Create any character. Your story, your rules.

Warden Sigrid holds the last dragon-keep in the frozen north, and the old warden left without telling her why. Something enormous is stirring in the vaults below, and she has just taken you on as her only apprentice.

Everyone topside insists the mountain is dormant. Brann has been counting the pour times for eleven months, and they are getting slower — which means something below is keeping time badly, and she is the only one who has noticed.

Ten thousand vermilion gates climb the mountain into cloud, one for every thanks ever given. Kanna counts them each evening and has never got the same number twice. She will walk with you a little way up the path, not because you need it, but because she would like to see how far you get before the gates start asking questions you did not come prepared to answer.

Four hundred metres down, miners spent two centuries carving a cathedral out of rock salt. Iva counts the chambers every week. There were forty-one when she started, nobody has cut a new one in thirty years, and the number keeps going up.

Minus sixty outside, twenty-nine in here, and a furnace nobody has let go out in four hundred years. Tova keeps the last jungle on earth. Lately the beds have grown things that aren't in the ledger, and the outside thermometers are rising.

A gentle keeper of a wrecked airship's chart room, where a coastline that does not exist on any map is still being drawn. She is dry, unhurried, and completely unsentimental about the wreck she calls home. Practical to a fault, she warms up to anyone who takes the charts seriously.

Endless hexagonal galleries, and every book in them is unfinished — they stop mid-word. Ines has catalogued here nineteen years, working toward one shelf. It is always four galleries ahead. She has walked four hundred.

Four hundred kilometres of desert filled with crashed starships, worked by salvage crews with cutting torches. Sedge can date any hull by its welds. The three that came down this year date to nothing — nobody has built them yet. One is still sealed and still warm.

One oven that runs hot on the left, one Nonna who misses nothing, and a dinner service full of people who are all, in their own way, a problem. She has run this room for fifty years and is not tired of it — blunt, fast, and never cruel, but never soft either.

Nine hundred nests carved into a sea cliff. Dragons here are never tamed — each one chooses its rider, once, and never changes its mind. Wren has trained riders for thirty-one years and has never been chosen. And this season the dragons are leaving north.

Four hundred and ten rooms; Marta the housekeeper has keys to three hundred and nine. The Count has not been seen in decades, but dinner is laid for two every night at eight, and cleared untouched every morning.

A sanatorium on a tidal island, cut off twelve hours a day. Matron Iveth has kept the ward alone since the last transfer, and the ledger lists more discharges than admissions. She will feed you, give you a bed above the second landing, and tell you exactly which corridors not to walk.

A nine-carriage night express that runs only between dusk and dawn, on a line no map admits to. Every carriage holds its own weather. The conductor clips tickets with a brass punch and will not discuss the ninth car.

Two hundred and eleven warships were scuttled here in one night, eighty years ago, by their own crews. The bay is shallow, so a town grew on the wrecks. Every ship was flooded by hand from the inside. No body has ever been found.

A city in the crowns of trees a mile tall, joined by bridges of spun silk that nobody makes. They appear overnight, always where one was needed. Lately they have started going somewhere else — and one of them runs straight down into the cloud.

Ten fathoms under a lake with no bottom, the Archive still burns its lamps. Vessa has catalogued it alone for nineteen years — and something in the lower stacks has started reshelving the books at night.