Universe Reference
The Glossary
The working vocabulary of the universe — the Seam and its cost, the institutions that traverse it and the one that hides what traversing it does, the species, the factions, and the ships. Full canon: this page gives things away.
The Wound Bottleneck concentration The cost of traversal is not spread evenly across the sky — it concentrates on the routes that carry the most traffic. Full entry → Ships & Tech Boundary array The harmonic array turned outward as a weapon — and every shot is charged to the Wound. Full entry → The Wound Boundary cascade A deliberate de-tuning that seals a junction into chaos — non-navigable, for a time. Full entry → The Cairn build-lease A forty-year lease granted in exchange for building the volume it covers — the bargain that bought the Cairn its rings. Full entry → Institutions Certification The act that makes a junction legally usable — and provenance-locked so it cannot quietly be undone. Full entry → Institutions Cohort A training year-class of navigators (continuous numbering from ~2123). Full entry → The Seam Dead reckoning Navigating with no network and no charts — only the ship's own logged track. Full entry → The Seam Drift The accumulating positional error a vessel carries across traversals. Full entry → Ships & Tech Drift lab The three or four stations aboard where a traversal's landing point is actually calculated. Full entry → The Seam Drift margin The spatial error a crossing is permitted to land inside — and it tightens across the decades. Full entry → The Cairn drusk A station slur for the displaced and refugee lines — ugly, compact, and never translated. Full entry → Institutions EATNP Early Traversal Navigation Program — the first institutional traversal effort (founded ~2123). Full entry → Ships & Tech Energy lance An Architect-residual weapon with a finite number of shots that can never be replaced. Full entry → Ships & Tech Exploration-class The deep-frontier capital explorer of the Long Watch era (312 m). Full entry → The Cairn first call The build-lease priority clause — the right to draw before the residents do. Full entry → The Wound Gain-band The tolerance envelope of a harmonic array's output — and the number the Wound hides inside. Full entry → Institutions Geneva Operations Directorate The Geneva body whose order created the rank of Captain in 2192. Full entry → The Cairn gone long Returned having lived more time than the route allows — said of ships first, then of people. Full entry → The Wound Guttering stars Stars that are not exploding but flattening — light without usable warmth. Full entry → The Seam Hard drift An uncontrolled traversal with unpredicted displacement — typically fatal or close to it. Full entry → The Seam Harmonic array The instrument that engages the Seam boundary and drives a traversal — the fold drive. Full entry → Wide Sky Highreach The station over Earth — gateway, market, embassy row, and the Survey's home berth. Full entry → Institutions ISA International Seam Authority, 2079 — the link between the first classified programme and everything after. Full entry → Institutions ISCA International Seam Contact Authority (constituted early 2190s) — first-contact protocols. Full entry → Institutions ISCA-FC ISCA Frontier Command — the deep-explorer service of the Spent Light era (2240). Full entry → Institutions ISNA International Seam Navigation Authority — the Seam-navigation licensing body. Full entry → Institutions ISNI International Seam Navigation Institute (founded 2135) — trains navigators. Full entry → The Seam Junction A navigable node in the Seam network — a place a ship can traverse to or from. Full entry → The Wound Junction scar The irreversible mark a Seam leaves at its own site, which does not heal when the Seam closes. Full entry → Spent Light korrvesh Nhál: a grief formally carried rather than discharged — a grief-debt. Full entry → Institutions Marcus Cole Academy Where Survey crews train — named for a captain sixty years dead. Full entry → Wide Sky Mercer Yards The great Mars shipyards where the survey ships are built. Full entry → Ships & Tech Mercer-class The Open Reach Survey's deep survey ship — laboratory, habitat, node-seeder, provenance authority. Full entry → Ships & Tech Meridian-class The latest-generation modular deep explorer (2240) — the Endurance's class. Full entry → The Wound Metric noise Degrading spacetime cannot be measured precisely — so the instruments quietly lose decimal places. Full entry → Ships & Tech Node network The relay network that gives human space near-real-time communication across the Seam. Full entry → Ships & Tech NV Dawnward Mercer-class survey ship of the Open Reach Survey — the ship that opens the Sable Reach. Full entry → Institutions Open Reach Survey Earth's civilian exploration service in the Guttering age — idealists, not the fleet. Full entry → Wide Sky Ostry A heavy world under a reddening sun — the Ferren home, and the anomaly at the centre of the trilogy. Full entry → The Wound Over-push Drawing a lane or an anchor harder than it can bear, because the schedule says so. Full entry → Ships & Tech Patchwork hull A ship cut from other people's ships — no class, no registry, no two alike. Full entry → Ships & Tech PMK The portable translation stack used in alien contact — slow, and never certain. Full entry → The Cairn printer bourbon Anything that does the job and carries no provenance — including an explanation nobody believes. Full entry → Ships & Tech Pulse-test A commercially-motivated gain-band survey — and the procedure that gets people killed. Full entry → Wide Sky Roadmakers What the Ferren call Earth-humans. Full entry → The Seam Running dark Approaching a junction without broadcasting the calibration signal. Full entry → The Cairn settled, non-standard A board status coined by the Warden for something readable and still wrong — workable without being understood. Full entry → The Cairn short-count A dock game of brass washers — and to call short-count is to admit a shortfall before it is found. Full entry → Ships & Tech Sling and catcher Mass-driver logistics: cargo flung across a system and caught by a station built to receive it. Full entry → Institutions SNG Seam Navigation Group — the dominant private traversal operator. Full entry → Institutions SNRI Seam Navigation and Research Initiative, 2072 — the classified programme that put people through Seams. Full entry → The Cairn splice Dock insult for a mixed-line person — two lines made one, weaker at the join. Full entry → Institutions Stave Press The Anchorage's publishing arm — and the structural opposite of the Brief. Full entry → Ships & Tech T-class The traverse-class workhorse of the Drift era (~128–142 m). Full entry → Factions The Anchorage A network-opposed movement that traverses in order to disrupt traversal. Full entry → Species The Architects An extinct, formless civilization that communicates by reshaping the geometry of space. Full entry → Species The Ascendant An expansionist, human-descended power native to the far pocket. Full entry → Institutions The Bergen Charter The 1127-word founding document that committed the Anchorage to non-violence — and the loophole inside it. Full entry → The Wound The Brief The classified document chain that has carried knowledge of the Wound since 2123. Full entry → The Cairn the bypass A stretch of Ring Six corridor named for an emergency pipe that is long gone. Full entry → Wide Sky The Cairn The authentication relay at the Sable throat — a road-marker that becomes a compact. Full entry → Factions The Combine The dominant commercial power of the frontier era — a freight company behaving like a sovereign state. Full entry → The Wound The cooling A junction becoming measurably harder to hold open, year after year — the frontier's version of the bill arriving. Full entry → The Wound The Dimming The permanent, measurable cooling of the sky in the wake of the network's expansion. Full entry → Species The Drowned Ancient-Earth humans on a green world, who survived by forgetting. Full entry → Spent Light The far pocket A disconnected, dying Seam network with no shared coordinates — off every chart. Full entry → Species The Ferren A human people, five generations diverged, living on Ostry under a failing sun. Full entry → The Wound The floor The observable signature of the Wound — a baseline that reads above spec and keeps climbing. Full entry → Wide Sky The Going-Out The Ferren name for the dying of stars. Full entry → Species The Hostile The one contacted species with which no communication has ever been established. Full entry → Ships & Tech The Kindred The colony ship lost into the Sable Reach in a seam accident — the Ferren's ancestor. Full entry → Species The Nhál A people met at the deep frontier who arrive coordinated, speak a tongue a translator can render, and consistently know more than they will say. Full entry → Ships & Tech The node-ledger The public, immutable, provably-authored seam-map the whole civilisation runs on. Full entry → Species The Orun The non-humanoid indigenous people of the far pocket — grieving, not hunting. Full entry → Institutions The Reach Accord The talks that tried to govern the frontier — convened by the one party everyone trusted enough to host. Full entry → Wide Sky The Sable Reach A newly-reachable deep cluster at the blank edge of the map — the setting of Wide Sky. Full entry → Wide Sky The Sable throat The single door in and out of the Sable Reach — the chokepoint every hull must pass. Full entry → The Seam The Seam The phenomenon that allows instantaneous traversal between distant points in space. Full entry → The Wound The Severance The 2280s collapse that fragmented a large share of the home system's population. Full entry → The Wound The sky falling inward In the worst wound zones, local expansion reverses: light blueshifts, and gravity starts winning. Full entry → Spent Light The Span The single junction that bridges the far pocket to the home network. Full entry → Factions The Splinter The hostile faction the Resolute first engages at the deep frontier. Full entry → The Wound The standing gradient The universe's finite endowment of usable order — the thing every crossing actually spends. Full entry → Species The Tarvan Silicon-composite, pressure-adapted aliens; first sustained mathematical contact. Full entry → Species The Vekhol Multi-limbed, long-lived aliens who speak in two-to-four-hour electromagnetic pulses. Full entry → Species The Veray Another long-stranded human line in the Sable Reach — and the reach's armed answer to Earth. Full entry → The Wound The Wound The accelerating heat-death of the universe, caused by humanity's use of the Seam. Full entry → The Wound Thermal bridging Every active Seam is a bridge between regions nature would have kept apart for cosmological time. Full entry → The Wound Thermodynamic depletion signature The readable trace a spent region leaves in its own ambient emission. Full entry → Ships & Tech Topology shield A defensive system that works on the local shape of space rather than on the incoming round. Full entry → The Seam Traversal Crossing the Seam from one junction to another — a fold. Full entry → Ships & Tech Universal translator The node-coupled neural device that turns a calibrated alien signal into near-real-time speech. Full entry →