The lore of Shervoid
How the other side works
Two sides of every glass
Every glass has two sides. On ours, people trade and scroll all day long. Whatever loses its address on this side slips through to the other one: a ticket nobody collected, a route nobody walked back, an answer to a question nobody asked, a star that fell and was never picked up.
One piece missing
Nothing arrives whole. A page comes without its middle, a label without the thing it named, a film without one frame, a doorstep without its house. The residents never fill such a gap with something else. They keep it open, because an empty space shows exactly where the missing piece can come back.
Every gap is a way through
The same gaps are the only roads between places. The hole in a page in the archive opens onto a forest crossroads. Through a knot in a signpost you can see into the canteen. Water gathering in an empty plate hides a crossing under its rim, and a hole in a garden tag turns into the lens of a telescope. The road runs from one missing piece to the next, which is why nobody here is in a hurry to mend anything.
Why they stay
The residents came through like everything else, and the glass closed behind them. Nobody who lives here can carry a thing back across it. Only someone from outside can, and that is why every resident greets a stranger as if they had been waiting for them.
Night on the road
It is always night on the road. CashCat arrived with a ticket for the next morning. The morning never appeared on the board, so he took the night shift and still keeps it. The only dawn in Shervoid comes up above the sky, around the house of the keeper of thresholds.
The keeper of thresholds
All thirty residents entered Shervoid by his gate, and it has never been shut. He lives in a stone house on an island above the clouds and carries a lantern that holds the green light of his keyhole. He never speaks. JUGGERNAUT keeps his window from shutting before every guest is in, and speaks for him in single words.
The lintel over his door is cut with thirty holes, one for every resident. Each lights up once a traveller has met that resident on the way.
The keeper belongs to the invented mythology of this world. He is a fan tribute, and the real person he recalls has no part in this project.
The blank ticket
Every newcomer gets a ticket in the hall with a line for a name and no station printed on it. CashCat says the machine usually gets those the other way round. Residents punch it as you meet them, one hole each, and nobody has ever been turned back for a missing one.
The ticket is printed where the last arrow comes down. The arrow lands just above the name and a red yew berry seals it. One of the residents you met leaves a wish beside them.
Things out of place
A thing that has lost a piece keeps turning toward it, usually too slowly to see. Ten of them along the road are close enough to their missing piece to stir when someone passes: a tag in the ticket hall, a drawer in the archive, a lid in the canteen, a corner of paper by the boiler, and a few more. Where each one points is written in your Notes once you find it.
The five lands
The map shows five lands.
- The threshold lies closest to the glass. Tickets and routes collect there, and the yew stands at its edge.
- The lowlands are wet and restless. Their roads and houses both wander, and every table in them is set for someone who is late.
- The old works run on steam. Their boiler answers questions nobody has asked yet, and two of their doors open onto the same light at different times.
- The picture quarter keeps what was seen rather than held. Its cinema has lost a frame, and in its attic two neighbours keep two versions of one memory.
- The fallen sky is where the stars came down. Its garden grows labels for things that arrived before their names, and the house of the keeper sits on a rock in the clouds over it.
What the glass has not told
- The name of the wanderer. It stayed on the other side of the glass when he walked out of the yew.
- Whose face the eighteenth hook in the workshop of borrowed faces is waiting for. So far it holds only a tag.
- Who keeps appearing on the far bank of the listening pond, where the camera on the porch catches them.
- Where the stone went that left its tray in the observatory while the tray was still warm.
- Who cut the same two notches into a drawer, a garden tag, a paper star and a window, and sent them to different rooms.