Wiki › The Wane's Root
The Wane's Root
The sixth of the bands below, from 327,680 to 655,359 rows below the old floor of the world. This is where the grey grows up from. Nothing down here was ever finished: the stone is unmade stone, with lines where its grain should be, whole walls are only outlines, and the colour drains out of everything the longer you look at it. There is no lava and no water in the Root.
The Grown here have a Might of ×8.0 at the band's top and ×12.1 at its bottom (see Might and temper).
Getting in
The band begins with a seal of unmade stone, 8 rows across the whole world. Unmade stone gives only to an embersteel pickaxe and a pick temper of V (won with the Hollow Sun's dawngold). So does the rest of the band's rock: the half-drawn stone and the greyroot.
The strata
| Stratum | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| The Unmade | blobs of nothing with ragged edges, their rims only half drawn, and blank patches hanging in the open. |
| The Root Tangles | thin tunnels through stone shot through with grey roots; roots hang from every roof. The darkest of the three. |
| The Sketchlands | a pale world drawn in outline: broad caves, and much of the rock only lines on paper. |
The fade
The Root forgets you a little at a time. Your fade shows in your buff row, as a share of you:
- It grows by itself while you stay in the Root: from nothing to all of you in about five minutes in the Unmade, seven in the Root Tangles, nine in the Sketchlands.
- As it grows, your own light shrinks around you.
- From 80% it starts to take your life (1% a second, 2% when it is all of you).
- Out of the Root it lifts again, in about a minute.
- Unmade patches, the blank white spots on the floors, take you faster where you stand in one (3% more of you a second) and hurt (4% of your life a second, which no armour stops). Step out, or fill it with a block.
What keeps it off:
- the land of your own lit Home: on it the fade lifts, quickly;
- a keeping lamp: within 7 tiles of one the fade lifts (make it at a sun-forge from 2 greyheart, 2 sunglass and a loose line);
- carrying a light in your hand slows it;
- a keeping charm, an amulet, halves it (6 greyheart, 4 loose lines and 2 dawngold, at a sun-forge);
- a draught of remembering clears it at once and keeps it off for 3 minutes (a vial, a loose line and a cinder petal, at a cauldron);
- greyroot broth heals 300 life and lifts it a little (2 greyroot and 2 glowcaps, at a cauldron).
Places
| Place | Where | |
|---|---|---|
| A room only half drawn | the Unmade and the Sketchlands | a room of planks and furniture whose far half is still only lines. Its walls can be taken. |
| A root heart | the Root Tangles | a knot of grey roots round a hollow where greyheart grows. Kept as it was. |
| A grey echo of Aldhearth | the Sketchlands and the Unmade, rarely | the Wane's copy of the capital's square: every shape there, and nothing named. Kept as it was. |
Each has a chest (greyheart, loose lines, draughts of remembering) and a page to find.
The Unmade
The Grown of the Root look drawn rather than born, in grey pencil on the dark: Half-drawn Wolves, Line Spiders, the Grey Choir, Unfinished Knights, Sketch Wyrms and Erasures. Their swarm is the Scribbles, seven to twelve at a time.
Every lair holds a great one of them: the Root of the Wane. It sends grasping roots up under each of you (a little over a second to step off them), and every so often it draws the grey in: a wide ring round it fills, and whoever is still inside when it closes is hurt, and the Root is healed for each of them. Its own blows heal it a little, it hits harder once it is badly hurt, and it scribbles swarms out of nothing. Killed, it leaves greyheart, loose lines and a page, and sometimes a root of itself.
Greyheart and what to make
Greyheart, the grey set hard and hidden in the unmade stone until you open a face of it, is the band's ore: 28 of it and 1,678,000 gold raise a temper to VI, for each place (weapon, armour or pick; 84 and 5,034,000 gold for all three: see Might and temper).
- Drawn brick (four unmade stone in the grid) to build with.
- Loose lines come from the Root of the Wane, raids and chests; greyroot from the roots themselves.
- The keeping lamp works in the Last Dark too: what is in its light, the dark cannot reach.
A Home here is raided by the Unmade, and pays greyheart and loose lines to those who hold it.
Above the Root: The Hollow Sun. Below it: The Last Dark.
Weapons
Weapons of this band. At a Deep anvil, 32 Greyheart, 8 Loose line and 800k gold make the Greyroot bow, a bow of 172 damage. The great one here leaves The Root’s Reach (spear, 189, Hungering Dash) one kill in five. To forge it you must first read its forging notes, Forging notes: Greyroot bow: the Root of the Wane 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. See Weapons of the Deep.