this world
also known as this world, this planet
The unnamed planet Nomad has Skipped to — a slowly rotating world where the dawn moves slowly enough across the surface that the hovercities can outrun it. The day side burns with sunlight too potent to be ordinary; on the night side the dark is lit by the reflected glow of the planet's rings. Civilisation lives in the twilight band between, in cities that fly and never stop moving. STD:TSM:Ch 2
Known facts
- hovercities-outrun-dawnRotates slowly enough that hovercities — and the smaller hovercycles that dock to them — can stay ahead of the rising sun by simply flying west, never landing for long. The civilisation here lives in the twilight band and must keep moving.STD:TSM:Ch 2
- sow-and-reap-dailyThe civilisation here farms on a daily cycle — sowing seeds onto the ground just before dawn so the plants mature in hours under the Invested sunlight, then fleeing back into the dark before the sunline arrives.STD:TSM:Ch 3
- small-dense-coreNomad notes that a short, fast hovercycle run has visibly shifted the angle of the rings against the stars, which means the planet's circumference is small — yet surface gravity feels normal, implying an unusually dense core.STD:TSM:Ch 6
- five-phase-rotationNomad sketches the planet as a cycle of five bands chasing each other around the surface: dawn-side death zone where prisoners are left to burn, the day inferno, the trailing cloud belt of constant rain, the great maelstrom at dusk, and the ring-lit growing band where farming briefly happens before the cycle starts again.STD:TSM:Ch 8
- landscape-resets-each-rotationNothing on the surface is the same from one rotation to the next. The passage of the Sky Tyrant melts and reshapes the land each day; only large-scale features (the southern highlands, the persistent mountain range) survive. Maps cannot be drawn.STD:TSM:Ch 12
- magma-formationsThe strange craggy rock formations dotting the plains between storms are solidified magma eruptions, frozen mid-flow by the rains that follow the sunset. The cratered, jagged surfaces show none of the smooth weathering of true erosion.STD:TSM:Ch 12
- ships-cannot-fly-highThe local ships cannot fly over the persistent southern range — they simply cannot reach that altitude — and the range is wide enough that going around drops travellers into killing canyons. The altitude ceiling is one of several places Nomad notices the local technology doing strange things.STD:TSM:Ch 12
- sunlight-is-investedThe sunlight itself is heavily Invested. The local sunhearts would not, on a single soul, contain enough Investiture to absorb the kind of energies Nomad and Aux consumed through the drained ember cell; the sun supercharges each soul as the heat condenses it.STD:TSM:Ch 13
- no-threnodite-ghostsDespite the population's Threnodite origins, there are no shades on this world. The dying do not leave behind the smoky spectral echo their ancestors would have — the sunlight consumes the soul as it kills, condensing it into a sunheart before any shadow can form.STD:TSM:Ch 13
- spontaneous-magma-geysersMagma erupts unpredictably from the surface even far from the sunlit band — a geyser fountains beside Nomad's cycle during the chase, sparks that refuse to extinguish and waves of glowing stone heaving up from the crust at random. The mechanics do not fit ordinary tectonics; the planet's whole surface is unreliable.STD:TSM:Ch 14
- around-fifty-groups-in-corridorsCarries somewhere on the order of fifty groups of people running parallel in its habitable corridors — a population dense enough to prevent inbreeding but scattered enough, Nomad thinks, to invite the rise of a tyrant. The surprise of the Cinder King, in that light, is not that he came but that he took so long.STD:TSM:Ch 15
- called-canticleIs named, by the Cinder King himself, Canticle.STD:TSM:Ch 16
- is-small-with-thin-atmosphereBy Nomad's math, Canticle is comically small for the gravity it carries — implying something very dense and Invested at its core — and its atmosphere thins so abruptly that a thousand feet up is already lethal. The locals' ships hover only thirty or forty feet off the ground for that reason.STD:TSM:Ch 19
- rotation-ten-hours-standardCompletes one rotation in roughly twenty local hours, which by Nomad's internal clock is about ten hours galactic standard. The planet is small enough that ordinary aircraft can stay ahead of the sunline simply by keeping pace with its turn.STD:TSM:Ch 19
- mountains-at-polesAlways carries mountains at its poles — untraversable regions where the hovercities cannot run.STD:TSM:Ch 19
- sunlight-fails-to-destroy-at-altitudeThe moment Beacon clears the summit, Nomad is bathed in direct sunlight above the cloud line — and nothing happens. The light is calm, warm, ordinary. He had already noticed that the Night Brigade ship hangs in orbit without its shields being overwhelmed. The two observations point at the same problem: if the planetary sunlight were really as intense as it acts down on the ground, it should have stripped the atmosphere off Canticle long ago. He suspects something else: perhaps the world is naturally an oblate spheroid with the atmosphere pulled toward the equator, so what reads as polar mountains is really just the edges of the oval poking out above the air — and the destruction below happens to the day-side air, not to the air-free space above it.STD:TSM:Ch 30
- natives-share-cosmic-connectionAll native souls of this world are Cosmere-Connected to each other and recognise one another as effectively the same self — which is how Beaconite living can share heat with Beaconite dead through sunhearts and through their heat prayer. Nomad, an offworlder, is excluded from that web. He can pull Investiture out of a sunheart, but the sunheart will not accept anything he tries to put into it. Linguistic Connection alone is not enough; the cultural practice runs through a deeper Cosmere bond.STD:TSM:Ch 33
- core-feeds-on-investitureStanding in the great maelstrom, with the burnt new ground cooling under him at impossible speed, Nomad feels something in the depths of the planet trying to siphon his Investiture downward. It cannot have his, but it tries. He puts it together with everything else: the world's gravity is too high for its diameter, the core must be either impossibly dense or impossibly Invested, and the rapid cooling of the day-side ground that quiets the storms and lets the shadow exist is the same draw at work. The planet feeds on Investiture the way he does.STD:TSM:Ch 34
- sunlight-is-a-current-to-the-coreSunlight on Canticle does not merely shine on the surface — it is pulled into the Invested core like a current, the way lightning forms a current between cloud and ground. Everything caught between the sun and the core acts like the filament of an incandescent light bulb, superheated by the transfer of energy as it passes through. Aux notices that the light itself *pushes* against his shield wrong; Nomad works out the reason on the deck and realises this is why surface rocks melt, why a sunheart charges as it does — and why he could stand on top of Beacon in the sunline without burning, because the city's hull put him above the line of flow rather than within it.STD:TSM:Ch 39
Backreferences
- facthovercity
- factthe dark zone
- factthe Refuge
- factthe great maelstrom
- factGlowing Eyes
- factthe translation device
- factthe first offworlder
- factCanticle
- factthis world
- factthe southern range
- factzephyr aether
- factNight Brigade
- factSigzil
- factthe Refuge
- factSigzil
- factthis world
- summarySTD:TSM:Ch 32
- factthe great maelstrom
- summarySTD:TSM:Ch 33
- factthis world
- factSigzil
- summarySTD:TSM:Ch 34
- factthis world
- factthe great maelstrom
- summarySTD:TSM:Ch 35
- factthe first offworlder
- summarySTD:TSM:Ch 39
- factthis world
- factthe Refuge