The world is called the Scattered Realms — an endless desert of shifting dunes, fractured ruins, plasma storms, and wandering mobile cities. At its centre, always visible on the horizon, impossible to reach: the City of Zarkath.

No one knows how old the world is. History is not a resource to be studied. It is something excavated — in Memory Stones, in the architecture of ruins, in the behaviour of ghosts. Every fragment raises more questions than it answers.

And yet everything feels ancient and familiar. As if the player has been here before. As if the ruins were built by people not so different from those alive today. Whether this sense of familiarity is truth buried in plasma-memory, or simply the nature of a dream recycling its own imagery, is unknown.

The world is a dream. The dreamer is the Yellow King. The spiral galaxy visible in the night sky is said to be his Eye, slowly closing as he dies.

As the dreamer weakens, the world becomes unstable. Fragments of forgotten ages resurface — ruins appear, disappear, and move. The closer one travels to Zarkath, the more reality fractures.

All factions are, at the deepest level, fragments of the Dream itself — expressions of memory, fear, hope, and ambition inside the mind of the Yellow King. The Veiled Architects know this. Most others do not.

Memory Stones are crystallized plasma shards containing fragments of the Yellow King's mind — memories, emotions, identities of those who have passed through the Scattered Realms.

They are simultaneously currency, power source, crafting material, and lore artifact. Absorbing a Memory Stone can grant skills, unlock faction contacts, or reveal a piece of the dying god's history.

The Miners' Brotherhood treats them as resources. The Veiled Architects treat them as sacred relics. The Memory Keepers dedicate their lives to preserving the identities encoded within them. All three are correct.

The players are the Yellow King.

Not servants of the Yellow King. Not chosen by him. They are the Yellow King — a dying god whose consciousness is fracturing, playing out its final hours in a dream it can no longer fully control.

The Scattered Realms is not a world with a dying god at its centre. It IS the dying god. The desert is the dying god's psyche. Zarkath is what remains of the god's self — the last coherent image at the centre of a dissolving mind.

Portals appear scattered across the desert — a door standing alone in the sand, an arch of fused glass, a column of still air that smells like rain. These are Memory Worlds: portals into a memory of the Yellow King, preserved in crystallized plasma.

Each is a self-contained story from the Yellow King's past — a village, a fortress, a ship, a single night at a feast. The intimacy is the point. The player falls in love with the place and its people.

And then, because the god's memory is decaying, they watch it all dissolve. The player returns to the desert with a Memory Stone and a fragment of knowledge. The portal is gone.

Elyna is the only consciousness in the dream who experiences both the collapse and the reconstitution in real time. She exists at the Staircase Sites — the thinnest points of the dream's fabric — because that is where she can feel attention arriving and withdrawing.

At deep Sanity erosion, her presence becomes audible. Not words — presence. A quality in the silence between other sounds. Players who have encountered Elyna directly will recognise it. Players who haven't will feel it as something they cannot name.

The Seven Stairs are the mechanism by which the dream recognises those worthy of reaching its centre. Each Stair is a threshold — a question the dream asks, and waits for an honest answer.