Hallowbound
Everything the opening chapters will tell you, and nothing they will not. The rest is worth meeting in the game.
Start here
That is the whole of it. Everything else you learn from a room, a label, a piece of gear, or something a character does without stopping to explain it.
The Bound carry an inherited essence in the blood, and every piece of magic in the world comes out of it.
Humans are born without it, so they built tools instead, then engines, then weapons, and they have taken most of the map doing it.
The Bound cannot replace their own numbers fast enough to hold ground, so they take human children and graft the essence into them with the rite.
A child who has been through the rite keeps the shape of their body and loses almost everything of who they were.
Human laboratories now run the mirror of the same act, taking children of the Bound and drawing the essence back out to power human equipment, and neither side calls its own version a crime.
The world
Every location in the game is built at two time periods, fifteen years apart. You are meant to recognise the second one.
Home, built up instead of out.
Two names for the same ground, fifteen years apart.
Ordinary, on purpose.
Factions
Written in their own framing, the way each of them would put it to a new arrival.
Discipline, clean execution, results that hold up in a report.
A modern intelligence and operations command built around reconnaissance, precision and outcomes nobody has to apologize for in a briefing room.
A people who continue by taking.
Half the pack you grow up with was born to it. The other half was brought in. Neither half is spoken of differently.
Characters
Chapters
Only the opening is listed. The later chapters are written and we are keeping them off the site, because finding them yourself is the point.
Prologue
Two children in a village learn a two-player timing game together, and the raid that separates them takes the game away mid input.
Chapter One
A human officer and his partner run a clean, one-sided operation, drones and marked targets and a plan that never once loses control of the room.
Chapter Two
A theft and a rooftop escape across a torchlit undercity built up and down instead of across, home to a people who live, cook and raise their young there.
Glossary
All of it is the ground two children were taken from.