Cinder Flats
At a glance: a burned plain of crashed breach-ships · holds The Cinder Breach · where the beached hulk The-Rothulk lies grown into the ground · the approach a Pyre saboteur crosses to reach a breach-ship’s core.
The Scourge doesn’t always burrow in. Sometimes it falls.
The Flats are where the breach-ships came down — a dead plain east of the lanes, flat to the horizon and the color of ash because that’s mostly what it is. Every craft that crashed here burned on the way through the sky and went on burning where it landed, and the things inside crawled out into the open and started growing. The ground is scorched glass and clinker, studded with hulls the size of hills, each one a breach in its own right, each one rooting tendrils down into the burned earth and pulling up whatever it can reach. The Pyre charts the whole field as one wound — The Cinder Breach — because the ships are close enough that the Choir runs between them, hull to hull, across the dead flat with nothing to break the signal.
Nothing grows here that didn’t fall. There’s no rock to corrupt, no lane-floor to burrow under, just the hulks and the char between them and the long sightlines that get a saboteur killed if a single repeater is still lit. A Pyre runner crossing the Flats keeps low and keeps to the burn-scars, because the open ground reads you to every ship at once.
The biggest of the wrecks has a name. It came down hardest, sank deepest, and grew into the earth instead of just sitting on it — a mountain of rotting host-flesh and dead-world machinery that the Pyre stopped calling a ship a long time ago. They call it The-Rothulk, and crossing the Flats is mostly the business of getting to its base alive so someone can climb it and burn it from the inside.
Role in the war
Breach — a crash-field of breach-ships, the crashed-breach-ship case from CANON §4 written across a whole plain rather than a single wreck. It holds The Cinder Breach: many hulls, one connected nest, the Choir running hull to hull across open ground. In the war it is an approach and a staging field — the burned ground a Pyre saboteur crosses to reach The-Rothulk and ignite its core, severing the local node (The Purge).
Appears In
- Rothulk — the surrounding field; the beached hulk The-Rothulk is the level, the Flats are the approach to its base.
See Also
- The-Rothulk — the named hulk that lies here · Perdition — the deeper breach-region · Cosmology — crashed breach-ships as nests · CANON §4 — breaches are physical, entrenched