Wiki › The Hollow Sun
The Hollow Sun
The fifth of the bands below, from 163,840 to 327,679 rows below the old floor of the world. Long before Nyrath, before even the worlds above it, a sun was buried here, and it has never stopped burning. The rock is its skin: sunstone, warm right through and glowing a little in the dark. The light is gold, the air shimmers, and everything you stand on is hot.
The Grown here have a Might of ×5.3 at the band's top and ×8.0 at its bottom (see Might and temper).
Getting in
The band begins with a seal of sunstone, 8 rows across the whole world. Sunstone gives only to an embersteel pickaxe and a pick temper of IV (won with the Crystal Cathedrals' own material). So does the rest of the band's rock: cinderstone and the flare vents.
The strata
Three kinds of stratum take turns, 512 rows each:
| Stratum | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| The Corona | round bubbles in molten sunstone over wide seas of lava; sun-drips hang from the roofs, cinder blooms and flare vents on the floors. The brightest, and the hottest. |
| The Cinder Plains | wide flat plains in layers, one over the next, with pillars of black cinderstone between them and cinder blooms all over their floors; a little lava. |
| The Dawnforge Deeps | tall chasms with galleries off them, veins of dawngold in their walls (more here than anywhere), lava at the bottom. |
Here and there a chimney runs down through the rock into the next stratum.
Heat
The Hollow Sun warms you while you stay in it. Your heat shows in your buff row:
- It builds by itself, fastest in the Corona (about a minute from cool to burning), slower in the Dawnforge Deeps, slowest on the Cinder Plains, and far faster within three tiles of lava.
- At 60 a warning comes up: find water.
- At 100 you are burning, and lose 3% of your life every second until you cool down.
- Standing in water cools you fast; water within two tiles cools you slowly. Out of the Hollow Sun the heat goes in a few seconds.
- It never touches you in a town's ground or on the land of your own lit Home.
What keeps it off:
- a cooling draught cools you at once and stops the heat building for 5 minutes (a vial, two cinder petals and ice, at a cauldron);
- a dawn loaf heals 350 life and cools you a little (two bread and two cinder petals, at a furnace).
Sunflares
The flare vents in the floor erupt every nine seconds or so. A ring of light on the ground shows where one is about to go off, a second and a half before it does: step off it. A flare that catches you takes 14% of your life.
Places
| Place | Where | |
|---|---|---|
| A sun-forge | the Dawnforge Deeps and the Corona | the sun-smiths' hall of sunstone brick, its forge still burning under a hood of sunglass. You may work at it. Kept as it was. |
| An ash temple | the Cinder Plains | pillars of sunstone brick, a floor of ash, an altar between two braziers. Its stone can be taken. |
| A corona ring | the Corona, rarely | a ring of sunglass round a little sun that fell off the big one, with a name scratched inside. Kept as it was. |
Each has a chest of what the sun-smiths left (dawngold, sun-embers, cooling draughts, sunglass) and a page to find.
The Sunborn
The Grown of the Hollow Sun glow like metal in a forge: Flare Moths, Cinder Saints, Magma Striders, Dawn Hounds, Sunforged Colossi and Corona Wyrms. Their swarm is the Ember-motes, seven to twelve at a time.
Every lair holds a great one of them: the Ember of the First Dawn. It gathers the dawn round itself (get out of its ring before it fills: three seconds) and calls sunfall down on whoever is near it (a column of light, a second and a half). It hits harder once it is badly hurt, now and then it sheds a swarm of embers, and it bursts when it dies: stand clear as it falls. Killed, it leaves dawngold, sun-embers and a page, and sometimes its heart.
Dawngold and what to make
Dawngold, hidden in the sunstone until you open a face of it, is the band's ore: 24 of it and 1,343,000 gold raise a temper to V, for each place (weapon, armour or pick; 72 and 4,029,000 gold for all three: see Might and temper).
- A sun-forge of your own: 6 dawngold, 20 sunstone and 4 embersteel bars, at an anvil. Set it down and it lights itself. The deepest work is done at it: the keeping lamp and keeping charm of the Wane's Root and the nightflares of the Last Dark.
- Sunstone brick (four sunstone in the grid) and sunglass (sunstone and glass) to build with: a wall of either glows faintly all night.
- Cinder petals come from the cinder blooms; sun-embers from the Ember of the First Dawn, raids and chests.
A Home here is raided by the Sunborn, and pays dawngold and sun-embers to those who hold it.
Below the Hollow Sun: The Wane's Root.
Weapons
Weapons of this band. At a Deep anvil, 28 Dawngold, 6 Sun-ember and 700k gold make the Dawngold falchion, a sword of 169 damage. The great one here leaves the First Light (sword, 186, Burning Groundwave) one kill in five. To forge it you must first read its forging notes, Forging notes: Dawngold falchion: the Ember of the First Dawn always leaves them the first time you kill it, and one kill in four after that; the band's Grown drop them now and then (an elite more often), and the chests of its landmarks may hold them. Vesna in the Delvers' Lodge sells The sunforge brand (sword, 186) to anyone who has been this deep. See Weapons of the Deep.