People
Aveline before the voyage
Her childhood, education, relationships and ambitions: a life already under way before the novel’s opening.
Worlds · crowns · ordinary lives
Life at the edge
has a price.
Crowns claim worlds. People keep the pumps running. Explore the outer rim through its histories, streets, working machinery and households with plans of their own.
Enter the extended AtlasThe rim is the everyday name for the galactic Outer Rim. Its inhabited planets and moons are rim worlds.
Reference period: before Aveline’s departure. Tarsenne: opening SR 683. Imperial correspondence: CR 412. Maps state their projection and scale limits.
The princess and the empire
House Orinth →Realms
The Orinthian Empire
A crown spanning several worlds, a court accustomed to being heard, and provinces with reasons of their own to remain within its reach.
Start with a world
World registers and maps →
Worlds
Tarsenne: planetary almanac
A planet of cold crowns, reservoir cities, monsoon kingdoms and island parliaments. Its countries share a sky; they have never shared a single government.
Worlds
Caelune
A temperate world of estuaries, upland settlements and old industrial districts, where royal history is only one layer of daily life.
Worlds
Damar
A world of inhabited basins, managed water and civic gardens whose beauty depends on unglamorous work.
Realms
The Kingdom of Nereth
A lunar monarchy whose sovereignty is sustained by skilled yards, careful maintenance and agreements with larger neighbours.
Worlds
Pelaset
An ocean-dominated world of working coasts, glass-making districts and communities whose connections exceed the reach of any single charter.
Atlas
The Serev system
The inner setting: Orinthian Caelune, Sarthene Damar, and the independent moon kingdom of Nereth.
What the weather brings inside
Search every entry →
Culture
Biomes, weather and bad air
Environmental conditions across the rim, from cold pressure settlements to corrosive rain belts and inhabited wetlands.
Culture
Teeth, wings and working animals
Predators, pests, domestic animals and the ecologies that make them more than encounters on a road.
Culture
Roots, spores and creeping growth
Plants, fungi and colony-forming growths in food, medicine, industry and the slow occupation of neglected places.
The systems people depend upon
Culture
Passage, freight and news
Spaceflight, ground routes, communications and the people excluded from their advertised reach.
Culture
Law, debt and captivity
Status, courts, enforcement, coercive labour and the practical limits of a person’s rights.
Culture
Care, injury and the repairable body
Clinics, disease, prostheses, inherited modifications and the limits of diagnosis on the rim.
Culture
War, garrisons and their invoices
Armed institutions, strategic industry, civilian exposure and the limits of force across the rim.
Culture
Psionic Aether and the learned arts
Distinct disciplines, training, materials and institutions governing psychic and arcane practice.
Culture
The household ledger
Food, wages, shelter, domestic work and the small reserves that let people make choices.
Return to a life
All citizen stories →Lives
Edris Ro: The Good Tablecloth
At forty-two, Edris Ro knows how to preserve an embroidered cuff and how to stretch a quiet evening. A change to his working hours gives him a chance to keep a promise at home.
Lives
Kesra Dey: A Seam of Her Own
Kesra wants to be trusted with work that will leave the yard. Learning to report a small error gives her a more useful confidence than pretending she never makes one.
Lives
Istra Harn: Room on the Bench
Istra can usually tell where a boat leaks before its owner has finished denying it. A troublesome repair prompts her to let a neighbour take a larger part in her work.
Lives
Sevren Hal: Lessons After Lunch
Sevren spent his working life preparing other people's children for doors already open to them. In retirement, he finds a smaller and more reciprocal use for what he knows.
Lives
Lethra Cerin: Beyond the Garden Wall
Lethra wants to work with plants in conditions the palace gardens carefully prevent. A paid junior post in the highlands offers less comfort than the place Aveline could find for her, and a prospect she cannot leave alone.
Lives
Edris Ro: The Wrong Song
With Evin away for a restday, Edris goes out to hear a favourite singer. The singer is absent, her replacement is loud, and the evening refuses to become the quiet pleasure he had ordered for himself.
A route into Tarsenne: the planetary survey → the Sedge Coast → Reedbank’s streets → Istra’s repair bench.