The World

The cosmos is a pair. Seen from the Hall of Speakers of Sigil, the City of Doors at the top of the multiverse, two crystal spheres hang side by side: Terra and Antiterra. Neither can exist without the other.

Between them runs the Band of Dissolution, the one cut between being and not being: a leak of everything, and the line where light and shadow can meet. It is the spine that holds Sigil up. The wider the Band, the less real Sigil becomes.

The pattern repeats at every scale. The twin cities of Torregrises and Torreluces are joined by their foundations (the Dual Universe). Each zodiacal platform is split by the Band and held by two opposed guardians. The number that divides a universe varies — twelve for the zodiac — but it is never one.

Seen from inside

• The sky is red, with a permanent comet.
• The world is a crystal capsule that grows a new skin with time, frozen toward its core.
• The north is shut by a golden, prismatic curtain — the aurora — between the civilized world and the Tartars, Mongols and demons beyond.
• Science includes magic. Electricity is known and forbidden; steam drives trains and paddle steamers; the telephone is a prodigy. Firearms are rare — revolvers only on the frontier and among the forces of order — duels are fought with swords, and alchemical nebolas do the work of grenades.
• The people are mortal, of flesh, with “diabolical atoms” in them. They do not dream: dreams were sealed for centuries so that the devils could not fulfil a pact. Their ideal is to vibrate like the Earth.
• The gods do not reign here. Gods who came in to set things right never left; the sky shows them nailed to iron towers.

A closed world

No one enters, no one leaves. The world is a prison, each platform a cell, and time, stopping, closes the lid: nine years on Terra are almost an instant here.

At bottom Antiterra is an angel, imprisoned by Graz’zt, to whom Arian gave the True Name with which it was made. Graz’zt walks its history under a dozen names.

Five floors

Whoever sets foot in Antiterra walks on five planes stacked one above the other.

Terra, the twin without magic

Terra was once the kingdom of God. Now it has no magic: what is conjured in Antiterra is bottled and sold in Terra. War and black smoke cover it. Its hell lies at its center in layers of time — Dante’s 1300, then 1900 — so that to descend is to go back.

The third

The pair calls for a third, and the third destroys Terra. In the Cocytus, before the splintered throne of Asmodeus, the devil’s last card is a dual question — Who rules: me or him? The answer comes in three. Terra explodes (the Detonation of Terra), and from its energy Marian is born: where there were two poles, there is a three.

Posed in pairs

Dual magic is cast as a question with two answers — who rules, me or him? — or as a formula: to defeat A, B is needed. It brought down Graz’zt; Elías commands it five or six times beyond his companions.

Forgotten on purpose

Whoever first learns it forgets it. Its discoverer was made to bathe in the rivers Tigias, and wrote it down in a hidden place. Its sign is the pair, marble and ebony; it splits into a charismatic and an intellectual lineage. Few hold it: the Oathbinder, Maristo, and those who seek it as the price of a pact.

A platform is a concretion of energy around one concept. The zodiac divides the dual universe into twelve (the Zodiacal Platforms). Each house rests on a column: the axis of one concept — violence, vanity — that crosses every world, constant in concept, changing in style. The platform is horizontal; the column is vertical.

All of Antiterra’s land rests on the twelve platforms, like a frame. They are rune-carved stone; they move, open and close; people live on them. Between one and the next stands a barrier of time, crossed by ship or through the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

The houses move across the centuries. Aries rose before Notre-Dame in Paris in 1717, closed in New York in 1784, and opened again in 1888 in a desert temple of the Ouroboros in Mexico, with Taurus in Louisiana. Virgo is London; Libra, Alexandria; Pisces, an ocean strip from Antigua to the Prismatic Wall of Tartary — the water-gate to Atlantis.

Each platform has two guardians, always opposed — the eagle and the serpent. Twelve houses, twenty-four guardians: the lords of the platforms, who are also the guardians of time. They keep the platforms as jailers, permit passage between the planes, and police time against those who abuse travel. They meet in council in Venice. They were once fallen gods of another world; they died, and others took their place.

• The Dual Corruption. Whoever kills a guardian becomes the guardian or is destroyed. The office rotates; the column stays. Not even death frees a guardian.
• Hatred holds the world. If the two guardians of a house hate each other without killing, the house holds. If they destroy each other, it falls with everyone on it. If they unite, they become a Sentinel, and Antiterra could sail like a ship — but that takes all twenty-four at once.
• The council is coveted. Graz’zt wants every lord of the platforms under him, and sends his twelve sons against the twelve.
• The same law reaches history. Time casts some travelers as Uchronic Guards, bound to an appointed murder — Sarajevo, 1914; whoever kills a Guard inherits his memories.

• Aries — Gabriel, a priest who cannot master the wrath of his sign, and the blue dragon Oximec. When Gabriel dies in 1888, Gorgona inherits his half.
• Taurus — Erzebeth, its guardian to come.
• Virgo — a maiden with a sheaf of wheat.
• Libra — Valor, found dead in Alexandria in 1891, his post passing to one of the company that found him; and the Fever, collector of souls.
• Scorpio — Jean-Baptiste, changed by the office: scales and a cold blue sting.
• Pisces — the Cakravartin and the Great Khan, held aloft by their forgiveness.

“The North sees, but its sight fades. The East knows, but its wisdom darkens. The West remembers, but its memory fades. The South feels, but its heart grows cold.”

Above the platforms, the four Guardians of Antiterra hold the world up from its geometry. By 1901 they live only on the belief their peoples still keep. When they die, Terra and Antiterra come apart, English rule ends, and the world begins to fall.

Uchrony is the history that might have been. In Antiterra it is a place, and a trade.

The end of Antiterra is not a clean death. What survives is sewn to the remains of its twin: Sinterra, the synthesis. Uchronic Paris, its churches turned into libraries by Paulus, is the membrane where Terra and Antiterra are sewn together for the last time.

“Uchrony is not relief: it is a scar.”

In Sinterra a street that was one thing in Terra and another in Antiterra is now both. The sky keeps traces of two atmospheres. Those who came from either world know which; those born after cannot tell.

“A sad victory.”

Before the platforms and before A.D.A., there was the war of the suns. At the sun-king’s last feast Veloria, the Shadow, poured a love philter into the wine of her rival Adara. Mocked as a poisonous spider, she led the elves of the Black Poplars to war and killed the twenty-four princes, the twenty-four suns. The Liosalfar, the light elves, won and drove their dark brothers underground. Veloria took Adara below with her.

Millennia later she freed Adara so the king could father a twenty-fifth sun: Arian. Then, as a talking black panther, she led him to the drow, whose priestess made him sign the Pact. His mark runs through the later worlds. When he dies he returns elsewhere a year later; in Vala he is worshiped as the god of magic and fantasy; in the present cycle he is called Caladan; his avatars form the Arian Line.

Arian · The Elf and the Shadow — the comic in English (PDF) →