark energy, maybe it does summit but it does so so high up that you'll never see it, much less get anywhere close even with the strongest thrusters in the game. It presents up close as a vertical wall of gravity you have no hope of climbing". You also said: "You can indeed do sick bounce maneuvers off of a big negative mass like this". This overturns the still summit above and settles the first of the two questions just above. The lore was swept again in place.
+
+**What changed.**
+
+- **[[Adrasteia Space]]**: nothing stands on or in a pillar.
+  - **The wall.** The pillar fills the zone's centre like a large sun's disc. From the bowl it is a glow behind the fog that fills half the sky. Up close it is a face of frothing nebula with moving dark lanes, and the push rises from slope to vertical in the last stretch, the **foot**, where thrusters at full only hold a ship a while before it is thrown back.
+  - **The waves come from the face.** On each beat the whole face heaves at once and throws a swell off all the way round, carrying dust frothed off it. The richest dust is now the froth on the face, not a foot under the water. The swell runs down the foot, sweeps the floor, and climbs and dies on the outer slope, as before.
+  - **Anchors, gates and keepers live on the floor of the bowl, in the bank.** The arrival scene now opens in the bank's dark under the glow. Keepers live in cold stations among the squid; it is Adrasteia's most dangerous posting and its most honoured.
+  - **A new section, Meeting the Wall:** the **bounce** (the foot hands a ship's speed back at the matching slant, for free; pursuit ends at the wall), the **kiss** (opening the scoops at the top of a bounce for the froth; on the beat the face's heave is added and the ship is thrown), and timing every bounce to the count. Spacers say *kiss the wall, don't lean on it*. **Wall-kissers** join Who Goes In.
+  - Bands are now face, foot, bank, cradle, dark. The old charts' picture of stars strung up a column survives only as what Adrasteia draws inside the wall.
+- **[[Cachalots]]**: they skim the froth at the foot, bounce off the wall without seeming to try, and dive into the bank. **[[Soot]]** and **[[Rays]]** are reworded from "outer wall" to "outer slope" so that "wall" means the pillar.
+- **[[Anchors and Gates]]**: the Ink's anchors hold on the floor of a pillar's bowl and creep round it. A pillar glimpsed through a tear is now a wall of frothing light. **[[Wonderland]]**: the Ink's gates sit in bowls.
+
+**The anchor's new home, and what it does.** The floor of the bowl is the right home, and the rule improves on it: anchors hold where forces cancel *and push back*. The floor is a valley, so an anchor nudged off it slides home. The old summit was a hilltop, which needed lore to explain why anything stayed there. Moving the anchors there does four things to the lore:
+
+1. **Gates open among the animals, in the darkest place in the reach.** Arrival is now a held breath in the bank, not a lamp. Keepers have to run cold to live, which ties Adrasteia's second lock (the Ink cannot be worked warm) to its first (only they hold anchors).
+2. **Anchors creep.** A valley that runs round the pillar holds an anchor in one direction only, so it creeps along the floor. I kept this: an Ink anchor is "never where it was planted, only how far round", keepers follow their anchors, and an anchor's tuning carries its creep. That is question 1.
+3. **The monopoly loosens in principle.** Any floor of any pillar can now hold an anchor, so a rival's lucky blind gate that came up on a floor could be anchored by a crew that survived the bank. None is known to have done it. I kept that: a rumoured rival anchor in some bank is a better story than a law of nature saying it cannot be done.
+4. **The richest dust moves from an unreachable foot to a reachable but deadly face.** The froth is taken by kissing the wall, which is a craft and not a secret. This gives you the bounce play you described and an economic reason to master it.
+
+**Where I'd change your framing.** One place only. "A vertical wall of gravity you have no hope of climbing" should still have a **foot**: a short stretch where the slope steepens from gentle to vertical, instead of a cliff with no lead-in. A bounce needs that stretch to read as a craft, because that is where the pilot feels the push building and chooses the slant. A true cliff would make every contact the same collision.
+
+**New questions.**
+
+1. **Do Ink anchors creep round the pillar?** *My recommendation: yes.* Creep is what a ring-shaped valley does, and it gives keepers a job and gates a phase. The alternative is to hold anchors only where the field cancels in every direction. In a single reach no such place exists, so every gate into the Ink would have to open in the narrows of a pair, and pairs are rare.
+2. **What does the wall give back?** *My recommendation: exactly what a ship brings between beats, a clean mirror at the matching slant; and on the beat the face's heave is added on top.* That makes bouncing free and predictable most of the time and makes the count the whole skill of the kiss. It is for the Ink gravity law (`aetheria-release:follow_up:ink-gravity-law`).
+
+#### The Wall Is a Steepening Ramp
+
+Ruling `pillar-wall-steepening-ramp`, in your words: "How hard the bounce feels depends on how fast you're going", and "You got it, it is indeed a steepening ramp". This adopts the foot argued for above and answers question 2 of The Pillar Is a Wall. [[Adrasteia Space]] now says the following:
+
+- **The foot is a ramp** that steepens without end. The Up Close scene and the bands table say so; no ship climbs high enough to touch the face.
+- **The bounce's outcome works like a mirror.** A ship leaves as fast as it came, at roughly its slant in, bent a little by the pillar's curve.
+- **The bounce's feel follows speed.** A slow ship turns in a soft arc low on the foot. A fast ship climbs high and is turned sharply. A fast ship at a shallow angle only glances off.
+- **The kiss needs speed.** The froth hangs high on the ramp, so a kiss is a bounce taken fast and nearly straight in, the hardest turn the wall gives. The beat's extra shove stays.
+- **Wall-kissers come in fast and straight.** A new spacer saying covers the soft touch: *she arcs, she doesn't bounce*.
+- **Who Goes In fix:** the Hunters line had lost its last sentence to the Wall-kissers line in the previous sweep. It is restored.
+
+Question 1 (whether anchors creep) stays open and has been routed to the Ink gravity work. How fast the ramp steepens is a tuning value for that cut, not lore.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Flatspace.md

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+**"Out here a kilometre is a kilometre. Be grateful. Further on, it isn't."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, revised r5 and r6, for the operator's review. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. Flatspace is the vanilla galaxy: Sol, and the map of nebulae and stars the game draws today. Its other half is [[Wonderland]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]], [[Fauna Lore Review r5]] and [[Fauna Lore Review r6]]. Ruled: flatspace is held by minds, an effect the Timeless built into Elysium (`flatspace-held-by-minds-in-timeless-elysium`).
+
+Flatspace is everywhere you can live without being changed. Its physics is strange by Sol's standards (the [[Aether]] has a current, heat turns into light, things live in the nebulae), but it is physics: it holds still long enough to be learned, charted, insured and taught. You can colonise it without accepting that reality has been altered. Most people in Elysium never leave it.
+
+#### Sol
+
+Sol sits in a bubble with no nebula in it: a black, clear sky, the old planets where they always were, no current to speak of and nothing alive in the dark. Spacers call it the desert, and Solar people call everywhere else the weather. The bubble is the one place in Elysium where space behaves exactly as the textbooks from before the Rupture say it should.
+
+#### Vanilla Elysium
+
+Beyond the bubble, through the wormholes, lies the rest of flatspace: nebulae lit from inside by [[Glim]], braided currents, gravity wells with whirlpools, and the [[Open Water]] ecology. This is where the ordinary factions live: the core worlds, the corporations, the ports and insurers, the registries and the courts. Canon calls its settlements the Flatlanders' camps, built on islands of stability. From inside, the islands look like a continent.
+
+Flatspace has a shape that people feel without naming:
+
+- **The core** is settled, busy and thin in fauna. Ships keep the krill scattered and the sharks away.
+- **The edges** are richer. The current is stronger, the glim thicker, the animals bigger, and that is where the **Chaos factions** live: canon puts them at the edges of stable Euclidean space. They are the ones who keep a foot on each side.
+- **The gates into [[Wonderland]]** stand mostly at the edges, because that is where the people who build them live; the few rare tears in the core are the best-kept secrets in Elysium. Holding an anchor in a layer is how a faction stops being an edge faction and starts holding a foothold [new].
+
+#### Lanes
+
+Every wormhole on the map is a gate, and every gate is a pair of anchors somebody paid for [new]. The shape of flatspace, which zone opens onto which, is not geography. It is history: where a crew once got to the far end carrying an anchor, the slow way across the dark or through an aimed blind gate thrown a short way ahead, and where a company could afford a ring at the near end. The oldest lanes run out of Sol's bubble, and the names of the crews who walked them are the names of the oldest companies ([[Anchors and Gates]]).
+
+Between the lanes stand the **dead gates**: rings opened blind that came up on nothing and were never anchored, left in the dark when the money ran out. Some are shut; some still hold a sliver of mouth onto somewhere useless, too expensive to close properly. Each is a monument to a company that bet everything and lost it. Salvagers strip them, pirates hide in them, and pilots passing one dip their lights [new].
+
+#### Pirates
+
+Pirates are flatspace's scourge, and only flatspace's. Piracy needs what flatspace has: lanes with traffic on them, charts that stay true, ports that will buy without asking, and a place to hide that is still a place. Wonderland gives none of that. A raider that runs for a link to shake pursuit may come out the other side, but rarely comes back a raider, and the stories it tells after are not pirate stories [new].
+
+#### Why Flatspace Is Flat
+
+Because minds hold it flat, and Elysium was built so that they could [new].
+
+The [[Aether]] answers to minds ([[Cognitive Interfacing]]), and wherever enough minds expect Euclid, it gives them Euclid. That is not an accident of the Aether. Elysium is a shard of bespoke spacetime the Timeless built for their prisoners ([[Temporal Nonlinearity]]), and they built that answer into it: they gave humanity the space it had always lived in, and the power to impose its reality on their creation. Sol is the flattest place there is because it is the oldest and most crowded expectation in Elysium.
+
+The cost was hidden. The gift was not given to humanity alone. Everything ever confined in Elysium imposes its reality the same way, and some of those things come from very strange places. Where human expectation runs thin, theirs shows through, and some spacers think that is all [[Wonderland]] is: other prisoners' ideas of how space should be, held as hard as we hold ours [new].
+
+The old accounts survive as politics, and each is partly right:
+
+- **The core worlds' account.** Flat is how space is, and pseudospace is an incursion into an orderly universe. Wrong on both counts, and the most comfortable thing to believe.
+- **The edge account.** Canon's line, and the Chaos factions' creed: *we brought flat space with us; we are the incursion.* Right about the mechanism. The edges are where human expectation is thinnest, which is why the Chaos factions live with a foot on each side.
+- **The Timeless account.** Flatspace is the cell, made comfortable. Right about who built it; wrong if it thinks the cell was built for us alone.
+
+The same mechanism is what an anchor is ([[Anchors and Gates#Why an Anchor Works|Why an Anchor Works]]).
+
+Spacers say: *flat is a promise, not a fact*; and, of a crewmate back from a link with a far look, *she's been off the map*.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Gleaners.md

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+**"Loot fast. The gleaners are coming."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: scavenger, detritivore. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Fist-sized, armoured, all jaw and gut, moving in loose swarms of a few dozen. Gleaners eat what is dead: carcasses, wreckage, spilled cargo, the debris that spirals down every well. They are why wrecks in pseudospace do not last [new].
+
+**Eats.** Organic matter first, then metal. Their gut grinds and concentrates metal from scrap and bone into dense pellets, the way some deep-sea animals concentrate minerals [new].
+
+**Moves: the tell.** A swarm drifts with the current until it smells a fall, then swims straight to it. Gleaners moving against the current means something died upstream.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A swarm heading somewhere is a pointer to a fresh wreck, a whale fall, or a fight. Gleaners on a hull mean the hull is dead, or about to be.
+
+**On sensors.** A cluster of tiny returns, like debris that knows where it is going.
+
+**How it hurts.** They eat loot: dropped cargo and salvage drift in the current and gleaners strip it. A disabled or stationary ship gets nibbled: slow hull damage and lost external modules until it moves [new].
+
+**Yield.** Gut-metal: refined metal pellets, worth more by weight than ore. Harvested by netting fat swarms after a feast.
+
+**Lives.** Debris discs on the inner slopes of wells, where the drain carries everything; old battlefields; trailing behind whales; and anywhere something just died.
+
+*Designers:* field drawn to wrecks and drops; competes with players for loot; hazard is attrition on stationary hulls.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Glim.md

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+**"Sol is cloudless because nothing there is alive."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: producer. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Glim is the living part of the nebula. Most of a nebula is dust and gas; the part that glows is glim, motes smaller than a grain of sand, each a shell of membrane that catches light and keeps it. A thick glim front looks like a nebula lit from inside [new].
+
+**Eats.** Starlight inside a sun's light radius, and heat-light everywhere else: the photons the [[Aether]] makes out of heat ([[Negative Entropy]]). Glim is thickest on the fronts where the current piles it, on the warm floors of wells, and around wormhole mouths.
+
+**Moves.** It doesn't. It drifts with the current, exactly. Glim is the current made visible; a pilot reads the stream by watching it.
+
+**What a pilot sees.** Colour and brightness in the nebula. Where glim brightens, something warm is near: it feeds on heat and glows as it feeds.
+
+**On sensors.** Background. It is not a contact. But a hull running hot in thick glim wears a halo: the glim around it brightens, and a hunter looks for the bright spot with no contact in it [new].
+
+**How it hurts.** It doesn't, directly. It gives away the hot.
+
+**Yield.** *Skimming*: scooping concentrate from a front. Cheap feedstock for vats and Bloom farms, and a mild coolant that gets warm and glows.
+
+**Lives.** Everywhere outside Sol, thickest on fronts, well floors, near mouths and on battlefields. Thicker the further a zone lies from Sol, out toward the edges of flatspace. Absent in Sol, which is why Sol is cloudless.
+
+*Designers:* this is the existing nebula and stardust, read as partly alive. Its one hook is the halo: heat in glim raises visibility.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Hyperspace.md

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+**"Every road in hyperspace is short. That's the trap."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, revised r5, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]]: the hyperbolic one. Developed from the operator's sketch (ruling `hyperspace-is-the-warp`): a very abstract place where navigating is the main challenge; it can connect you to your destination, but like entering the Warp, unless you are extremely prepared and have beacons to navigate by, you are not getting out, much less at your destination and intact. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]] and [[Fauna Lore Review r5]].
+
+#### What It Looks Like
+
+Almost nothing. The gate closes behind you and there is no nebula, no slope worth the name, no stars: a grey-violet nothing that seems to go on further than nothing should. Sensors report contacts that are close and then, very quickly, contacts that are impossibly far. What you can hear is a handful of beacons, chiming their codes, and between them silence.
+
+**The map.** Hyperspace's galaxy map is a disc. You are always at its centre. Near you, things are drawn at a sensible size; toward the rim, more and more of the layer crowds into less and less of the picture, and the rim itself is infinitely far away. Beacons are the only labels. Known roads are arcs from beacon to beacon. Everything else is rim [new]. (This is how hyperbolic space is usually drawn: the Poincaré disc, which HyperRogue uses too.)
+
+#### How It Works
+
+Hyperspace is hyperbolic: there is exponentially more room in it the further you go [new].
+
+- **Every road is short.** Room grows so fast that a few hundred kilometres from any point lie more places than in all of flatspace. Gates from zones that are far apart in flatspace open close together here. That is why anyone goes: from the right gate, on the right heading, a crossing that takes weeks in flatspace takes hours.
+- **Every error is fatal.** Two courses that leave together a hair apart drift apart exponentially, not steadily. A heading error of a thousandth of a degree, harmless in flatspace, puts you somewhere you have never heard of after a short crossing, with more room around you than anyone could ever search. Dead reckoning does not degrade here. It fails.
+- **Nothing carries.** A signal spreads into exponentially more room as it travels, so it fades exponentially too. A beacon a short way off is loud; a little further it is gone. You cannot hear your destination. You can only hear the next beacon.
+- **The drive is held open.** Coupling a drive to this Aether is a transition that never finishes. The whole crossing, the drive is held in it, and holding it makes heat and wears the coupling. The longer you are lost, the hotter and more fragile the ship.
+
+#### Beacons
+
+Beacons are survival, and so they are an economy [new].
+
+- **A beacon is an anchor that sings.** The same twinned instrument the Wavecrafters grow for every anchor ([[Anchors and Gates]]), tuned to chime as well as hold. A gate from flatspace into hyperspace opens on a beacon, and that is the only kind of gate into hyperspace that is any use. The keepers are not just lighthouse crews; they are the landlords of every gate in the layer.
+- **Where blind gates go.** Hyperspace has more room in it than every other space together, so a gate opened with no anchor is likelier to land here than anywhere: somewhere on the rim, out of earshot of any beacon. That is the commonest way a blind gate fails, and some of the Lost are the crews who went through to see [new].
+
+- **What one is.** A hull anchored at a surveyed point, chiming a code that says where it is relative to the beacons around it. Hear two and you have a fix; steer toward the one whose code is nearest your destination, then the next, and you arrive. (Real networks route this way: give every node a hyperbolic coordinate and the greedy hop is almost always right.)
+- **Laying one.** This is the slow way, a step at a time. A layer flies out from the last beacon, toward the rim of its earshot, and anchors a new one before the old one fades. Because signals die so fast, chains are dense and every beacon is a crew's work. A road is years of laying.
+- **Keeping one.** Beacons drift, wear and go quiet. Someone has to live aboard. The **keepers** are the people of hyperspace: beacon crews, often for life, who maintain the chain and are bound to answer any distress call within earshot. The bond comes from the [[Cetacean Navigators]]' rescue obligation, carried into a place where it is the only law [new].
+- **Paying for it.** Crossings are tolled per beacon. The chain's codes are sold as a subscription, and a ship without the current codes hears chimes it cannot read. Insurers price a crossing by its chain, and will not cover a ship that left a road.
+- **The transition in and out.** A gate into hyperspace needs the drive carried through a hard coupling transition, which is exactly what canon's [[Wavecrafters]] sell: calibration profiles, one per link. An Undertow profile that passes the berth check and fails mid-transition is how most ships that are never seen again are lost.
+- **False beacons.** A beacon is a claim about where you are, and a ship believes it because it must. A forged chime, one wrong code in a chain, sends a ship along a road to nowhere, and nobody will ever find the wreck because there is too much room to search. Wreckers do this to take cargo at a fake road's end. It is the most feared trick in the layer, and the one an electronic-warfare crew is best placed to play.
+
+#### Arriving Intact
+
+The operator's word "intact" is literal. A crossing that goes wrong arrives, if it arrives, late, hot, worn, followed and changed: drive coupling half spent; radiators past their limits; the wrong side of a toll; with something behind it; and with a crew who have spent too long in a place with too much room in it. Canon's design note already says arrival state carries the route's consequences. Hyperspace is where that bill is largest [new].
+
+#### Who Lives There
+
+- **The keepers**, on their beacons.
+- **The Lost.** Crews who never found a road out and did not die. They live in the rooms between roads, altered past going home. Sometimes they answer distress calls, and sometimes they make them. Keepers will tell you which kind of call to answer. They will not tell you how they know [new].
+- **Wisps.** Animals that chime. They learned the beacons' cadence the way a lyrebird learns a chainsaw, and a lost ship that follows one goes where wisps go: further out [new].
+- **Corbies.** Scavengers that find lost ships, because lost ships wander in circles and corbies follow circles. A corbie on your board means you are lost, and have been for a while [new].
+
+#### What It Does to People
+
+Hyperspace takes the way home. Returners have too much room in them: they do not sleep well in small cabins, and they look past people toward a rim that is not there. It gives the roads: a returner knows routes nobody has charted, and every keeper started as one. Tales from hyperspace are the old ones about mortals who spent a night under the hill and came back to find the world older or younger than they left it. Whether hyperspace does anything to time, or only to the people who tell the tales, is not decided [new].
+
+Spacers say: *two chimes or turn back*; *never leave the road for a call you can't place*; *a wisp sounds like home*; and, of a crewmate staring at nothing, *she's seeing the rim*.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Checked: canon [[Wavecrafters]], [[Aetheric Drive]], Galaxy and Navigation, and Cetacean Navigators notes via voidbot, 2026-10-14; the operator's ruling text. From memory, not checked:
+
+- Hyperbolic geometry: in the hyperbolic plane the circumference and area within radius r grow like e^r, and geodesics leaving a point at a small angle separate like sinh of the distance travelled; any geometry text (e.g. Anderson, J. W., *Hyperbolic Geometry*, Springer).
+- Greedy routing in hyperbolic coordinates: Kleinberg, R. (2007). Geographic routing using hyperbolic space. *IEEE INFOCOM*; Boguñá, M., Papadopoulos, F. & Krioukov, D. (2010). Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping. *Nature Communications* 1.
+- HyperRogue (Zeno Rogue), a roguelike played on hyperbolic tilings, drawn in the Poincaré disc with the player at the centre.
+- The Warp of Warhammer 40,000, and Navigators who steer by the Astronomican, as the genre ancestor of a beacon-dependent layer.
+- Lyrebirds imitating mechanical sounds; will-o'-the-wisp folklore of false lights leading travellers astray; the (largely unsubstantiated) legend of wreckers luring ships with false lights.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Krill.md

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+**"Calm water."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: swarming grazer. Kept from the operator's sketch and from r1, changed: krill graze [[Glim]] rather than make their own food, and they drift with the [[Aether]] current, not with the orbit. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Clouds of thousands of finger-length creatures, each a flat membrane around a speck of dark tissue. One krill is nearly invisible. A cloud glints like a dust lane.
+
+**Eats.** Glim, filtered from the current. Krill gather where glim does: in long lines on the fronts, along the strands of the [[Skein]], on the shoulders of wells.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** A cloud drifts with the current, exactly, and each krill sways in a small, never-repeating loop around its place in the cloud. Krill drift; they never travel.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Ships do not drift; a ship in a cloud has to fly the current by hand. A member that holds still against the stream, or sways too regularly, or is warm, is a hull. *Going krill* is the cheapest disguise there is, and every hunter checks it first.
+
+**On sensors.** Aggregate at range, individual returns close in. Below identification, a krill return and a small hull return look alike.
+
+**How it hurts.** It doesn't attack; it fouls. Flying through a dense cloud clogs radiators and smears sensor glass, and dense krill block sight lines like vapour [new]. A cloud hit hard flashes its stored light all at once: harmless, and very visible.
+
+**Yield.** *Raking*: sweeping a cloud with a net or field. Krill meal for vat feed and Bloom farms. Cheap per tonne, wanted forever. A raked cloud is back in days.
+
+**Lives.** Fronts, skein strands, well shoulders, the big grounds around gas giants. Never in Sol.
+
+*Designers:* field; motion is current plus bounded sway; hazards are radiator fouling, sensor smear, obscuration; fast respawn.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Lanterns.md

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+**"Never answer a light in the slack."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: ambush predator, mimic. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+A lantern is a mouth with a light in front of it, the size of a gunship, almost all of it dark. The light is a lure organ that pulses warm and uneven, the way a crippled reactor does [new]. Deep-sea anglerfish hunt this way; so do lanterns.
+
+**Eats.** [[Sharks]], mostly, which come to warm things, and the occasional salvager, which also does.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** It doesn't. A lantern settles in slack water, the saddles between wells where the current goes still, and holds there for weeks. Its lure pulses on an irregular rhythm.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A warm, ship-sized return that holds still and flickers looks exactly like a disabled ship, and a disabled ship looks like salvage or a distress call. That is the point. Tells: it sits in slack water and nowhere else; nothing small lives near it; and sharks that should be circling it are missing. Real wrecks drift. Lanterns don't.
+
+**On sensors.** A ship-sized warm contact, stationary, thermal flickering. Below identification it is indistinguishable from a crippled hull. It does not lie: its heat is real heat. It is the reading that misleads.
+
+**How it hurts.** The strike: anything that closes to within reach is engulfed, held and crushed, heavy hull damage, and the lantern does not let go until it is hurt badly enough [new].
+
+**Yield.** The lure organ, which makes thermal decoys that pulse like a damaged reactor; pirates use them to fake distress [new]. Lantern hide is dark enough to sell to anyone who runs cold.
+
+**Lives.** Saddles and slack points between bodies, often near a [[Void Spiders|spider]] net. Rare, one to a saddle.
+
+*Designers:* anchor that holds station; the mimic is a real emission, so it fits the rule that fauna never write false beliefs. A hazard that rewards the hunter's patience and punishes the rescuer's haste.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Limpets.md

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+**"Scrape the limpets or wear a lamp."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: parasite. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Palm-sized discs with a sucking foot and a back of membrane. Limpets drift until they meet something warm, then fasten and drink its heat. Their natural hosts are [[Whales]], which carry thousands. Ships are warm enough [new].
+
+**Eats.** Heat, through the hull.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Drifts with the current while free; rides its host after that.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A limpet colony is a lamp: limpets glow faintly as they feed, so a crusted ship is brighter than it should be. A hunter who sees a cluster of small glowing returns in a fixed pattern, moving together and ignoring the current, has found a hull.
+
+**On sensors.** A crusted ship's signature is raised; that is the whole harm and the whole tell.
+
+**How it hurts.** A slow drain: heat and a little energy, and a raised signature that ruins stealth until they are scraped off. Running hot through drifting limpets, or loitering near a whale, picks them up [new].
+
+**Yield.** Little. Scraping is a dock service. Limpet foot glue is sold as a hull sealant.
+
+**Lives.** Around whales, in thick glim, and wherever warm ships loiter.
+
+*Designers:* a status on the ship rather than a contact: signature up, small heat drain, removed at dock or by burning hot.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Minnows.md

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+**"A school that parts for nothing is a warning."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: schooling forage. Kept from the operator's sketch and r1, with the motion law moved from the orbit to the current. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Hand-sized darts of dark membrane with a row of light organs down each flank. A school in motion flickers like a swarm of sparks.
+
+**Eats.** [[Krill]], grazed off the downstream edge of a cloud. Minnows are the middle of the web: almost everything above them eats them.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** The school drifts with the current; inside it, every fish mills fast and never stops. A school parts around hulls and shots.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A ship can sit at a school's centre and match the current, but not the milling. Wearing the school works at range and fails up close. A school that parts around empty space has something in the gap. A school balled tight and dim has a [[Sharks|shark]] near it.
+
+**On sensors.** One bright smear at range; a storm of tiny returns close in.
+
+**How it hurts.** A startled school fires every light organ at once, blinding passive sensors for a moment; pilots spook schools into a hunter's face to cover an escape. A school that is attacked rams back: hundreds of tiny hits that strip paint, sensors and point defences from a ship that lingers [new].
+
+**Yield.** *Netting*, usually after stunning the school with a tuned resonance pulse. Photophores (the light organs) become flares and sensor glass; meal from the rest.
+
+**Lives.** Downstream of krill, along fronts and skein. Where minnows are, sharks follow.
+
+*Designers:* field; current plus fast milling; scatter on disturbance; hazards are glare and swarm damage.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Moths.md

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+**"If the moths are thick, someone is lying on the Aethernet."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: mind-grazer. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Pale, flickering things the size of a hand, with wide, soft, dusted membranes. The [[Aether]] is attuned to cognition: minds and information bend it ([[Cognitive Interfacing]]). Moths feed on that bend. They are drawn to crews, ship minds, [[Aethernet]] transmitters and stations, and to [[Spirits]], which they eat until nothing is left [new].
+
+**Eats.** Mind-light: the Aether disturbance around thinking things and around signal. Loud transmitters, AGI cores, [[Necrotech]] and espers are feasts.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Drift with the current until they sense a mind, then flutter toward it in a cloud that thickens around the brightest source.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Moths gather where someone is transmitting or thinking hard. A moth cloud with no contact in it is a ship running dark but talking. Necrotech hulls attract them in swarms, which is the dissidents' favourite argument that bound spirits are minds.
+
+**On sensors.** A soft cloud of tiny returns, centred on a source.
+
+**How it hurts.** They eat signal: a thick cloud garbles comms and Aethernet traffic around its host [new]. Espers inside a moth cloud report a pressure behind the eyes and lose focus. Bound spirits in necrotech degrade faster.
+
+**Yield.** Moth dust, the scales from their wings. A pinch lets a non-esper brush the Aether for a few minutes. It is illegal everywhere, sold everywhere, and corporate media call it a hallucinogen, as they call espers hallucinating [new].
+
+**Lives.** Around stations, relays and busy lanes; thinly everywhere else. They cannot live in Sol, which has no current to carry them, and which is the brightest mind-light in Elysium. Spacers say moths dream of it.
+
+*Designers:* field drawn to transmitters and minds; hazard is comms degradation; reveals transmitting ships.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Open Water.md

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+**"Read the slope, then the current, then the glow. Then look for what's eating it."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14, revised r4. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. The design reasoning behind the bestiary of **Open Water**, the ecology of [[Flatspace]]: what its life lives on, who eats whom, and how the shape of a zone tells the story. It is strange and it is natural: everything here runs on physics a crew can learn and trust. The layers of [[Wonderland]] run on other budgets; the Ink's is in [[Adrasteia Space]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+#### Energy: What Feeds the Sea
+
+An ecology is an energy budget first. Earth's oceans run on sunlight at the surface and, in the dark, on chemistry at hydrothermal vents, where whole food webs live on what the vent gives off. Open Water has four budgets, and each has a geography.
+
+| Source | Where it is strong | Who taps it first |
+|---|---|---|
+| Starlight | Inside a sun's light radius | [[Glim]] |
+| Heat-light ([[Negative Entropy]] in the wild) | Around warm bodies: suns, gas giants, the floors of planetary wells, and ships | [[Glim]], [[Limpets]], [[Sharks]] |
+| Gravity waves | Around gas giants and suns, which ripple the slope | [[Whales]] |
+| Mind-light (Aether distortion from cognition) | Crews, ship minds, transmitters, stations, [[Spirits]] | [[Moths]] |
+
+Heat-light is the vent of Open Water: the Aether turns heat into photons, so anything warm is a lamp that life can eat [new]. That makes ships vents too. It is the root of the line spacers learn first: the fauna come to the guns.
+
+#### Transport: The Current
+
+Open Water moves. The [[Aether]] current is a slow braided stream through each zone, plus a swirl around every gravity well and a gentle drain downslope [new]. Everything that does not swim drifts in it: dust, nebula, glim, krill, loose cargo, wreckage. Ships hold their own course; nothing alive that is small can.
+
+Three features of a current make an ocean's patchiness, and they make Open Water's:
+
+- **Fronts.** Where the stream converges, drifting things pile up into long bright lines, as plankton and sargassum gather at ocean fronts. Fronts are the richest grazing in a zone.
+- **Shear.** Where a well's swirl meets the open stream, the current changes speed over a short distance. Albatrosses fly for free on wind shear; [[Sharks]] patrol it the same way.
+- **Slack.** In the saddles between wells, pulls cancel and the current goes nearly still. Drift stalls there. Ambushers wait there: [[Lanterns]], [[Void Spiders]].
+
+The downslope drain does what marine snow does in the deep sea: dead matter sinks. In Open Water it spirals into wells, so every well has a debris disc on its inner slope where [[Gleaners]] work, and a warm floor where the glim is thick.
+
+#### The Web
+
+```
+starlight, heat-light ──► Glim ──► Krill ──► Minnows ──► Sharks
+                           │         │          │           │
+                           ├──► Rime │          └──► Lanterns, Void Spiders
+                           └──────── Whales ◄── gravity waves
+mind-light ──► Moths
+heat of hulls and whales ──► Limpets
+everything dead ──► Gleaners ──► Rime (on the bones)
+Skein: carries food between wells; everything grazes along it
+```
+
+The [[Skein]] sits outside the chain. It is the network the chain lives on: a slime-mould web that grows toward food along the gravity slope, linking well to well, and moving nutrients down its strands [new]. The patterns it draws are the patterns the whole web follows.
+
+#### How the Level Tells the Story
+
+| Feature | What lives there | Why |
+|---|---|---|
+| A sun | Thin, fast, bright glim; little else close in | Rich light, a cliff of a slope, a fast swirl that shreds clouds |
+| A planet's well floor | Dense glim, gleaners | Warm floor; the drain brings debris down |
+| A well's shoulder | Krill, minnows; sharks on the shear | Swirl meets stream: fronts and shear |
+| A gas giant | Whales; the biggest krill grounds | Gravity waves to ride, heat to glow, broad gentle slopes |
+| The saddle between bodies | Lanterns, void spiders, stalled drift | Slack water |
+| A belt | Rime reefs | Rock to hold onto in the current |
+| A convergence front | Krill and minnows in long lines | The current piles food there |
+| A wormhole mouth | Rich glim, krill | Mouths jet Aether: an upwelling [new] |
+| A battlefield | Everything, in order | Heat, then corpses, then wrecks |
+| Sol | Nothing | No current, no glim, no food |
+
+#### Succession: What Happens to a Body
+
+Whale falls on the deep-sea floor feed a sequence of communities for decades: mobile scavengers strip the flesh, opportunists work the enriched sediment, specialists live off the bones, and finally the skeleton is a reef. A whale fall in Open Water runs the same course, and so does a dead ship [new]:
+
+1. **Heat.** The body is still warm: sharks, limpets and glim gather.
+2. **Strip.** [[Gleaners]] take soft tissue, loose cargo and anything not welded down.
+3. **Bones.** Gleaners work the frame and bones for metal.
+4. **Reef.** [[Rime]] settles on what is left. Old battlefields are reefs.
+
+#### Recruitment: Why It Refills
+
+Reef fish repopulate a reef from larvae carried by the current, not from the adults that live there. The fauna refill the same way: the current brings spores and larvae from the edges of flatspace, out where the links to [[Wonderland]] open, into every zone. Recovery is fast at the bottom of the web and slow at the top, so overharvesting the big animals has consequences that krill raking does not [new].
+
+#### Sources
+
+Real ecology:
+- Corliss, J. B. et al. (1979). Submarine thermal springs on the Galápagos Rift. *Science* 203. The discovery of vent communities.
+- Van Dover, C. L. (2000). *The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents*. Princeton.
+- Smith, C. R. & Baco, A. R. (2003). Ecology of whale falls at the deep-sea floor. *Oceanography and Marine Biology Annual Review* 41.
+- Alldredge, A. L. & Silver, M. W. (1988). Characteristics, dynamics and significance of marine snow. *Progress in Oceanography* 20.
+- Franks, P. J. S. (1992). Sink or swim: accumulation of biomass at fronts. *Marine Ecology Progress Series* 82.
+- Sachs, G. (2005). Minimum shear wind strength required for dynamic soaring of albatrosses. *Ibis* 147.
+- Widder, E. A. (2010). Bioluminescence in the ocean. *Science* 328. Lures, counter-illumination, burglar alarms.
+- Tero, A. et al. (2010). Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network design. *Science* 327. Physarum rebuilding the Tokyo rail map.
+
+Speculative biology and fiction:
+- Sagan, C. & Salpeter, E. E. (1976). Particles, environments, and possible ecologies in the Jovian atmosphere. *ApJ Supplement* 32. Sinkers, floaters, hunters: a food web designed from an energy budget.
+- Clarke, A. C. (1971). *A Meeting with Medusa*. Jovian giants and their predators.
+- Hoyle, F. (1957). *The Black Cloud*. A living interstellar cloud.
+- Niven, L. (1984). *The Integral Trees*. A whole ecology in free fall, organized by a gas torus and tides.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Rays.md

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+**"Rays ride out. If one is coming in, something is chasing it."**
+
+> Draft r3, 2026-10-14, revised r6. Part of [[Adrasteia Space]] (the Ink); niche: bulk grazer that surfs the swell. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Black wings as wide as a frigate, thin as sailcloth, rising on the swell. A ray surfaces in a pocket with its whole width spread flat on the water, skimming, and the dust caught in the plates of its mouth flickers when the light finds it.
+
+**Eats.** [[Soot]] and wave dust, skimmed off the surface through broad plates like a manta's gill rakers. The dust stays in those plates for life and builds up [new].
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Rays surf. Each one catches a wave as it crosses the floor of the bowl, rides it up the outer slope inside its pocket, grazing, and slips off the back as the pocket slows near the top; then it slides back down the slope under the fog to catch the next. A ray's whole life is that commute, out on the beat and back between [new]. They never swim against a wave. A ray going inward through a pocket is fleeing.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Rays are the Ink's weather vane. Where they surf, the pocket is safe and the beat is steady. A school breaking off the wave all at once means [[Squid]] in the pocket wall.
+
+**On sensors.** Wide, flat, cold returns riding a wave front, close to the surface. A school reads as one long cold smear moving at the speed of the swell.
+
+**How it hurts.** It defends; it doesn't hunt. A ray's wing drinks heat from whatever is beneath it, and a startled school can blanket a ship, chilling it fast and blinding its sensors for as long as they cover it. A diving ray's wingbeat throws a short, steep swell.
+
+**Yield.** *Plates*: the mouth plates hold more dust than soot ever does, in a form that keeps. Ray hunting is the Ink's mid-grade trade: well paid, risky, and the reason [[Squid]] learn to follow skimmer crews. *Wing*: a cold-holding fabric prized for insulation.
+
+**Lives.** The cradle, on the outer slope of the bowl, between the bank and the top of the slope. Thickest low on the slope, where the soot is freshest; never at the foot of the pillar, where the swell is fast and steep enough to roll them.
+
+*Designers:* anchor moving outward with the pulse and returning under fog between pulses; flees inward when threatened; hazards are a heat-drain blanket and sensor occlusion; moderate respawn.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Rime.md

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+**"A rimed rubble pile is half a Bloom already."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: sessile colonial filter-feeder, reef-builder. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Rime is a crust of tiny colonial animals that grows on rock: frost-white, glittering, branching into combs that face the current. A rimed belt looks frozen. Each colony is millions of polyps sharing one mineral skeleton, the way coral does [new].
+
+**Eats.** Glim and krill larvae, combed out of the current as it flows past.
+
+**Moves.** It doesn't; it rides its rock.
+
+**What a pilot sees.** Pale glittering crust on rocks and on old wrecks. Thick rime means the current here is rich and has been for a long time. Rime on a wreck means the wreck is old.
+
+**On sensors.** A rock that is slightly warm and slightly too reflective.
+
+**How it hurts.** Mining a rimed rock sets the colony off: it fires a spray of mineral spicules, micro-shrapnel that scours the miner's sensors and drills [new]. Rime also cements rubble together, so rimed rock breaks into bigger chunks than it should.
+
+**Yield.** Rime lattice, a mineral-organic cement. [[Bloom]] builders like rimed rubble piles because the rime has already bound them; a rimed asteroid takes less processing to become a habitat shell [new]. Miners and Bloom contractors fight over the same rocks.
+
+**Lives.** Asteroid belts, the inner rings around gas giants, and every wreck that has been sitting long enough. Old battlefields are reefs.
+
+*Designers:* a property of belt chunks rather than a new entity: rimed chunks spit spicules when mined and yield lattice.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Sharks.md

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+**"A shark that won't hunt is a ship."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: pursuit predator. Kept from the operator's sketch and r1. Changed: sharks hunt the shear lines at well shoulders, the way albatrosses fly wind shear, and they are middle predators, not the top of the web. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+The size of a light ship: long, dark, with a ridge of heat-drinking tissue along the back that glows dull red after a kill. Alone or in twos and threes.
+
+**Eats.** [[Minnows]], and anything warm. In a sea where heat is food, a reactor is the richest smell there is.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Sharks never drift and never stop. They soar the shear where a well's swirl meets the open current, gaining speed for free on every pass, then cut out of it and fall downslope onto prey. They accelerate harder than anything else alive.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A shark is a ship-sized return that ignores the current, which is what a ship looks like. The difference is behaviour: patrol the shear, strike downhill, patrol again. A shark-sized return that holds station, climbs out of a well at full burn, or ignores a bait ball is a ship.
+
+**On sensors.** A ship-sized return below identification. Warm after it feeds.
+
+**How it hurts.** The bite: a sprinting shark rams and latches, tearing armour. The drain: a latched shark drinks heat, cooling the ship and stealing its energy until it is full or the ship is cold [new]. A drained ship reads colder than its surroundings, and spacers say a contact that cold is dead, Adrasteian, or bitten. Running cold is the defence: shut down and a shark loses interest.
+
+**Yield.** Bounty work. Heat-organs make the best radiators money can buy; hide is layered into armour by [[Zhestokost]] [new]. Sharks are also a weapon: a pack led into a rival's krill grounds is [[Resource Denial]].
+
+**Lives.** The shoulders of wells, above minnow schools. Wherever sharks circle a krill cloud, something warm is inside it.
+
+*Designers:* anchor moving across the flow; patrol on the shear, downhill sprint; attracted by heat; hazards are ram, latch and drain.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Skein.md

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+**"The skein knows where the food is. Follow it."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: network organism, neither animal nor plant. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+The skein is one organism the size of a system: a web of faint threads joining well to well, thickening where food is and fading where it isn't, rebuilding itself as the bodies move. It behaves the way slime mould does on a dish: it grows toward food, reinforces the paths that carry the most, and lets the rest wither, until the web is a map of the zone's gravity and its plenty [new].
+
+**Eats.** Nothing directly. It moves food. Glim caught on its strands is passed along them toward the wells that need it; the threads pulse faintly when they carry.
+
+**Moves.** It grows. Strands run along the gravity slope, around the shoulders of wells and across the saddles between them, and shift as the bodies orbit. It never drifts; it is anchored to the slope, not the current.
+
+**What a pilot sees.** Threads of pale light linking bodies, brightest along the busiest paths. Krill and minnows string out along it like beads.
+
+**On sensors.** A faint lattice on passive; nothing on active. It is never a contact.
+
+**How it hurts.** It doesn't. It is the one thing in Open Water that never attacks. Flying through it breaks strands, which regrow; the [[Krill]] scatter.
+
+**Yield.** Thread, by the gram: it carries Aether disturbance along its length, and makes fine antenna for [[Aethernet]] gear. Cetacean Navigators consider harvesting it vandalism of the chart [new].
+
+**Lives.** Every flatspace zone outside Sol, anchored to the slope. Not in the Ink, where there is no glim to carry; there the seams between two pillars' reaches, where their waves cross and their dust piles up, are the nearest thing to strands [new]. Deep zones have skeins as thick as cables.
+
+*Designers:* the skein is the slime-mould pattern the placement ruling asks for, given a body in the lore. It is drawn from the gravity slope at run time, as the placement law already is. The ambient slime trails could be it.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Soot.md

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+**"Soot on the swell means the pocket just passed. You're late."**
+
+> Draft r3, 2026-10-14, revised r6. Part of [[Adrasteia Space]] (the Ink); niche: producer. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Black lace on the moving surface of the Ink: a colonial film, finer than net, that spreads across the swell in the wake of each dust wave and sinks again before the next. In a pocket's light it glints where dust grains are caught in it.
+
+**Eats.** The heat of the dust. A wave's dust leaves the pillar warm and cools as it travels; soot spreads behind each wave and drinks that warmth through the trace of strange matter it catches, the way [[Glim]] eats light in Open Water. It is the only thing in the Ink that lives on the waves directly. Everything else lives on soot or on what eats it [new].
+
+**Moves: the tell.** It doesn't. It blooms in a ring behind each pocket, thickest where the pocket closed, and fades as the ring cools. A soot ring is a clock: how fresh it is says how long since the last wave passed.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Soot is how you read the beat in fog. Thick, fresh soot means a pocket just went by and the next is a full beat away. Thin, old soot means the next wave is close.
+
+**On sensors.** Nothing at range. Close in, a faint cold sheen on the surface, colder than the fog.
+
+**How it hurts.** Barely. It fouls intakes and nets, and a ship that sits in thick soot loses heat a little faster. It is dangerous mainly for what it draws: [[Rays]] come to graze it, and [[Squid]] follow the rays.
+
+**Yield.** *Soot-ash*: skimmed, dried and sold through blind drops. A trace of dust in a great deal of ash. It is the Ink's safe harvest, and the one most vouched independents ever take.
+
+**Lives.** The cradle of every pillar: the outer slope of its bowl, where the pockets slow and linger, in rings that move with the beat. Little near the wall, where the pockets pass too fast to bloom behind.
+
+*Designers:* a ring field that blooms behind each pulse and fades by the next; a heat-sink patch; a readable indicator of the pulse phase.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Spaceborne Fauna.md

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+**"Sol is a desert. Everywhere else is a sea."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r2, 2026-10-14, revised r3, r4, r5 and r6. The ecology is designed first, from what life can live on; the animals fill its niches. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning and the changes argued for are in [[Open Water]] and the review notes ([[Fauna Lore Review r6]] is current). The frame since r4: the animals below live in **Open Water**, the ecology of [[Flatspace]], the vanilla galaxy. The layers of [[Wonderland]] have bestiaries of their own: [[Adrasteia Space|the Ink]], [[The Glass]], [[The Fold]], [[Hyperspace]]. How the spaces are joined, by gates built against anchors and by rare natural tears, is [[Anchors and Gates]].
+
+Leave Sol's bubble through any wormhole and the dark is no longer empty. The nebula glows because something in it is alive. Threads of faint light run from one gravity well to the next. Clouds of krill turn in the current, schools of minnows flicker along their edges, and sharks ride the shear where a well's whirlpool meets the open stream. Rocks in the belts are crusted with rime. Something at the slack point between two moons is holding perfectly still and glowing like a wreck that wants rescuing. Do not rescue it.
+
+Spacers named what they found after Earth animals, because that was the vocabulary they had. None of it is related to anything from Sol.
+
+#### What They Are
+
+Native life of Elysium's flat space: strange, but natural. A biologist can study it, a crew can learn it, and nobody has to be changed to live beside it. It is the wildlife of a frontier, not the folk of a fairy tale; that is what [[Wonderland]] is for [new].
+
+Open Water life lives on four things Sol does not have:
+
+- **The [[Aether]] current.** Outside Sol, space moves. A slow, braided stream runs through every zone, swirls around every well and drains gently downslope. It carries everything that does not swim: dust, nebula, spores, larvae, wreckage. Ships are the exception; they hold their own course [new].
+- **[[Negative Entropy]] in the wild.** The Aether turns heat into light. Every warm thing glows a little in a band no human eye sees, and life eats that glow. Heat is food [new].
+- **Gravity waves.** Gas giants and suns ripple the slope around them. Things that flex can drink the ripple.
+- **Minds.** Cognition distorts the Aether ([[Cognitive Interfacing]]). Some life grazes that distortion, and is drawn to crews, ship minds, transmitters and [[Spirits]] [new].
+
+Sol has none of the first three in any strength and a great deal of the fourth. That is why Sol is a desert with no nebula in its sky, and why it is the one place the [[Moths]] dream about.
+
+#### The Bestiary
+
+By niche, bottom to top. Each note says what a pilot sees, what sensors show, how it hurts a ship, and what it yields.
+
+| Niche | Animal | One line |
+|---|---|---|
+| Producer | [[Glim]] | The living part of the nebula; eats heat-light and starlight. |
+| Network (neither animal nor plant) | [[Skein]] | A slime-mould web joining wells; draws the pattern everything else follows. |
+| Sessile colonial filter-feeder | [[Rime]] | Crusts on belt rocks and wrecks, combing the current. |
+| Swarming grazer | [[Krill]] | Clouds that graze glim on the fronts. |
+| Schooling forage | [[Minnows]] | Flickering schools that eat krill and feed everything above them. |
+| Bulk filter-feeder, giant | [[Whales]] | Wave-riders of the giants; the richest and slowest harvest. |
+| Pursuit predator | [[Sharks]] | Heat hunters that soar the shear lines. |
+| Ambush predator, mimic | [[Lanterns]] | Sit in slack water glowing like a disabled ship. |
+| Trap predator | [[Void Spiders]] | String nets across saddles and fronts. |
+| Scavenger | [[Gleaners]] | Strip wrecks and loose cargo; concentrate metal. |
+| Parasite | [[Limpets]] | Ride warm hulls and whales, drink heat, glow. |
+| Mind-grazer | [[Moths]] | Drawn to cognition and signal; eat chatter, haunt spirits. |
+
+And past the charts, the thing that eats whales. Nobody has a picture of it. The whale roads near the edge have gaps in them.
+
+#### Where Things Live
+
+The level is the ecology. See [[Open Water]] for the whole story; in one breath: glim thickens where the current converges and where warm wells glow; the skein grows along the gravity slope between wells; krill and minnows ride the fronts and the skein; sharks hunt the shear at well shoulders; spiders and lanterns sit in the slack saddles between wells; rime crusts the belts; whales surf the giants' waves; gleaners follow the debris spiralling into every well; and wherever ships run hot or fight, the whole web comes to feed.
+
+#### Elysium's Harvest
+
+Sol spent a thousand years fighting over dwindling rocks. Elysium's wormholes opened onto a sea that refills, and the survivors organized it the only way they knew: claims, permits, contracts and debt [new].
+
+- **It refills from upstream.** The Aether current carries larvae and spores in from the edges of flatspace into every zone, all the time. A ground stripped bare is recolonized from the current, fast at the bottom of the web and slowly at the top. Krill come back in days. A whale road emptied by flensers stays empty for a long time [new].
+- **Deeper is richer.** The further a zone lies from Sol, out toward the edges where the Chaos factions live, the stronger the current, the thicker the glim, and the bigger the animals [new]. Harvesters go outward, and outward is where the links to [[Wonderland]] open.
+- **Who takes it.** Independents do the dangerous middle work. The [[Pan-Solar Consortium]] issues harvest claims on the model of the [[Conflict Permit]] [new]; everyone breaks them. Leading sharks into a rival's grounds is a recognized form of [[Resource Denial]] [new].
+- **What is taken.** Krill and minnow meal for Bloom farms and vat feed; photophores for flares; shark heat-organs for radiators; rime for building; gleaner gut-metal; spider silk; whale oil, veil and bone. The one thing Open Water does not yield is strange matter: that comes only from the Ink ([[Adrasteia Space]]), and only Adrasteia buys it [new].
+
+#### The Fauna Come to the Guns
+
+A ship is a hot thing in a sea that eats heat. A running reactor is a vent; a battle is a feast. Glim brightens around a warm hull, limpets settle on it, sharks turn toward it, and when the shooting stops the gleaners strip the wrecks and the rime starts to grow on what is left. Every fight leaves an ecology behind it, and a pilot who knows that can read last week's battle from today's fauna [new].
+
+#### Who Watches Them
+
+- **[[Cetacean Navigators]].** The first to read the currents beyond the mouths. They read the skein as a chart and the whales' roads as the current's own record, and they hold that whether the [[Whales]] are persons is an open question. Navigator space allows no whaling [new].
+- **Spacers.** *Calm water*: thick, undisturbed krill. *The fronts*: the bright lines where the current converges. *Slack*: the dead water between wells, where lanterns and spiders wait. *Going krill*: hiding a hull in a cloud by flying the current. *A fall*: a dead whale, or a dead ship, and everything feeding on it.
+- **Superstitions.** A shark that won't hunt is a ship. Never answer a light in the slack. If the moths are thick, someone is lying on the Aethernet. If the net is empty in calm water, turn around.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Squid.md

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+**"If the radiators are happy, be afraid."**
+
+> Draft r3, 2026-10-14, revised r6. Part of [[Adrasteia Space]] (the Ink); niche: pack predator. Named for the Earth animal that hunts in the dark and leaves ink behind it. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Long, pale, many-armed, the size of a light ship, and almost never seen: they live in the fog walls at the edges of pockets and in the inky clouds, and come into the clear only to strike. Packs of three to a dozen.
+
+**Eats.** [[Rays]], other squid, and heat. A squid holds enough dust in its body to eat heat at a distance: it can drain a ray, or a ship, from inside the fog without touching it [new].
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Squid hunt the pocket edge. They pace a pocket from inside its fog wall, just out of the light, and strike inward as a pack when something comes close to the wall. They do not ride the swell; they hold their place against it. Between hunts they go back down to the bank, the ring of settled dust on the floor of the bowl, and lie in it.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Stay in the middle of the pocket. Never ride the wall. When the pocket closes, the squid are already where you are. A pack hunts heat, so the warmest ship in a pocket is the one they take.
+
+**On sensors.** A cold contact that grows colder as it closes, because it is drinking your heat at range. Several at the pocket edge make the edge itself read cold. Squid are why Ink crews call any contact colder than the fog a squid until it proves otherwise.
+
+**How it hurts.** *The hush*: a pack drinks heat at range and a ship goes quiet. Systems slow, weapons stall, and the crew grows calm, the danger [[Running Cold]] warns of, done by an animal. *The strike*: arms and beak, close in, tearing armour. *Ink*: a wounded or retreating squid clouds the water with a dust-heavy dark that eats light and sensor returns alike and lingers after the pocket has passed. An inked ship is blind until it flies clear.
+
+**Yield.** *Ink sacs*: dust in fine suspension, more concentrated than any ray's plates. The richest harvest a crew can take and usually live. Old squid ink is also a smuggler's paint: a hull coated in it is very hard to see anywhere [new].
+
+**Lives.** The fog walls of pockets in the cradle, and the bank, which their ink helps to thicken.
+
+*Designers:* a pack of anchors pacing a moving pocket from outside its edge; strike when a heat source nears the wall; hazards are a ranged heat drain, melee, and a persistent sensor-occluding ink cloud; slow respawn.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/The Fold.md

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+**"Never trust a straight line in the Fold. If it matches you, it is you."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]], from r3's flavour of the same name. It is where canon's definition of [[Pseudospace]], space that does not follow Euclid, is true in the most local way: distance itself bends. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+#### What It Looks Like
+
+Through the link the stars double. Some smear into arcs, some sit in the wrong place, and one or two appear twice in different parts of the sky. The slope is solid and the current runs, so at first it feels like flatspace. Then the ranges on your board stop agreeing with each other, and a straight course starts to curve.
+
+**The map.** The Fold's galaxy map cannot be drawn flat, so it is drawn honestly: some zones appear twice, in different places; some edges are marked as glued to edges far across the map; and the lines between zones are labelled with depth, not distance. Pilots fly it by the labels and ignore the picture [new].
+
+#### How It Flies
+
+- **Knots.** Near a knot a kilometre grows longer the deeper in you go, so a moon's neighbourhood is bigger inside than it looks from outside. Fleets hide inside knots. A pursuer who chases you into one finds the space unfolding ahead faster than either of you can cross it.
+- **Seams.** Along a seam two far places are glued edge to edge. Fly through and you are somewhere far away; look back and you see where you came from, small and close. A seam is a link inside the layer, and the Fold is full of them.
+- **Sight lines bend.** Light curves around a knot, so you can see a contact that no straight shot can reach, and from two directions at once. Beams follow the light; slugs and missiles follow their own, different curve. Learning the difference is learning to fight here.
+- **Ranges lie, honestly.** Range on sensors is the light's path, the truth about the light and not about your trip. Pilots fly by **depth**, how far into a knot they are, measured against the [[Aether]]'s reference frame.
+- **You meet yourself.** Light can go round a knot and come back, so a ship deep in the Fold sometimes sees its own image ahead of it, minutes old. It is real light: it is where you were.
+
+#### Who Holds It
+
+Nobody. A foothold is held by holding the anchors at the far ends of its links ([[Anchors and Gates]]). An anchor in the Fold is in two places, as anything there can be, and a gate opened on it may open at either; every gate into the Fold is half blind, and nobody's has stayed theirs for long. And the far end of every seam can be seen from it, so nothing inside the Fold is secret either. What the Fold has instead is traffic [new]:
+
+- **The Undertow** (canon's off-ledger retuners and smugglers) runs routes through Fold seams that no registry can follow, because the route on the record and the route flown are not the same length.
+- **The [[Parallax Auditors]]** make a living here. A ship that crossed the Fold may have been seen in two places at once, by two honest sensors. That is continuity residue in canon's exact sense, and the Fold makes more of it than anywhere.
+
+#### What It Does to People
+
+The Fold takes certainty about who came back. A crew that has met its own image enough times starts to wonder which ship turned home. The tales are changeling tales: the one who returned is kind where she was sharp, or knows a thing she never learned, or her records say she docked at two ports on the same day. The Auditors' findings cannot say whether she is the same person; the law has never been sure it wants to know. It gives the short way: returners find the seam in things, the shortcut through a station, a contract, an argument, and are uncanny company [new].
+
+#### Its Animals
+
+Small and few, because the Fold is mostly a place you pass through [new].
+
+| Animal | One line |
+|---|---|
+| **Hinges** | Long thin bodies that live straddling a seam, half on each side, so one animal is visible in two far places. A hinge marks a seam; pilots look for them |
+| **Knotfish** | Schools that live deep in knots, where there is more room inside than out, and stream out at the mouth when something big comes in |
+
+Nobody has caught a hinge whole. Cutting one at the seam gives you two halves of nothing much, in two places, and an Auditor's case.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Checked: canon [[Pseudospace]] and [[Parallax Auditors]] notes, and the Undertow section of [[Wavecrafters]], via voidbot, 2026-10-14. From memory, not checked: changeling folklore as the register for returners; gravitational lensing (an Einstein ring, a lensed quasar seen twice) as the real-sky model for doubled stars.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/The Glass.md

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+**"In the Glass you don't hide. You decide what you were seen doing."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]], first sketched in r3 and now proposed as the Wavecrafters' pseudospace home. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon; everything about the Wavecrafters here is [new] beyond canon's [[Wavecrafters]] note. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+#### What It Looks Like
+
+Through the link the current stops. The slope goes still enough to be a mirror. The nebula hangs where it has always hung, sharp-edged, and the stars are needle points at distances that should have blurred them. You can see everything in the Glass, very far away, and everything can see you.
+
+Behind your ship a line stays on the slope: your wake, printed into the still Aether, fading over hours instead of seconds. Look around and there are other lines, old and older, crossing like the tracks of skaters on a frozen lake. Some are yours. Most are not.
+
+**The map.** The Glass's galaxy map is the sharpest in the game: silver on black, every zone visible at once, nothing in fog. Drawn over it are the wakes: recent traffic as bright lines, older as faint ones. The map tells you where everyone is, and where everyone has been [new].
+
+#### How It Works
+
+- **Stiff Aether.** No current. Nothing drifts, nothing mixes, nothing is carried. Whatever is left somewhere stays there.
+- **Heat stays.** The Aether makes no light of heat here (wild [[Negative Entropy]] never happens), so a hull's heat has almost nowhere to go. Radiators stall; ships climb toward their limits; a battle in the Glass is short [new].
+- **Wakes persist.** Every disturbance a hull makes in the Aether stays printed on it: course, speed, the drive's signature, the moment a weapon fired. A wake is a record no one can edit.
+- **Light carries.** Nothing eats light and nothing scatters it. Sensors reach further here than anywhere.
+
+#### Who Lives There
+
+The **Wavecrafters**. Canon makes them the people who know how disturbances travel, how systems are observed, and how machinery couples to the field, and says their inner practice is hidden and their senior cultivators travel through "protected guild channels". This note proposes where both come from [new]:
+
+- **The Glass is their school.** A place where every disturbance stays is the only place you can watch one travel from start to finish. Apprentices learn *listening* by sitting beside a wake and reading it for days. The breath forms began as ways to manage heat in a place that keeps it.
+- **The Glass is their secret's reason.** In the Glass nothing can be hidden, and the Wavecrafters learned there what being seen costs. Their concealment of espers in flatspace is the discipline of people who grew up where concealment was impossible: once you leave the Glass, you never again let yourself be read that easily.
+- **The protected channels are Glass gates.** Guild houses keep the anchors, and the far ends are guild land. An anchor in the Glass holds anywhere and can be seen from anywhere, so nobody plants one in secret: the guild holds the layer by watching, not by hiding, the opposite of Adrasteia in the Ink. A Wavecrafter master travelling the Glass can see a pursuer coming for days, and a pursuer can see where she went, which is why the guild keeps the gates rather than the roads [new].
+- **Sacred Instruments are made here** more than anywhere: an instrument cultivated for years in a place where every disturbance stays can learn its relation exactly. The commonest are anchors and beacons, cultivated in twins; nearly every gate in Elysium hangs on something grown in the Glass ([[Anchors and Gates]]) [new].
+
+#### What It Does to People
+
+The Glass takes privacy. Crews who stay too long feel watched for the rest of their lives, in rooms with no windows, and they cannot forget: memory sets like the wakes. It gives sight of how things travel: returners hear a faint signal under noise, see where a stranger has been from how she stands, and some of them, the ones who stayed longest, come back espers. The guild calls them its own, whether or not they agree [new].
+
+#### Its Animals
+
+Everything alive in the Glass is slow, thin and old, because a body makes heat and here heat cannot leave. Only life with a vast surface and a tiny metabolism survives [new].
+
+| Niche | Animal | One line |
+|---|---|---|
+| Producer | **Baskets** | Lattices kilometres across, grown over centuries, catching the Glass's long light; nothing kills them, and very little grows |
+| Grazer | **Skaters** | Flat, fast, short-lived things that ride fresh wakes and feed on the disturbance itself; they follow ships the way gulls follow a trawler |
+| Predator | **Augurs** | Still hunters that read wakes and wait where a wake will be. They never chase; they are already there |
+
+Baskets are the Glass's oldest landmarks; some are on Wavecrafter maps by name. Skaters are a pilot's tell that a wake is fresh: if skaters are on it, someone passed within the hour. An augur waiting ahead of you means you have been flying predictably.
+
+Spacers say: *every wake is a confession*; *if the skaters are behind you, so is someone else*; and of a Wavecrafter, *she's already read you*.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Checked: canon [[Wavecrafters]] note via voidbot, 2026-10-14. From memory, not checked: glass sponges (hexactinellids) as the model for Baskets, including the deep-sea *Monorhaphis chuni* specimen dated at around 11,000 years (Jochum, K. P. et al. (2012), *Chemical Geology* 300-301); gulls following trawlers as the model for Skaters.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Void Spiders.md

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+**"The net between the moons isn't ours."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: trap predator. From the operator's 2020 line about "space whales and space spiders", named as a gap in r1 and filled here. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Many-limbed, the size of a fighter, almost all reach. A void spider strings a net of fine glittering silk across slack water and waits at its hub. The nets are kilometres wide and nearly invisible until something is caught in them.
+
+**Eats.** Whatever drifts or swims into the net: krill rafts stalled in the slack, minnows, the occasional shark. Drift piles up in slack water; spiders sit where the current delivers.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** The spider doesn't, until something hits the net; then it runs the strands to it, fast.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Krill that have stopped drifting in a neat sheet, in slack water, are caught. Glints in a plane where no plane should be are silk. A spider at the hub is a small warm return that does not move with anything.
+
+**On sensors.** The net barely shows on active and not at all on passive; the spider is a small stationary contact.
+
+**How it hurts.** The snare: silk sticks to hulls, slowing and tethering a ship that flies into a net; heavy ships tear free, light ones are held [new]. A held ship is bitten and drained like a shark's prey, but slowly.
+
+**Yield.** Silk, the strongest fibre in Elysium: tethers, cargo nets, armour weave. *Silking*, cutting nets whole while the spider is away or dead, is skilled and well paid.
+
+**Lives.** Saddles and trojan points between bodies, and across convergence fronts where the current runs slow.
+
+*Designers:* anchor at a slack point with a net area; hazard is snare (slow and tether) then drain.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Whales.md

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+**"Never kill the first whale you see on a run."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: bulk filter-feeder, giant. Kept from the operator's sketch and r1. Changed: whales ride the gravity waves of gas giants and suns, which is why they swing in arcs. Revised r3: the r2 rumour that whale bone grows strange matter is cut (ruling `strange-matter-not-biogenic`); strange matter comes from the stars of [[Adrasteia Space]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Many times the size of any ship: slow, warm, ribbed with pale bone, trailing a feeding veil wide enough to sweep a krill cloud whole. A whale glows in thermal like a small station. It sings, and the song carries through the [[Aether]].
+
+**Eats.** [[Krill]] and [[Glim]] in bulk, filtered through the veil.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Gas giants and suns ripple the slope around them. Whales surf those ripples: they flex with each wave and ride it outward, then glide back in, in long arcs between the giant and its moons that take hours or days. They never hurry and never turn sharply, and they repeat their arcs closely enough to be charted as whale roads [new].
+
+**What a pilot learns.** The brightest thing in its sky and the slowest. Nothing a ship does looks like a whale except flying its arc for a very long time. Hanging in a whale's shadow hides a ship, until the whale notices.
+
+**On sensors.** A station-sized warm return on a slow arc.
+
+**How it hurts.** It defends; it doesn't hunt. A crowded or wounded whale rolls, and its veil and mass batter anything close. A threatened whale dumps its heat in a thermal flare that washes out sensors for a long way. A distressed whale sings loud enough to flood the [[Aethernet]] nearby with noise: everyone in range knows a whale is in trouble, and roughly where [new].
+
+**Yield.** *Flensing*: oil that runs reactors cool and long, veil for fine nets, and bone light and strong enough for spars. A whale kill is the richest single harvest in Elysium and the slowest to recover: a road emptied by flensers stays empty for years.
+
+**A fall.** A dead whale drifts for weeks. Everything comes to it in order: sharks and [[Limpets]] while it is warm, [[Gleaners]] for the flesh and bone, [[Rime]] at the end.
+
+**The slow singers.** The [[Cetacean Navigators]] call them that. They hold that whether the slow singers are persons is an open question, and in a setting where personhood is owned and disputed that is a political position. Navigator space allows no whaling, only salvage from natural falls [new]. [[Esper]]s say the song has structure.
+
+**Lives.** Gas giants above all, and the outer slopes of suns. Rarely around rocky planets.
+
+*Designers:* anchor on a slow repeating arc around gas giants; very bright thermal; hazards are roll, thermal flare, song noise; very slow respawn.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Wonderland.md

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+**"Everyone who goes in comes back with a story. Not everyone comes back."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, revised r5 and r6, for the operator's review. Replaces r3's "Pseudospace Flavours". Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. Wonderland is canon's name for pseudospace territory; this note gives it a shape: separate **layers**, each its own space with its own map, joined to each other and to [[Flatspace]] by **links**: gates someone paid for, and a few natural tears ([[Anchors and Gates]]). `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]], [[Fauna Lore Review r5]] and [[Fauna Lore Review r6]].
+
+Canon defines [[Pseudospace]] as space whose geometry does not follow Euclid, and says that past the islands of flat space "absolutely anything is possible". Both are true. Wonderland is what a pilot meets in between: places where anything is possible but something in particular is true, reliably enough to learn, and strange enough that learning it changes you.
+
+#### What a Layer Is
+
+A layer is a whole space with its own rules: its own sky, its own physics, its own animals, and its own galaxy map. It is not a region of flatspace with odd weather. It is somewhere else, reached through a link, and the map screen shows it as its own layer [new].
+
+What makes layers differ is the [[Aether]]'s temper, which canon says "varies with local conditions". Five questions tell layers apart (r3's dials, kept):
+
+| Dial | The question | Flatspace's answer |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Light** | How far does light carry, and what eats it? | Far; nothing eats it |
+| **Heat** | Where does a ship's heat go? | Out, as light, which feeds the glim |
+| **Surface** | Does the slope hold its shape? | Yes; charts stay true |
+| **Flow** | What moves the medium? | A braided current |
+| **Distance** | Does a kilometre stay a kilometre? | Yes |
+
+Every layer gives a different answer to at least one of them, and each layer's animals live on its answers. Very little crosses from one layer to another, because what feeds an animal in one does not exist in the next.
+
+#### Links
+
+A link is a place where two spaces share an edge. Fly through and you are in the other one. Nearly every link is a **gate**: a ring someone built and paid for, opened onto an **anchor** someone carried to the far end the slow way. A few are **tears** nobody built. [[Anchors and Gates]] has the economics; what matters here is what a link means to a layer [new].
+
+- **A layer is only as reachable as its anchors.** Humans opened gates long before they understood what the gates open into. A layer is known because somebody got in (through a tear, or a blind gate that came up lucky), crossed it, and planted an anchor. Every anchored gate into a layer is a record of that walk.
+- **Links have tells.** A link leaks its far side. Near a link to the Ink the stars dim and radiators run too cool; near a link to the Glass the current slackens and dies; near one to the Fold the stars double. A pilot learns to taste the far side before committing. Gates and tears leak alike; only a tear leaks somewhere nobody has charted.
+- **Some links keep hours.** A gate keeps its anchor's hours: the Ink's gates breathe with the pillars whose bowls their anchors sit in. A tear keeps its own: a beat, a season, a tide in the current. The fairy ring opens on the right night [new].
+- **Links are owned by holding the anchor.** A faction holds a foothold in a layer by holding the anchors at the far ends of its links and keeping their tunings secret, and how well that works depends on the layer: an anchor in the Ink cannot be found, one in the Glass cannot be hidden, one in the Fold is in two places at once. Anchor registries are the most valuable documents in Elysium, and the best of them are never written down.
+
+#### Depth
+
+Depth in Wonderland is counted in links and in time, not kilometres. One gate from flatspace is shallow. Every link further, every step past the last anchor anyone keeps, and every day spent, takes you deeper. Going too deep is how people stop coming back: not because the way is barred, but because by then they no longer want the place they came from, or it no longer recognises them [new].
+
+#### What Wonderland Does to People
+
+Flatspace you can live in unchanged. Wonderland you cannot. Each layer works on the people inside it the way its rules work on light and heat: slowly, and in its own direction. The old fae legends are the right register: the folk under the hill keep their own law, a guest who eats their food may not leave, and those who return are gifted and marked, never just themselves again [new].
+
+Each layer note gives what it takes and what it gives. In short:
+
+| Layer | Takes | Gives |
+|---|---|---|
+| [[Adrasteia Space\|The Ink]] | Warmth. Returners are calm, quiet, uneasy in light | They feel heat the way others see light |
+| [[The Glass]] | Privacy. Returners feel watched, forever, and cannot forget | They see how a disturbance travels; some become espers |
+| [[The Fold]] | Certainty about who came back | They find the short way; they see the seam in things |
+| [[Hyperspace]] | The way home | They know the roads; nobody else does |
+
+#### Travellers' Tales
+
+Layers become known the way Faerie did: by the stories of people who went and came back. A tale is evidence with no chart attached. It says what the place did to the teller, not where it is. Factions buy tales, insurers discount them, the [[Parallax Auditors]] subpoena them, and the people who tell them best are often the ones who went least deep [new].
+
+In play, a tale is route knowledge in canon's sense: rumour, attributed, maybe manipulated, until somebody flies it.
+
+#### The Layers So Far
+
+| Layer | Its map | Foothold | One line |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| [[Adrasteia Space\|The Ink]] | Black; only the pillars shine | Adrasteia | A sea of fog that drinks light and heat; each zone is ruled by a pillar that does a sun's work in beats of dust |
+| [[The Glass]] | Sharp and silver; old wakes drawn as lines | The Wavecrafters | Stiff Aether: no current, nothing fades, nowhere to hide |
+| [[The Fold]] | Places drawn twice; edges glued | Nobody holds it | Knots where distance grows, seams that glue far places |
+| [[Hyperspace]] | A disc, crowded at the rim, recentred on you | The beacon keepers | Hyperbolic room: every road is short and you will never find it |
+
+More exist. Canon's "anything is possible" belongs to the layers nobody has a tale from yet, the ones only blind gates and tears have touched.
+
+Spacers say: *taste the far side first*; *don't eat the food*; and, of anyone who came back too pleased, *ask her what it cost*.