A holy world of stone

Sarn is a holy world, terraced from pole to pole in quarry-temples, where geology and liturgy were never separate disciplines. Stone is sacred. Worked stone is more sacred. Stone that has been sung awake is the most sacred thing there is.

The Vespertide & the Choral See

The world rings. A standing resonance wave — the Vespertide — circles Sarn on a slow period; during it the quarries sing back, instruments detune, and the faithful keep vigil. The Choral See governs the faith, the quarry rights, and the Cantors; its fighting arm is the Sevenfold Choir, seven Lithic Orders, one per Stone-Tradition. A Cantor raised to formal commission carries the title Stoneknight.

The Hush & the Unsung

Two things everyone on Sarn knows and nobody can explain. First, the Stilled: hundreds of kneeling, silent Colossi scattered across the world — because three generations ago, in a single season, nearly the entire commissioned Choir stopped. Mid-patrol, mid-battle, mid-verse: they set down their songs, climbed out of their machines, and never sang again. Many never spoke again. It is called the Hush; the See teaches it as apostasy; pilgrims leave offerings in the joints of the kneeling giants. Second, newer, whispered in worker barracks: the Unsung — hollow things rising where the singing has been longest and hardest. The See calls them resonance accidents.

You are starting your career in the middle of all that.

The giants were the wall

For longer than anyone alive remembers, the singing Colossi were the only thing standing between people and the Unsung — the hollow things that rise to swallow every voice they find. When the dark came up out of the deep, the Choir met it. That was the bargain the whole world rested on.

Three generations ago the Choir walked off the wall. In one season they laid down their songs and knelt — the Hush — and the wall has been down ever since. The See calls it apostasy. The towns just know that no one is coming when the hollow ones come back.

And they are coming back. So this was never about waking a giant for the wonder of it. It is about a world with no one left to defend it — and a power, asleep in the stone, that picked you. What you do with it is the only thing between everyone you know and the silence.

The Rising

The See calls the Unsung accidents — a stray harmonic, a quarry that sang too long, nothing a Cantor can't put down. But the hollow ones are surfacing more often now, and nearer the living than they used to be. The oldest hands on the plateau have another name for it. They say it has happened before, that there is a rhythm to it, and that the rhythm is quickening. They call what's coming the Rising.

The See does not use that word. That alone should tell you something.

And this is why your Colossus must wake all the way back to itself. A frame returned to its true voice — its full power — is the one thing built to meet the Rising. That return is the work in front of you, and the reason you bond at all.

Out past Sarn

Sarn is not the only world that sings — and not the only thing that is listening. Beyond the last jump, in the concord they call the Unison, there is a king who never died. He is still as the kneeling giants. He has held one note for three generations, and he means for it never to end — not the war, not the dying, not you. Everything, fixed in place. Forever.

The Hushed go silent when you say his name. Whatever they refused, he is its opposite — and somewhere out past the dark, he already knows yours. You won't understand why for a long while yet. Hold onto it anyway: the Still King.

Faces you'll meet

A few of the people you'll cross early. You don't need to remember any of this — they'll make themselves known.

• 

  Edda Reyes

  Your handler

  The voice on the line. Quarry-ops, came up through logistics, unimpressed by miracles. If she's calling, it has already gone wrong.

• 

  Maren Voss

  Keeper of the Stilled

  Old, and silent by choice. She tends the kneeling giants — and remembers what the See would rather forget.

• 

  Prime Cantrix Ilvane

  The Choral See

  Devout, exact, and carrying a compromise she will never name aloud.

You are a Cantor

You are a Cantor — one who makes stone resonate; one who sings it awake. Your machine is a Colossus: not a vehicle, a waking being, with a body, a voice, a temperament, and — you will find — opinions.

But it wakes wrong. After three generations silent, your Colossus comes back off-key and half-amnesiac, wearing a wound where its true voice should be. This is the heart of it, and it is a partnership: it has needs of its own, and you do not command it so much as answer it. Every truth you face and every Ideal you live — together with it — is how it remembers what it is and how its real power returns. You help it become what it is, and in doing so you become what you are. Neither of you wakes alone, and the world is going to need what you become together.

What binds you is the Pact, sealed at first bonding and deepened across your whole career through Ideals: spoken oaths you must live before you may swear them. Every Cantor's first words are the same — the Zeroth Ideal, sworn at bonding, before your own Stone's ladder begins:

The words come next →

The Zeroth Ideal

Every Cantor's first words are the same — sworn at bonding, before your own Stone's ladder begins:

"I will wake the stone. I will carry the song. I will release the note."

The three faces

Every Stone carries three faces:

• FractureWhat turns against you when you push too hard. Your fracture, made mechanical — and the exact place your power releases from, once it has been faced.
• TransformationThe active gift you channel through song. What flows through you and changes what you can do.
• OathThe earned strength that holds you up. Grace, not a stat boost — sworn, lived, and renewable. An oath leaned on too long becomes a cage. Courage curdles into recklessness, compassion into martyrdom, clarity into cold. Earning it once is not the same as keeping it.

You don't get the Oath by avoiding the Fracture. You get it by walking through it. That is the whole game.

Seven Stones, seven Colossi

You'll choose the one that calls to you — by what it does and how it sounds. Each wakes not yet knowing what it is; what it comes to ask of you, the two of you find in play. Here they are, root to crown:

• GraniteEarth · Anchor / Defender
• CarnelianWater · Skirmisher / Dancer
• PyriteFire · Striker / Vanguard
• MalachiteAir · Linker / Force-Multiplier
• LapisSound · Controller / Commander
• ObsidianLight · Sniper / Diviner
• QuartzThought / Spirit · Avatar / Cataclysm

Read about the seven Orders — your people →

A table note

A table note before the paths: some of these run on real-feeling beats — confession, grief, letting go. We use safety tools, and everything is fiction-first: you will never be required to disclose anything real. Your character's secrets count in full.

You know enough. The Hangar is open if you want to see the frames first. When you're ready, build your Cantor — bring the answers to session zero.