Keimo!

You come into the hall at Nevdah a little past midday, and the first thing you see is a man asleep in a chair in the back. Nobody woke him. Nobody’s going to. He’s been in that chair since before the barkeep was born and he’ll be in it after she’s gone, because he is technically alive, and technically a vampire, and mostly just tired. The chair is his the way the floor is the floor.

The board by the door is full. Someone needs a wagon walked south through the passes. Someone’s cellar has gone wrong in a way they’d rather not put in writing. The pay is posted in plain numbers, because it’s plain work, and the woman reading it beside you has a fox’s ears and a tail and the look of someone who’s done this a hundred times.

Adventuring is a job. You came here looking for one.

Keimo! is a world I’m building. One landmass — a single pangaea, no oceans worth crossing, which means nobody in this story is getting on a boat to go find out what’s on the other side. The whole map is right here. The interesting direction isn’t across. It’s up and down, and we’ll get to why.

First, the room. Nevdah sits at almost the dead center of the world, and every kind of person who exists is in it, all the time. That’s the resting state of the place. The question you learn to stop asking is why is this race here — they’re all here, they’re everywhere, the world is mixed down to the studs. The only question with any juice in it is why isn’t this one here, and there’s usually a story in the answer.

Adventuring is how a lot of these people make rent. Not a calling. A trade — closer to factory work than to legend. Most people aren’t adventurers; most adventurers aren’t anybody you’d write a song about. You take the job, you do the job, you wear a little plate that says how good you are at it — porcelain if you just started, platinum if you’re the kind of frightening they tell stories about — and the Guild skims your dues and quietly pays your taxes so you never once have to think about the government, and you don’t. That’s the deal. It runs the same everywhere.

So walk down the bar. Here’s who’s drinking.

The man in the chair is Kindred. Vampires, except nobody made him one — he was born this way, a whole living species of them, cold to the touch because that’s simply his body temperature and not a sign that anything is wrong. They don’t age. Barring a knife or a fever or a bad fall they don’t die, and when they finally do their bodies don’t rot, which is a small quiet horror if you sit with it too long. They sleep like cats: often, lightly, anywhere. And they’ve been alive long enough to have already seen your exact problem nine times. There is one asleep in the back of every hall in the world. It’s such a dependable fact that it’s become a joke with no punchline. You just don’t move them.

Two stools down is something eight feet tall and grey and built like a load-bearing wall, with horns, drinking tea. That’s a Diavola — the demon-looking folk, who come in three sexes instead of two. There’s a female and a male, and then there’s this one: the neuter, the big one, no part in making children and entirely given over to keeping them alive. Not by custom. By build. Nobody sat the large ones down and handed them the nursery; they come out of the womb already wired to stand between something small and something sharp. Put one in an adventuring party and watch the instinct quietly widen until it covers everyone shorter than it, which is everyone. Eight feet of demon who will cut your meat into manageable pieces and see nothing at all funny about doing it.

The two women laughing by the fire are elves, and one of them is a man. You will not be able to tell, and that’s the joke, and they are so deeply tired of the joke. Elves run their sexes through ear size: the big-eared ones bear the children, the small-eared ones provide the other half, and to a human eye both of them read as a confident woman with very good posture. The small-eared one — wide hips, soft chest, the easy swagger of a girl-gang boss who has never once lost a fight — is, to every elf in that room, simply a guy. No contradiction in it anywhere. You are the only confused person present. And whatever an elf makes a child with — a human, something stranger, it does not matter — the child comes out fully elf. There is no such thing as a half-elf. The scholars who’ve tried to explain the mechanism have written some of the most confidently wrong books in the world, and I love every one of them.

The fox-eared one beside you, still reading the board, is Komāu. Cat, fox, or rabbit — ears and a tail and otherwise shaped like a person, slim, a little under your height — and every last one of them belongs to a Proud and Ancient Noble Clan, Known Throughout the Lands. Every single family. They all mean it completely and without irony. The three kinds look down on each other with the low ambient suspicion of two clerks at rival corner stores, and a Komāu will happily make that joke at her own people’s expense and then clock an outsider cold for trying the same one. The rabbits are the ones who get restless and leave. That’s usually why you’ve met one.

The genuinely enormous woman by the door is an Amazon — not a strong human, a separate species, split off from humans about the way Neanderthals did: close enough to share children, far enough that you can tell at a glance. The men make Schwarzenegger look like he couldn’t be bothered to find a gym, and that’s the floor, not the ceiling. And the small one you somehow didn’t notice until right now, already halfway down the job posting with a look of mild professional contempt, is a Grassrunner: knee-high, quicker than the arithmetic says he ought to be, better than anyone else in the room at reaching a place the rest of you can’t fit. Not impressed by you. Has saved parties exactly like yours before and would prefer not to make it a thing.

So that’s the room. Warm, loud, mixed, a good place to spend an afternoon. Now go stand in the doorway and look north.

There is a continent in the sky. A whole landmass, floating, a fixed feature of the northern horizon the way a mountain would be if the mountain were two miles up and happened to be an entire country. That’s where the elves come from. There is no road up. No stair, no rope, no clever path — you get there by magic or you don’t get there at all, and if you walk off the edge of it you fall, sky and then ground, the same as anyone would.

It tore loose from somewhere. And the somewhere is still down here, directly underneath: a crater, enormous, kept in permanent shadow because the thing that used to fill it is now hanging two miles overhead, blocking the sun. It’s not a wound. Nobody did anything wrong. It’s a big dark hole in the world and that’s all it is.

The trouble is that something on the far side of reality looked at a big dark hole and thought: yeah. That’ll do. And things began to come out. Undead, to start. Worse, after that. It has not stopped, and there is no sign at all that it intends to.

Which would be the end of the world, except for the ducks.

At the lip of that crater there is a permanent garrison of furious, heavily armed waterfowl. Durulz — duck people, made on purpose, as a prank, by a Goddess with a genuinely mean sense of humor. They know they were made as a prank. They have not, for one second, gotten over it. And nobody marched them out to the worst place in the world and ordered them to hold it. They chose it. They moved in. The Durulz love war the way other people love their own children, and the front porch of hell is simply the finest real estate going if war is the thing you love.

So the joke got complicated. The prank race turned out to be the standing army between everything that lives and everything that doesn’t. They argue about this constantly and at volume. Did the Goddess fumble and accidentally hand them a purpose — the one thing a punchline is never supposed to have? Or is that the real joke, the long one: ha ha, the ducks have to fight hell forever and feel proud about it. Both readings are live. Nobody is winning that argument either, and they would not thank you for weighing in.

They don’t hold the line alone. Standing in it beside them are the Returned — suits of armor with nothing inside but a ghost and a grudge. A thousand-some years ago, something terrible drew something extraordinary out of the soldiers fighting it, and when those soldiers died they declined to treat that as a reason to stop. No curse. No tragedy. Just hatred, pure and uncut and patient, enough to keep an empty helmet swinging a sword for ten unbroken centuries. The armor gets mended and swapped a piece at a time until none of the first metal is left, and the ghost inside has no opinion on the matter whatsoever. The ducks and the dead men have stood at the same door, against the same thing, for longer than the records reach. They almost certainly get along great.

That’s the shape of it. A bright, busy, honestly good world — full of people worth meeting, where the work is plain and the bar is warm and the vampire in the back is fine, he’s just resting — laid down like a tablecloth over a hole that wants the whole table back. Most people up top know about the bottom the way you know about the sun: real, important, not a thing you stare straight at. They take the job. They go home. They let the ducks mind the ducks’ business.

It’s a good world, and it stays good for one reason — somewhere at the bottom of it the angriest creature creation ever made is standing in a doorway it chose, and it is not tired yet.