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Chapter III: Below the Well

Why can nobody hold land under the open sky? Chapter III is the answer, and it ends with ground of your own under it. It is a chain of five steps for one character. The Journal (J) shows the chapter as its own card, under chapter II's, with what to do now. Track puts it on the tracker under the map.

How to start it

• Finish Chapter II: The White Flame first (carry the Steward's Seal back to Oswin).
• Then talk to Oswin at the Warden House in Aldhearth again. His menu has a new line, Chapter III: Below the Well, and there is a mark over his head when he has something for you.
• The chapter takes you down into the Deep, below the old lava where the world used to end. Bring a pickaxe that can cut deepstone (iron or better), torches, and a Land deed (made at a Workbench) for the Home Stone you will set down. The first stratum's Grown are about ten levels above the land you dig down from.
• The chapter's things stay in your bag. You cannot drop, sell, list, trade, bank, mail or chest them, and an outlaw's death does not spill them. These things are the Founding Ember and the pages. Nothing in the chapter hangs on them either. If a page is gone, the one who gave it has another copy, or it is back on its nail when you go there again. If the ember is gone before you use it, it is back in its stone.
• At the end you get gold, experience, Bram's lamp (an amulet that sheds light, heals you a little faster and gives a little more life), and the title the Homeholder.

The rest of this page tells the story. Read it after, or read it now, as you like.

Spoilers: the five steps

1. The Edict of Ash. Oswin takes a page out of a drawer marked "Do not" and reads you the first law the Wardens wrote after the Burning, in the ash of Aurelmark. The open land is the towns' and the road's, never a person's. Aurel's ring of iron was a claim on the surface, and it burned the city. What lies under the open sky is watched from above, and what is watched and claimed is unmade. Stone is too patient for the Wane: an ember carried down and set in stone keeps a hold. The Warden House sold surface deeds against its own first law for two hundred years. Then the white lights and the Skyreach showed it what had been looking down at all those deeds, and it keeps the Edict again. Aldhearth itself was lit in a well-house, and the page is yours.
2. Below the Well. Bram, the old miner, sits at the well in Aldhearth's crafters' quarter, west of the plaza. He is the miner of the lost page Complaint to the Warden House: he has died twenty times, and something at the bottom knows his name. Click him and choose Chapter III: Below the Well. The year the city burned, the well-diggers carried an ember down the well and set it in the stone to hold it. This is the Founding Ember. It does not stay where they left it: go down, and it will be somewhere near you. Bram's notes are yours.
3. The Founding Ember. Dig down below the old lava into the Ember Sea, the Deep's first stratum. Once you are there, the ember is near you: a hollow a short walk to one side, made for you, never on or next to anyone's Home. If there is no room nearby, it is in the nearest great lair of the Ember Sea. The minimap marks it with an orange diamond, and it glows in the stone. Three Ember-drawn Grown sit on it, one of them an elite. Put them down, walk up to the ember, and it is yours.
4. The first Home. Set down a Home Stone at least 40 rows below the ground with any Land deed (nearer the surface the Grown never come for it, and the ember will not take there: it stays in your bag). Then hold the Founding Ember and right click the Home Stone. The ember goes into the stone and its land widens at once, to tier 2 (25 tiles across), without an ember core. If its land is that wide already, the ember is set in it all the same. If the wider land would break a rule here (it would touch another Home, or reach a town), the ember stays in your bag and the message tells you why: use it on another Home Stone.
5. The first raid, and back to Bram. A lit Home at least 40 rows down draws the Grown. Hold it through its first raid. A raid won while you are away counts at your next login. While there are no raids in the world, this step is done when you set down the Home Stone, and the Journal says so. Then go back to Bram at the well. He tells you what the Edict really means, gives you the last page of his notes, What knows his name, and his lamp. Chapter III is complete: the title the Homeholder.

The pages

• The Edict of Ash, from Oswin.
• Bram's notes, from Bram.
• One page for each kind of stratum: the Ember Sea, the Hollow Roots, the Choir Caverns, the Still Dark and the Grey Fold. The well-diggers nailed each one to the stone where its stratum begins, three hundred years ago. You get one the first time you reach that stratum after Bram has sent you down. Read them from your bag, like lost pages.
• What knows his name, at the end, from Bram. It is not the Wane. It knows names, and it keeps a ledger too.