West of the wall

Past the Highwall the streetlights stop, and Westgate is the last safe ground.

What it is

Mapped The newest part of the map. Names here may change.

The region called the West Reach lies beyond the Highwall, where the Loom stopped needing people and nothing arrived to argue. The Fringe has gunfire and contract boards. The Reach mostly has wind. The Seal caught all of it mid-shift.

The Highwall is Loom-era. East of it are streetlights, a suppression lattice and somebody's writ. West of it there is none of those. The Reach has people, but few of them.

The enemy ladder is different out here: survivors, then a warband, then the thing in the hole. There is no state rung at all. The groups who live here are described under the margins.

Places

Westgate

Kind: Checkpoint belt, a safe hub
Combat: None
Loop station: A platform that was built and never connected

Westgate is a belt of shops, yards and lamps at the foot of the Highwall. You spend a minute here, in the last place with streetlights somebody pays for, before you choose one of three gates. From the crest of the wall, east is the Coil, gold and still the tallest thing in sight. West is nothing you would call a city.

The gates are the Rust Gate, the Saltgate and the Ash Gate, and each arch carries its heat tier: 3, 4 and 5. A Scrapline staging yard issues water, rope and chalk by the unit. The Tourniquet station's sign says it is the last one out here. Kids use the Loop platform as a stage.

Nobody knows who keeps the Westgate Lamps, and they have never gone out. The belt has four theories about who does. On the Tally Wall people chalk who went out and did not come back, and the custom is that you rub out your own name when you return.

OUT · NAME · WATER · BACK

The Tally Wall, header The water column is the one people lie in.

206 chalked.

90 rubbed out on return.

The Tally Wall

the lamps were on

The Tally Wall, bottom right Small, and not part of the tally.

LAST PLACE WITH RULES

WITH LAMPS

The belt wall The second line is chalked, in a correcting hand.

Rustfield

Heat tier: 3

Rustfield is a closed mill that still runs warm. Substation Zero feeds the whole Reach: everything out here with a working light has a cable back to that building. It is the first district with no neon at all.

The sound is sheet metal, the cough of a vent stack and a rail that still settles at night. The Offcut crews work here, and they hold that a thing belongs to whoever has been keeping it running. See the margins.

The crucible is still hanging. Nothing has been poured in it for twelve years and the floor is still warm, because the Deepworks does not know the mill closed.

The Foundry

SHIFT'S OVER. NOBODY TOLD IT.

The mill door

Tidewrack

Heat tier: 4

Tidewrack is a neighbourhood at the wrong depth. Water from the Cut comes in through the Wrack Gates, six of them, and three have been jammed open since the Seal. Closing them would drain a district that four hundred people now live in. The causeways, the tops of the old arterials, are the only reliable ground.

The Pier-Wraiths are people: the ones who stayed when the water came. They know which slabs hold, and they talk across the water in a whistle code. The light is Deepworks coolant algae under sodium, with the whole district reflected in it.

THIS ONE HOLDS

Above the waterline Repeated on nine slabs. One of them has been crossed out.

The Cinderflats

Heat tier: 5

The Cinderflats were the Long Row, a terrace of works housing that burned in the third winter after the Seal. Nobody agrees on how it started. Nobody came to put it out. It is the only place in Catena where the Kindling murals are gone rather than faded. On one scrubbed rectangle someone has chalked the outline of a mural back on, at the exact size of the missing paint.

The Glasslands are a crater of fused black glass that reflects the whole fight back at you. The Emberhold, a warband, keep their settlement in sight of the Ash Gate so that everyone coming through sees it. The district is lit by combustion, because the Emberhold keep actual fires. See the margins.

Gravemaw

Heat tier: 5

Gravemaw is a hole with something in it. The quarry chased the aggregate into a fault and then the fault chased back. In a pit the threat comes from above by default, the sightlines are vertical, and the sky is a strip. Something down there is still drawing power.

See also