## REALM REGISTRY (KIT-WORLD; kept current from the ledger). Read before designing any death realm.
The user: death realms must be unique, horror (dread, never fun). No realm look, signature element, crossing or return in this table may be reused or re-skinned. The kit crossings / returns in 58k_worlds.js are raw material; see the TAKEN column of the kit list below.

| Realm | Kill | Crossing (how they get there) | Return (how it ends in the real arena) | Core dread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BELOW: black river, ferryman, hands under the surface | smg.below | the roof turns to tar-black water, he sinks | ferryman takes the casing; body spat up from a black puddle | the toll of the river of the dead |
| NOWHERE: grey ash void, one cold spotlight | smg.nowhere | every light dies but his spotlight; the yard falls away | lights snap on; body face down with no shadow | a loop that costs a limb a lap |
| THE REAPER'S GRAVEYARD: blood moon, crows, his own headstone | smg.name-on-the-stone | floorboards rot to grave dirt, he drops into the grave | a grave-shaped rectangle of dirt on the boards fades | his grave already dug, his name already cut |
| THE HALL OF REFLECTIONS: black mirrors, Faris in none | fists.the-mirror | his reflection pulls him down into a rain puddle | his whole reflection pounds under the puddle, sinks | his reflection dies a beat before him |
| COCYTUS: frozen ninth-circle lake, three-faced colossus | fists.ninth-circle | boots freeze; frost climbs to the throat; he stands in the lake | a melting ice block; the headless body slumps out | frozen to the neck over everyone Faris killed |
| THE SLAUGHTER LINE: skinned carcasses of him on hooks | fists.hook-hall | a meat hook drops from the sky and hauls him up | his legs fall from the sky; an empty hook comes down, is hauled up | hell's killing floor, every carcass is him |
| THE DEAD MAN'S GALLERY: rotting circus tent, tin targets | pump.shooting-gallery | 'c.curtain': moth-eaten velvet curtain drops and rises | 'c.flap': a tent flap pushed aside | the newest tin target |
| THE DOLLHOUSE: cutaway dollhouse in a giant dark bedroom | pump.dollhouse | 'c.shrink': he shrinks, the world swells past frame | 'c.box': four cardboard flaps fold in, THIS WAY UP | every doll wears his face |
| NO MAN'S LAND: trench hell under a hanging red flare | ar.no-mans-land | 'b.flare': a red circle of flare light grows into the realm | 'b.flareout': the dying flare's circle shrinks back | the dead go over the top forever |
| THE MAGAZINE: oily steel shaft, the dead as cartridges | ar.magazine | 'b.boltclose': a steel bolt face slides across | 'b.eject': the realm frame ejected like a spent case | loaded as the next round |
| THE COLD ROOM: morgue, named drawers, sheeted dead | pistol.toe-tag | 'a.flicker': a failing fluorescent tube, stutter frames | 'a.lightning': tubes die, one lightning flash, wet sheet | only the living breathe fog |
| THE GALLERY of the dead: oil portraits whose eyes follow | pistol.hung-on-the-wall | 'a.gild': the frame gilds, the saloon thickens to oil | 'a.tear': the canvas rips down the middle | the newest portrait |
| THE LAST RING: floating stone ring over a breathing fanged throat | laser.the-last-ring | two cut lines; everything outside the floor disc falls away | hard cut; a long beat; the half-digested corpse falls from the sky | a ring-out is swallowed |
| THE MINT: black foundry, molten gold, a coin press | laser.skin-gold | the saloon melts like wax in gold drips into the foundry | the coin drops out of the air and rolls to Faris's boot | struck into a coin with his face |
| THE OLD CUTS: dead field, red sun, rows of grey dead with hairlines | speedsabre.the-old-cuts | the dash line tears open into a red slit that swallows him | Faris cuts the air; the halves drop out; the slit heals to a scar | every old cut opens again |
| THE GILDED TOMB: gold-seamed vault, gold-masked dead, the balance | speedsabre.skin-gold | gold leaf spreads from the wound, curls and peels away | gold tarnishes and crumbles; corroded mask beside his heart | his heart weighed against a feather |
| THE INTERVAL: violet nothing between two frames of a blink | knife.the-interval | Faris blinks them both; the world smears violet and stops | Faris arrives alone; a beat later half of him arrives | stuck between frames, left behind |
| THE AUCTION: gilded rotten auction hall, skull auctioneer | knife.skin-gold | a giant auctioneer's gavel comes down out of the dark onto the castle like onto a sound block (KNOCK); the frame splits along the wood grain into splinters that fall away onto the hall | a giant gold SOLD stamp slams down over the whole frame and lifts off the real castle, every piece of him on the stones with a gold SOLD tag | sold off piece by piece |
| THE TOWN AT NOON: dead main street under a black sun | revolver.high-noon | 'a.bleach': over-exposes to white, the town develops | 'a.sundown': blood-red sunset in one breath, lamps come up | the bell only lets you draw on twelve |
| THE TRAIN OF THE DEAD: black freight through red hell | revolver.dead-mans-train | 'a.depart': the rooftops pull away like a platform | 'a.tunnelout': black tunnel, the exit grows from a pinpoint | one stop, the tunnel arch |
| THE GOLD COUNTRY: endless gold-dust dunes under a white sun at the zenith that never moves; the prospectors dead and dried at their claims on heaps of nuggets (no pans, no gold on faces) | revolver.skin-gold | 'a.mirage': a heat mirage rises off the boards and the room wavers away in rising wavy bands; the dunes shimmer in behind | 'a.coinsun': the sun sets for the first time, dropping into the horizon like a coin into a slot (clink); orange, black, the saloon | thirst among the rich dead: the water poured into the dust, and time runs on him alone until he is one of them |
| THE ANATOMY THEATRE: steep wooden tiers of the long-dead in wigs, a dissection table, an oculus | thammer.galvanised | 'g.arcs': electric arcs branch out of his body; the theatre is where they pass | 'g.unarc': the arcs crawl back into his remains; the audience's eyes stay in the saloon dark, blinking out pair by pair | his corpse made to perform with lightning |
| THE FOUNDATION: a dim pour-pit under an endless building; caged work lamps, rebar cages rising into the dark, mixers turning limbs in the slurry, strangers set to the chest in grey concrete, a pile driver in the dark | hammer.the-foundation | 'the pour': the slam cracks the floor; wet grey concrete pours over the LENS from a chute and closes the frame; a screed bar scrapes the glass and the pit is under it | 'formwork struck': the frame is shuttered in wooden planks like a mould; Faris knocks them off one by one, the real arena behind each; the last shows him as a broken concrete stump, his face in the fracture | built into the foundations, a soul set in the concrete (the builders' sacrifices through history, not Faris's dead) |
| THE STRUCK GROVE: lightning-split black trees under a violet storm, a charred person fused in every trunk | thammer.struck-grove | 'g.thicket': black lightning-shaped branches grow over the frame, then split like a struck trunk | 'g.fall': the split trees fall onto the lens one by one | planted and split like a struck oak |
| THE STILL CITY: a night street where time stopped, snow hanging in the air; everyone who was out in the cold that night frozen mid-flight, all running from one point, faces turned back (a pigeon mid-wingbeat, steam stood still, a dropped bottle in the air) | ice.the-still-city | 'h.breath': into the cloud of his frozen last breath, which swells over the frame and thins into the hanging snow | 'h.drop': one drop of real rain falls into the still city; reality returns in its ring | time stopped; he slows into one of them |
| THE GLUE FACTORY: a black iron rendering works under gas lamps (steam, belts, boilers, bins of old hooves and bone, a horse-head sign FARIS & CO. · GLUE); he rides the belt into the boiling vat, the bones go to the crusher, and the glue is strained, moulded and pumped into a glass tank | glue.the-glue-factory (H; replaces THE WEB, 25 Oct) | the camera dives into the glass glue tank on Faris's gun and its bubbles become the vats | the GOO SWAP: on the real arena Faris clicks the tank made of him into the gun, the glue faintly pink with a tooth turning in it (REVIEW: see the note below) | rendered down into glue (LIQUEFY) |
| THE TROPHY ROOM: a night hunting lodge with a stone hearth, rows of mounted live human heads (strangers, the lodge's catches) that breathe, swallow, weep and mouth silently with fixed glass eyes; a taxidermist under a green lamp who never turns | handcannon.trophy-room | thin brass-edged panel seams race across the frame from the impact like cracks across ice, the dark lodge (antlers hung inside) showing through; the seams widen and the panels swing open over the arena like cabinet doors until the lodge fills the frame (the real world never drops) | the needle sews the seam down his body shut stitch by stitch (thread pulled through, straw poking between the stitches), the lodge gathering in round him on the thread; the last knot lands on the real arena; the brass plate is already screwed to the real wall above him and its last screw turns once (on the floor beside him with no WALL); a catch record, never his name: HOMO TEMERARIUS · 24 · X · ONE ROUND | seamed, stuffed with straw and mounted alive |
| THE HALL OF SILENCE: a cold dark stone hall, grey columns, a black flagged floor, the cold shown as stillness (dust hangs in the air and never settles, breath makes no mist; no frost); the dead with bare grey faces, only their mouths sealed (a gold plug, a frozen gold drip down the chin); a dark iron bell hangs cracked, its clapper taken, its last note frozen under it as a gold ring; gold is only ever frozen sound | handcannon.skin-gold | 'k.goldbell' (1.9 s): the BOOM's sound-word and shock rings freeze and turn to gold, the outgoing world drains to grey, three heavy gold bell-rim rings close in from the frame edges to the impact like a bell's mouth (the realm outside them, the grey real world shrinking inside) | 'k.boomback' (1.3 s): all the sound comes back at once, a white shock ring out of the corpse, the realm image cracks into 14 radial shards that blow outward onto the real arena, the delayed BOOM and gold ring shards | his own scream turns to gold in his throat |
| THE DISCARDED: the cold dark where the originals end up (staged 25 Oct on The Deep: the abyss floor beyond the seabed), rows to the horizon of blank default figures (no face, no colour, jointed) standing in the black, revealed only as the Deep's sonar ping sweeps across them; strangers who once went through a portal | portalgun.the-original | the frame splits into a two-panel split screen; his copy walks on in one panel, the original's panel sinks away (no hole, slit or oval opens onto the realm) | the divider squeezes the realm panel to a sliver and away; the faceless copy left in the arena topples like a dropped mannequin | you were never the one who came out |
| THE LABYRINTH: black stone corridors under a starless sky, guttering wall lamps, the lost (strangers) sitting at the dead ends, a red thread that leads in a circle, something breathing behind the walls | portalgun.the-labyrinth | the arena floor's own seams (planks, tiles, stones) rise around him into maze walls | the walls sink back down as the floor's seams; a maze scratched into the real floor around him, his own fingernail tracks | you will stop trying; walked away to the knees (erosion, no ageing) |
| THE BACK OF BEYOND: the unpainted back of the world, plywood flats on struts under work lights, sandbags and rope lines; rows of strangers from every age, stabbed in the back by someone they trusted, standing as painted flats seen only from behind (stencilled names and dates; nobody turns; never Faris's dead) | tpdagger (J, MYTHIC) | at the backstab arrival the whole arena swings round on a hinge at the frame's edge like a stage flat and shows its back (REVIEW: close to THE TROPHY ROOM's cabinet-door swing; see the note below) | the plywood world is flown out, hauled straight up into the dark on its ropes, and the real arena is underneath | stabbed in the back, he becomes a painted plywood cut-out of himself mid-word on a strut, his stencilled name and one dagger-wide split weeping red paint on its bare back |
| THE THRESHING FLOOR: a black-timber barn under one swinging hurricane lantern; the sheaves stacked along the walls are people bound in twine; faceless threshers' arms swing flails out of the dark; the far doors open on a red wind | scythe.threshing-floor | 'the swathe': the reap cuts him down and the arena behind him falls in vertical swathes like cut wheat, strip after strip, revealing the barn | 'the chaff': a gust of chaff from the barn doors fills the frame and clears on the real arena, chaff settling round a twine-tied sack | harvested: threshed and winnowed, only his teeth kept as grain |
| THE OSSUARY: a low stone archive where every bone of the dead is sorted by type (femurs racked like firewood, ribs bundled like kindling, vertebrae strung on wires, pelvises stacked like bowls, finger bones in jars, skulls in pigeonholes facing the wall), one fresh empty space with a brass tag on every shelf | scythe.ossuary | 'the hatch': the crescent hooks the floor itself and lifts a slab of it like a hatch; steps go down into candle-dark | 'the drawer': the whole archive slides away like a long drawer pushed shut (a wooden clunk) and the real arena is outside it | filed: every bone leaves him for its gap on the shelves |
| THE MINEFIELD: an endless grey field under a white sunless sky, low mist, rusted wire on leaning stakes, triangular MINES signs; strangers stand scattered (never in rows) each with one foot pressed on a mine; now and then a far figure lifts his foot: a small flash on the horizon, a thump, silence; time runs on round him (seasons, grass, rust, snow, a nest in his helmet, a tree up through the wire) while he never ages | cluster.the-minefield | 'the signs': rusted MINES signs on stakes are hammered up out of the floor round him one after another (a clunk each, by no one), barbed wire unspools between them along the ground, and the arena's colour bleeds to field-grey sign by sign out to the horizon | the real arena on the same frame, but he carries the years (moss on his shoulders, the nest in his helmet, grass round his boots, a rusted sign by him); he finally lifts his foot and the mine goes off | the click under your foot, forever: the world ages round you and you can't lift it |
| THE BLINK: total black; the only light is the red blink of the bomblets the dead hold cupped against their breastbones, thousands, out of sync, so the crowd shimmers in red patches; strangers frozen mid-step in each flash, red-lit from below, mouths open; they only move in the dark (their feet shuffle in the black between flashes) | cluster.the-blink | 'the slow blink': the sixth bomblet's blink SLOWS (5 Hz, 2, 1) instead of speeding up; each flash is redder and the dark between longer, and each flash shows one more stranger standing in the real arena among its props, nearer; the arena's own light never returns after the fifth flash (it is not lights-out: no spotlight, the realm assembles in the flashes) | everything is pulled into the single blink (s.implode); black; the real arena fades up with only the bomblet on the floor, dark; one beat; it blinks once and he comes back OUT of it, unfolding from the point the wrong way like crumpled paper opening, every joint folded wrong, and the bomblet under him goes dark for good | the last half-second of a fuse, lived in the dark with the ones who only move when the light is off |
| THE HONEYCOMB: the inside of a hive the size of a cathedral: amber light through walls of golden comb, honey creeping down in slow sheets, the hum felt in the chest; the dead lie curled in the cells under pale cloudy wax caps (faces seen dim through the wax, never gilded); workers the size of dogs crawl the comb capping new cells | cluster.skin-gold | 'six cells': the six pops leave six gold hexagons on the floor, and the hexagons multiply cell by cell into honeycomb that spreads under him and softens; he sinks into a cell | a slow golden drip from the nearest overhang (or out of the air with none) lands beside him in the real arena; he lies glazed in honey and pale wax, one bee crawling on his lip, the hum fading | sealed alive in a cell and capped in wax (WAX 'bees') |
| THE PROVING GROUND: a concrete ballistics test bunker under one swinging sodium lamp; rows of tall gelatin blocks on steel stands, each holding NO body, only a frozen wound channel (a red-brown funnel with bone chips and teeth suspended where a body was) stencilled with its test number; a chronograph; a vice-mounted hand cannon on rails lined up on his block, a red test light counting down; his block is the only one with a man in it | handcannon.proving-ground (K, replaces BREACH, coordinator 00:10) | from the impact the world wobbles like struck gelatin and sets (REVIEW: see the note below on the 'tide closing over the frame') | his block splits slowly along the new wound channel, the halves slide apart, and he slithers out onto the real floor in a slick of gel and blood | the next test number |
| THE WICKER GIANT: a bare black hill under a low brown-red sky, straw blowing on the wind; a colossal wicker effigy of a man (lattice ribs, cage limbs, a woven head with no face) with strangers caged in its limbs and chest at every height, never in a row; villagers in straw animal masks (hare, ram, owl) circle it in silence with torches and never look up | flamer.wicker-giant (O) | 'the shadow': in the temple his burning body throws his shadow on the back wall; every torch flame leans toward it; the shadow stretches up the wall and thickens into the giant's lattice silhouette, and the camera pushes into it: the shadow is the night on the hill (not wicker over the lens: WOOD COVERING THE FRAME is at 2) | the giant's burnt frame folds into its own fire; the real temple, ash drifting down from nothing; he lies on the stones curled in the exact shape of his cell, hands gripping bars that aren't there, a lattice of scorch lines branded across him | burned as an offering by people who never look at you |
| THE BRAZEN BULL: an absent tyrant's black courtyard at night; an empty throne on a dais, a cup of wine still steaming on its arm; rows of cold bronze bulls on dead pyres into the dark, soot under every nostril; one bull lit for him on a fresh pyre; the reed pipes in its mouth turn his screams into a brass bellow that rolls round the empty courtyard | flamer.brazen-bull (O) | 'the brand': a red-hot bull's-head branding iron presses onto the lens from the camera side; the image smokes and chars in its shape, burns through, and the burn spreads out until the courtyard fills the frame | the real castle: the bellow leaves his own mouth one last time as a plume of steam; he lies curled in the shape of the bull's belly, glazed and cooked; a bull's-head brand scorched into the flagstones under him cools from orange to black | your screams made into music for someone who isn't even listening |
| THE PHOENIX'S PEAK: a black basalt peak above the clouds under an eclipsed sun (a black disc, a white-gold corona); a nest of cinnamon sticks, myrrh and gold-leafed twigs on the summit; an old, eyeless, moulting gold phoenix the size of a house waits on it; down the slopes, the burnt-out nests of earlier rebirths, each round a charred ribcage (strangers); gold only on the bird, the twigs and the corona, never on a face | flamer.skin-gold (O) | 'the plumage': the embers rising off him slow, turn and open into gold feathers in mid-air, more and more, until a whirl of feathers hides the arena; as it thins the peak is there | the real arena, still; his chest lies open, emptied, the ribs spread like a nest; one gold feather drifts down and settles in it (on his chest, not by Faris's boot) | your body is the nest it is reborn out of |
| THE SÉANCE: a black velvet parlour lit by one chimneyed candle; the dead seated round a mahogany table holding hands, heads bowed, one chair empty; a spirit trumpet in the air | tkglove.seance | 'g.float': gravity lets go of the arena; it lifts off in slow pieces and drifts up out of frame, the parlour beneath | 'g.planchette': the planchette slides to the lens and fills the frame; through its glass the real arena opens out | taken into the table's wood by the circle of the dead |
| THE ORRERY: a dark brass dome over a star-chart floor; a giant orrery whose planets are the dead curled in brass rings round a black sun; one arm empty | tkglove.orrery | 'g.wheel': the arena wheels round the held man like a sky round a planet and comes round as the dome | 'g.lid': the dome's engraved brass lid swings down over the lens like a watch closing, a click, the real arena | ground through the gears into a new planet |
| THE HOURGLASS: a white desert of bone dust under a dead sky; a colossal hourglass whose sand is the ground dead (faces surfacing in the grey), sifting through the neck | gravflip.hourglass | 'g.turn': the arena turns over round the held man like an hourglass, floor to sky, and drains away through a waist at the centre of the frame | 'g.lastgrain': the last grain falls; the realm drains out through the same waist, the real arena pours back in, and his red sand trickles out of the air into a small cone at Faris's feet | milled through the neck into a red stratum of the sand |
| RELATIVITY: a grey house of stairs going every way under a flat light; pale faceless figures climbing calmly in three gravities, stepping round each other | gravflip.relativity | 'g.fold': the arena folds round him, floor to wall to ceiling, into the house of stairs | 'g.unfold': the stairs fold flat into the real floor a flight at a time, and the last landing becomes the boards he lies on | broken on every stair edge as each flight gives him a new down |
| THE LAST FLIGHT: a crashing airliner cabin at night, nose-down, smoke along the ceiling, rows of buckled dead passengers grey under their dropped oxygen masks; the fuselage tears open at altitude and the cold pours in | rpg.final-approach | 'i.spin': a flat spin, the real arena whirling round his locked face like a stricken cockpit, the stall horn rising | 'i.crashdown': the cabin floor slams down onto the real arena floor and the fuselage bursts into dust and sheet metal, leaving his scorched seat | buckled in beside the dead while the cold takes his fingers on the buckle |
| THE SMOKE: an endless grey smoke hall under a dull ember glow, a chimney city far off; soft soot figures with no faces that drift, press their hands to his mouth and take his face with each cough | rpg.the-smoke | 'i.coil': the rocket's real smoke trail comes alive, coils round him from boots to throat like a python and lifts him into itself (filmed from outside, never smoke over the lens) | 'i.exhale': the real trail sighs out a man-shaped puff that holds his shape a beat before the wind takes it; his cap drops onto the floor | each breath gives a stranger his face until he is one of them |
| ECHO VALLEY: a mile-deep gorge seen from the riverbed, three bands of cliff converging on a crack of daylight; six carved stone mouths (heavy lips, worn teeth, eye pits) whose throats glow red when they answer; a dry riverbed of white stones and a goat's bleached ribs | sniper.echo-valley | 'n.swallow': the crack's echoes come back slower and slower (0.2, 0.6, 1.4, 2.0 s), each a hard jump-cut that makes him smaller and the rock taller, until the last lands him kneeling on the riverbed a mile down | 'n.lastecho': a plain hard cut on the faintest echo; the faint '...elp' fades off the real canyon wall | the valley answers his cry for help, and every answer takes something out of him (breath as wisps off the skin, the letters of his scream, his colour as motes, his insides by 'pores' and a red mist) |
| THE BAG: a night forest of black spruce in deep snow under a clouded moon; raised wooden high seats on stilts, a still hunter in a loden coat on each, his head in shadow under a wide felt brim (one pipe's ember), a rifle across his knees, still until the horn lifts the rifles to the sky; beaters known only by their torches; the clearing where 'the bag' lies in a row on spruce boughs, each man on his side with a sprig in his mouth, hoarfrost coming over them at the horn | sniper.the-bag | 'n.drive': a ragged line of beaters' torches sweeps in from the frame's edge (rattles, a horn), and behind it the base has become the snowy forest | 'n.sprig': Faris tucks the blood-tipped sprig into his crown; a storm of falling, whirling needles crosses the frame and as it thins the real tarmac is there (no scale-down) | the hunt is driven to you, and you are laid out with the bag |
| THE WATCHED: a flat black moor of heather and standing stones in low fog; a night sky where every star is a scope's glint with a hair-cross, and from every glint a hair-thin red line slants down through the fog onto him, a red loom with nobody behind it; the dots crawl round a standing stone onto him; the sky blinks once like a held breath | sniper.the-watched | 'n.rash': red dots double IN THE WORLD (on his body first, then fixed points over the saloon walls, the bar and the boards) until everything is speckled red, then dim, and the moor is behind them (nothing on the lens) | 'n.dawn': the glints go out one by one like stars at dawn, grey light rises, and the light comes up on the real street | every star in the sky is a rifle, and all of them are on him |
| THE GOLDEN SECTION: a black marble vault, compass arcs scratched into the walls by no hand, a fossil nautilus as big as a door set in the floor, the dead pinned to drafting boards as proportion diagrams with their measures inked on their skin | golden.golden-section | 'k.gsection': a gold compass line scratches a golden spiral across the frame into his navel; the real castle winds down into the spiral's eye like water down a drain (the rings twist harder near the eye and contract into it, a dark lip at the edge), the vault already there behind | 'k.gunroll': a log-spiral fan unrolls out of the floor like a shell's growth lines onto the real castle | cut into ratio squares that coil into the spiral's eye |
| THE GOLDEN ROAD: black nothing, a gate of light at the end of a gold-paved road, the dead walking barefoot toward it in an endless silent procession, never looking down | golden.streets-of-gold | 'k.goldroad': gold paving stones drop into place along the floor, spreading out from under her one by one; above and below each laid stone the arena fades to black, and the road comes up out of the black | 'k.gateopen': the paving stones flip one by one from gold back to the real floor in a wave from the gate side toward her, the real atrium appearing above each flipped stone | you fall in the path of the faithful, and nobody looks down |
| THE COUNTING HOUSE: a long candlelit counting house: dark panelled walls, shelves of ledgers in dull cloth spines (oxblood, bottle green, brown, black; no gilded décor), tall clerks' desks with candle stubs and open ledgers, the dead clerks (pale grey, hollow-eyed) writing forever, each dragging a chain of iron cash boxes and padlocks; one walks the length of the room dragging his boxes. Every quill stops and every hollow face turns to her | golden.skin-gold (realm key 'k.counting.house') | 'k.ledgerpage': a page of a ledger turns over the frame right to left; its back is ruled with names and what they owe, and FIDA ... OWING is written on it as it turns; the counting house is behind the turned page | 'k.floorboards': the boards crack out from under her, split into a jagged hole that grows, and the planks fall through it; through the hole, the real saloon (she drops through and comes out of the saloon's ceiling on the end of her debt chain) | entered in the ledger and chained to your debt, link by link, each link one of the rounds torn out of you (the dread is the debt, not the gold) |
| THE GIBBET ROAD: a black moor in the wind under a low bruised sky; a crossroads with a weathered fingerpost; a line of gibbet posts going into the fog, iron cages creaking with tarred strangers who turn their heads; ravens on the arms; a pitch pot steaming on a fire; one empty cage his size | sawedoff.gibbet-road (C) | 'c.irons': iron bars drop across the frame one at a time (a clang and a cold spark each), a riveted hoop swings over them, the view sways on a chain | 'c.lowered': the gibbet chain pays out and the cage is lowered into the real arena; it settles with a clank, the door swings open, he slumps out; the cage rusts to flakes on the wind | hung out in iron at the crossroads as a warning, for the weather and the birds |
| THE PASS: a high mountain pass in a night blizzard; three snowbound wagons with torn canvas; starving travellers (strangers of that winter) in frost-stiff shawls round a dead fire; gnawed bones in the snow, a cleaver in a stump, an empty iron pot | sawedoff.the-pass (C) | 'c.drift': snow falls on the real arena and drifts up every wall and prop from the bottom, the light going blue, until the arena is buried | 'c.thaw': the pot is kicked into the fire and the whole pass thaws in seconds (drifts sinking, water running), the arena back wet and steaming | they have been waiting for food to come up the trail |
| THE LANTERN SKY: a black marsh at night, reeds and still black water holding the lights, under a whole sky of rising paper sky lanterns, a stranger curled and burning in each one (writhing, pounding on the paper; as he passes they turn and press their faces and palms to it); high up the oldest have burned out to black husks that drift and crumble | beam.lantern-sky | 'e.smokepour': thick black smoke pours out of the cooked wound and billows up over the lens in curls; the embers riding it keep rising as it thins and become the first lanterns | 'e.smokesettle': the smoke settles back DOWN over the lens with falling ash and clears onto the real yard; he lies on the grass a paper husk curled on his side, faintly lit, a thread of smoke from the crown, the ember in his chest winking out | the beam cooked him into a lantern, and the sky is full of strangers still burning; he rises as one of them until his crown burns through |
| THE MOTHER LODE: a collapsed gold mine underground: timber props (one broken and sagging), rails, a dead cart on its side, water dripping; six dead miners, skeletons in rags under helmet lamps, swinging picks at a glittering vein that is made of men (arms, ribs and skulls in the gold ore); no gold on any face | beam.skin-gold | 'e.strata': the gold line bores a molten shaft and she falls down it through dirt and roots, old bones, then rock seamed with gold, tumbling, the camera falling with her (own; not a sink, a rot or the arena falling away) | 'e.cart': a black hold, then a rumble and a mine cart rolls up out of the real shaft and tips a lump of gold ore out at Faris's boot with her hand reaching out of it | the dead still dig, and the vein they dig is made of the ones who came before; their lamps turn to her one by one and they dig her in |
| THE DUST: the world under the floor at the size of a grain: grey dunes of dust and grit, crumbs like boulders, fibres lying across the dunes like fallen trees, the light from impossibly far above; the dead who were shrunk before, curled and dried in the fibres like flies in a web; pale ox-sized dust mites grazing on them (grey, dry, crawling; no gold, no glow) | shrink.the-dust | 'e.grow': the world grows round her zap by zap in one locked frame (her boots, a tile, the grout line a canyon, the grains boulders) until the camera is down among the grains (own; not a sink, a rot or the arena falling away) | 'e.blowdust': far above, a wind: Faris blows the dust off the floor and the whole realm tumbles away as a grey cloud in a white-out; the arena comes back with him crouched, cheeks out, and a red speck settling at his boot | the things that live in the dust graze on the shrunk dead, and they lift their heads (RETIRING 28 Oct: its slot is a REPLACE, the new realm below takes it; free once FLYTRAP lands) |
| THE CARNIVORE GARDEN: a bog garden at the size of a fly under a sweating glass bell-jar sky; sundews like red trees beaded with glue, pitcher plants as wells, flytraps as jaws in the moss; the shrunk dead hang drained in the dew strands, and the hum of trapped flies never stops | shrink.the-dust → FLYTRAP (N3 REPLACE, approved 28 Oct; not built yet) | 'the bell jar': a glass bell jar comes down over the arena from above and fogs from inside; through the condensation the garden grows up round him | 'the lift': Faris lifts the bell jar off, the real air rushes in, and his pieces lie on the arena floor beaded with dew glue | caught, held and digested by things that don't know he is there |
| THE IRON LUNGS: a long polio ward at night under a vaulted ceiling; two rows of cream steel iron lungs on wheeled legs to the dark, a stranger's head out of each rubber collar on a pillow, only the eyes able to move; the bellows boxes under every tank heaving in unison (WHUMP · HSSS), a hand crank on each for a power cut; a green-shaded lamp at a nurses' desk far down the ward; one tank at the end stands open, its bed slid out, waiting (no mirror over the faces) | burst.iron-lungs (B, approved 25 Oct) | 'the bed': as he lies gasping on the real floor, a steel bed slides under him and rolls him feet first into a cream tank that was not there; the rubber collar snaps shut round his neck; the camera pulls back off his face onto the two rows of tanks into the dark (nothing over the lens, nothing falls away, no walls rise) | 'the bed out': the power never comes back; the tank's bed slides out again, out and out onto the real arena's floor, delivering him onto it; the tank is gone behind him; the collar's red ring stays round his neck | your breath belongs to a machine, the machine is failing, and nobody comes (the bellows stop, every head gasps in silence, the nurse walks past) |
| THE PLAGUE CART: a narrow cobbled lane at night in a plague city; every door nailed shut and painted with a red cross and LORD HAVE MERCY; braziers of smoking herbs; buriers in long waxed coats and beaked leather masks; a doctor ahead tapping each door with his cane (no handbell); the death cart heaped with the dead, some still moving; the lane ends at a pit white with quicklime | burst.plague-cart (B, approved 25 Oct) | 'the rats': rats pour out of every gap in the real arena (under props, out of pipes and cracks) in a grey river that runs over him toward the frame's edge; wherever the river has passed, the floor is wet cobbles and the walls are red-crossed doors; when the last rat has gone, the lane holds | 'the last door': the cart reaches the end of the lane, where the last red-crossed door swings open onto the real arena; the buriers tip him out through it onto the real floor, white with lime and burned, and the door shuts on nothing | carted alive to the pit with the dead, and limed (CORRODE) |
| THE FOREST OF STAKES: an endless dusk plain of red heather; thousands of sharpened stakes in rings round a low hill, a stranger on every stake at a different stage of the slow slide (fresh ones high and kicking, old ones grey with their toes nearly in the heather); loaded wood creaking; a moan with no wind; days passing as dusk after dusk, never a night | spear.forest-of-stakes (F, PLAN 25 Oct, remake of IMPALED) | 'the planting': Faris drives the spear's butt into the arena floor with him run through on it; the shaft roots and grows tall, lifting him, while a low mist rolls over the floor and drowns it (the arena never falls away, no walls rise); the tops of the other stakes show out of the mist round him | 'the invisible stake': in the real arena he hangs in empty air a hand above the floor, still sliding slowly down nothing, a red line running down an invisible shaft beneath him; his boots touch and he folds; Faris draws the spear out of the empty air above him (nothing drops by his boot) | the slow slide over days on the stake (IMPALE: the realm's exemption) |
| THE HALL OF THE SLAIN: the spear-god's hall so vast its roof is the sky: an open trampled field under a sky tiled with gold shields on rafters of spears (outdoors, not a gilded interior); trestle tables of bones in the open; a boar boiled to the bone that climbs out whole; the slain in old mail with bare grey faces (no gold on any face) killing each other at dawn in the mud and waking whole at dusk, every day, for ever | spear.skin-gold (F, BUILT 26 Oct, home Spike Castle) | 'the rafters': gold spear shafts lay themselves across the sky over the arena one by one and gold shields close over them like tiles; the light goes to a dull gold glare (the sky closes; the lens is never covered, the arena never falls away) | 'the shields lift': the shields lift off the sky one by one like roof tiles over the real arena; he lies on the floor with every wound the field gave him open at once, each rimmed with gold | killed every day and waking every night; returned with all those deaths at once |
| THE MILL: a night cotton mill of the dead under moonlight through tall arched windows (cold shafts full of falling lint, gas only as small jets), brick, a line shaft with slapping belts, spinning mules creeping on their rails, far rows of them into the haze; grey adult mill hands with their scalps long since torn off by the spindles, working without looking up; the dark empty space under the mules (lint, a dropped clog); the overseer's bell ringing by itself; a carding engine (wire-toothed drums, the doffer comb); finished laps stacked by the wall, each with a stranger's face stretched across it (no child figures) | minigun.the-mill (MINIGUN, MYTHIC, 58k_w_minigun_3.js) | 'mg.unravel': the minigun's six-barrel spin-blur swells out of the muzzle until it nearly fills the frame, draws up to the top as a turning bobbin, and the real arena unravels onto it in ONE thread, a knitted row at a time from the top (the traveller running back and forth along each row, stitches showing at the edge); the realm is behind the stitches | 'mg.knit': the full bobbin comes back and spins the other way; the real arena is knitted back from the floor UP, row by row, fresh stitches on the newest rows, until the bobbin is bare and whips away; on the floor a red carded lap with his legs sticking out of it and his face stretched across it | carded alive: hair to the spindles, hands to the feed rollers, his face the last thing through the drums |
| THE CIRCLE: a black jungle valley at night under low black cloud that glows red where a rope of fire comes out of it from something circling unseen above (the moan of its guns arriving after the light); palms and broad leaves black on the slopes, paddy terraces holding the red, rain; a ring of churned red mud with a burning, smoking furrow walked round it by the rope, tightening; the dead of every war face down in a spiral where they ran (helmets of every era; strangers, not Faris's dead) | minigun.the-circle (MINIGUN, MYTHIC, 58k_w_minigun_3.js) | 'mg.fromcloud': Faris fires straight up; the CAMERA rides the stream up as a ceiling of black cloud closes over the sky, holds on black while something's fire passes inside the cloud, then rides a red rope of fire back down out of it onto the valley (a camera move through a cloud ceiling: nothing pours over the lens, no line wipes the frame, the arena never falls away) | 'mg.sweep': the rope's last pass sweeps round the frame like a clock hand from twelve, the real backyard behind it; on the lawn his grave cut open like a cross-section, full of red paddy water, his face at the surface | one orbit is one night: he rots in the time-lapse while the world does not age (ROT exemption) |
| THE CHOIR: a black nave without end; tall lancet windows high in the dark all broken, the moon's cold shafts through them, glass still falling slowly like snow; choir stalls tier on tier on both sides of the aisle, the dead in grey robes holding one note forever (mouths wide, throats raw, blood at the lips, jaws sung loose; strangers); candles shivering to the note; the organ's pipes rising out of sight (dim gold: with the gun, the only gold; never on a face) | minigun.skin-gold (MINIGUN, MYTHIC GOLD, 58k_w_minigun_3.js) | 'mg.heldnote': the gun's whine holds its top note as the barrels coast; the real arena shakes in a STANDING WAVE (vertical strips vibrating like a plucked string, still at the nodes) and drains grey, until it is gone at the antinodes and the realm shows through, the nodes last (nothing rises out of the floor, nothing falls away, nothing covers the lens) | 'mg.glassfall': the note cuts off; in the silence the realm comes apart as tall lancet panes of glass that fall straight down onto the real arena and burst into glints on the floor, the glass left lying round him (not radial shards blown outward) | an endless note that finds your frequency (RUNG) |
| THE WAITING ROOM: an endless institutional waiting room at three in the morning: rows of joined grey plastic chairs going into the dark (never a regular grid), a steady buzzing ceiling tube (never flickering), a ticket dispenser on a pole, a red LED NOW SERVING display over a frosted-glass door with black behind it; the dead (strangers, grey, in the clothes they died in) seated with paper tickets, heads down, all turning in silence when a number is called | minigun.cine-b (MINIGUN, 27 Oct) | a whip pan that follows his flying body lands on the realm (a slowed, detuned DING) | the reverse whip lands in the real arena: his body sits in ONE grey plastic waiting-room chair that stays, the ticket in his hand | your number is called |
| THE GRID: a black plain ruled in cold cyan to a dead red sun stopped half under the horizon, banded black, no glow left in it; far off on the plain stand the fading light-walls of everyone who ran here, each ending where its runner gave out in a little heap of ash with one shoe in it; the hum of a power line that never ends | minigun.skin-neon (STYLE 3) | 'mg.gridline': one cold line is drawn out along the floor from under his boots, the world above it drains to black and the line fans into the ruled plain | 'mg.ungrid': the plain is squeezed back into the one line under his boots, it snaps, the real arena opens out of it | the walls she leaves are her: every piece he breaks hurts her, and she dies running into her own last wall |

TAKEN SIGNATURE ELEMENTS (never again as a centrepiece): a minefield / feet pressed on mines / MINES signs and wire (cluster); the dead lit only by red blinks, moving in the dark between flashes (cluster); a hive / honeycomb cells / the dead capped in wax (cluster); ferryman / river of hands; a spotlight in a void; one's own headstone / open grave; mirrors / reflections; a frozen lake of the damned; meat hooks / carcasses; carnival / circus tent / tin targets; dolls / dollhouse; trenches / flare; cartridges / a gun's insides; morgue drawers / toe tags; oil portraits; a floating ring over a throat; gold foundry / coin press / minting; a field of the old dead with wounds; gold masks / heart-weighing balance; between-frames limbo; auction / lots; a dead western town at noon; a train of the dead; an anatomy theatre / a dead audience applauding; a grove of split trees with the dead fused in them; a frozen city where time stopped; concrete foundations / immurement / a pour-pit / formwork; a rendering works / boiling vats / a glue tank (THE WEB retired 25 Oct); mounted human heads / taxidermy / a hunting lodge; sound frozen into gold / mouths sealed in gold / a clapperless bell; the discarded originals / blank default figures; a labyrinth of stone corridors / a red thread in a circle; the back of the world / plywood flats on struts / the dead as painted flats seen from behind; a crashing airliner cabin / dead passengers under oxygen masks / a breached fuselage; a smoke hall of faceless soot figures who take your face. RECURRING (avoid a 3rd): 'everyone Faris / the weapon already killed' gathered in the realm (Cocytus, the gallery). The still city's frozen are now everyone out in the cold that night, and the foundation's are the builders' sacrifices, so neither counts. A waiting room / take-a-number tickets / a NOW SERVING display (MINIGUN).
TAKEN CROSSING / RETURN IDEAS: warning signs hammered up out of the floor + wire unspooling (cluster); returning to the real arena carrying the years (moss, a nest, grass) and lifting the foot (cluster); a slowing red blink assembling the realm in its flashes (cluster); a body unfolding out of a point the wrong way (cluster); hexagons multiplying into comb under the floor (cluster); a golden drip from an overhang onto a glazed body (cluster); tar water; rot to grave dirt; lights out; puddle reflection; frost climb; a hook from the sky; curtains (velvet, theatre); tent flap; shrink; cardboard box; flare circle; bolt / eject; fluorescent flicker; lightning; gild / oil / canvas tear; cut-away floor disc + corpse from the sky; wax melt into gold; a slit in the air + healing scar; gold leaf peel + tarnish crumble; violet blink smear; over-exposure + sundown; departing platform + tunnel exit; arcs / branches spreading out of the body (thammer); a black branch thicket over the frame that splits (thammer); trees falling onto the lens; a frozen breath swelling over the frame; a single raindrop's ring; a gavel KNOCK + the frame splitting along the wood grain; a gold SOLD stamp slammed over the frame; wet concrete poured over the lens + a screed bar; shuttering planks knocked off the frame one by one; a camera dive into a glass tank whose bubbles become the vats; (retired 25 Oct: the glue strand across the lens and the strands snapping back, free again); brass-edged panel seams racing over the frame like cracks across ice, the panels swinging open like cabinet doors; a needle sewing the realm shut into a seam on the body, the last knot landing on the real arena; a plate already screwed to the real wall, its last screw turning; a frozen sound-word and shock rings closing round the frame like a bell's mouth (the world drained to grey inside them); the held sound returning all at once and shattering the frozen rings (the realm cracking into radial shards blown outward); a split screen whose second panel sinks away; the floor's seams rising into maze walls / sinking back as seams; the arena swinging round on a hinge like a stage flat; the world flown out on ropes; a flat spin whirling the arena round a locked face (stall horn); a cabin floor slamming down onto the arena and bursting into sheet metal; a smoke trail coiling round the body like a python and lifting it; the trail exhaling a man-shaped puff; a gold spiral scratched across the frame with the world draining into its eye (K); gold paving laid stone by stone with the world fading to black above each stone (K); paving stones flipping back to the real floor in a wave from the gate (K). a whip pan that swaps the world mid-whip + the reverse whip home (MINIGUN); a realm object (a plastic chair) left behind in the real arena with the body in it (MINIGUN).
KIT LIBRARY STATUS (58k_worlds.js): taken by the SMG page as finished looks: sink (tar), rot, lightsout, and the spit / grave-mark / no-shadow returns. The new crossings and returns (KIT-WORLD, 24 Oct) are raw material: compose, recolour and re-time them, and add your own element so no two read alike. Too close to taken looks, so never use these kit ways as they are: 'veins' (thammer's arcs out of the body) and 'thorns' (thammer's thicket); rework them heavily or pick another. Log every realm line in the ledger; this registry follows the ledger (and the lane files, for realms in code before they are logged).
COUNTS TO WATCH (24 Oct, after THE WEB / TROPHY ROOM / HALL OF SILENCE): GOLD realms are 4 (MINT, GILDED TOMB, AUCTION, HALL OF SILENCE; gold is required on skin-gold kills, but a gilded INTERIOR is the auction's (the silence hall is cold stone; its gold is only frozen sound) and gold over the dead's faces is the tomb's: the next gold realm needs a new kind of space and keeps gold off faces). WOOD COVERING THE FRAME is at 2 (the auction's grain split, the foundation's shuttering; the trophy room's crossing is brass panel seams, cracks not boards): no 3rd. A SMALL OBJECT DROPPING OUT OF THE AIR BY FARIS'S BOOT as the return is the mint's (the trophy room moved off it). THE ARENA FALLING AWAY as a crossing is at 3 (NOWHERE, THE LAST RING, THE AUCTION): no 4th. EYES THAT FOLLOW are the gallery's.
REVIEW LOG (24 Oct): K revised both hand cannon realms per KIT-WORLD's 6 notes (no eye-follow; a catch record, never his name; no object falling to the boot, the plate already on the wall; panel seams, not boards or antler growth; mouths sealed only, faces bare; a stone hall, gold only as frozen sound). K applied the last 3 asks (cabinet-door panels, a sewn seam on the body, no frost): the crossing must not end with the arena FALLING AWAY (taken 3 times: NOWHERE, THE LAST RING, THE AUCTION's splinters), so the seams widen until the lodge fills the frame; the return seam is SEWN on his body (thread, needle, straw), never a line in the air (THE OLD CUTS' slit heals to a scar); the silence hall keeps no frost in its joints (frozen is COCYTUS and THE STILL CITY, and 'frost climb' is a taken crossing). THE WEB (H): clean; strangers, cocoons at random heights (never a row = THE SLAUGHTER LINE). First-realm-frame cost is checked when the code lands.
REVIEW (25 Oct 00:10): THE BACK OF BEYOND (J) is registered.
- Crossing note: a hinged swing over the frame is close to THE TROPHY ROOM's 'panels swing open like cabinet doors'. One fix: the CAMERA walks round the edge of the world and finds it is a thin painted flat (a dolly round the frame's edge, a new move), instead of the arena swinging. The rotation then stays the camera's, never a hinged panel.
- Death note for KIT-BODY: a painted cut-out leans on PAPER / PAINT (RESTING at 15). pump.skin-camo DECOY owns a cardboard cut-out of Faris; here the victim himself becomes the flat, which is clear of it.
REVIEW (25 Oct 00:25): THE PROVING GROUND (K) is registered. Two asks sent to K:
- Keep the gel CLEAR to pale, never 'amber'. A man suspended in an amber block is pistol.mid-in-amber's image, and THE HONEYCOMB now has amber light.
- Let the crossing be the world itself wobbling like struck gel and setting clear, not a tide of gel closing over the frame from the wound: a substance flooding over the lens is THE FOUNDATION's poured-concrete crossing.
REVIEW (25 Oct 00:50): THE GLUE FACTORY (H) replaces THE WEB; THE WEB's strand crossing and return are retired and free. One ask to H: the return, where the tank made of him is clicked into the gun as its ammunition, echoes THE MAGAZINE (ar.magazine: loaded into the rifle as the next round). Keep the tank OFF the gun, for example shelved and labelled among the factory's stock on the real arena, or poured into the glue pot Faris uses to glue the realm's own door shut.

REVIEW (25 Oct 01:20): FLAMER (O) registers THE WICKER GIANT, THE BRAZEN BULL and THE PHOENIX'S PEAK (approved by the coordinator 00:35). Checks: no taken element as a centrepiece; crossings avoid wood over the frame (at 2), the arena falling away (at 3) and a substance flooding the lens; the phoenix is a new kind of gold space (an open peak) and keeps gold off faces; the feather lands in his chest, not by Faris's boot.
REVIEW (25 Oct 03:10): RPG (I) registers THE LAST FLIGHT and THE SMOKE (both found in the ledger unregistered; now in the table). Checks: no taken element as a centrepiece, crossings and returns new (the flat spin rotates the arena round his face, not a hinge; nothing over the lens; the arena never falls away). Two notes to I: (1) THE SMOKE's soot people must not read as THE DISCARDED's rows of blank default figures: no rows to the horizon and no jointed limbs; soft drifting smoke that gathers and thins, its hook the faces forming. (2) A CROWD TURNING ITS HEADS TO HIM now appears in both of I's realms (the masked passengers, the soot figures); THE STILL CITY's faces are fixed mid-flight looking back at a point, so they do not count. Keep it in THE LAST FLIGHT (the masks turning is its beat) and drop it from THE SMOKE. COUNTS: VEHICLE-OF-THE-DEAD realms are 2 (THE TRAIN OF THE DEAD, THE LAST FLIGHT): no 3rd.
REVIEW (25 Oct 05:20): SNIPER (N) registers ECHO VALLEY (realm 1 of 3; THE BAG and THE WATCHED to follow). The look, the answering mouths and the '...elp' off the real wall are new. Two asks to N: (1) WALLS RISING OUT OF THE GROUND as the crossing and SINKING BACK as the return is THE LABYRINTH's (portalgun: the floor's seams rise into maze walls, sink back as seams). Keep the walls where they are: for example the cry goes out, the real canyon swallows it into silence, and a hard cut lands on his own echo coming back from a mile down, where he is already standing on the riverbed. Keep the '...elp' return, but not the walls sinking like a tide. (2) s.hollow 'siphon' as a ribbon pulled out of his mouth into a receiver is THE DOORWAY EFFECT's death (portalgun: his last breath siphons into a thought bubble). Use 'pores' (red mist drawn out of every pore toward the answering mouth) or the mouths' own breath, so the stream doesn't come out of his mouth. KIT FIX on N's report: makeRealm now draws a recipe's own ground.back / ground.front (it used to fall back to the kind's ground silently).
REVIEW (25 Oct 05:40): ECHO VALLEY revised by N: no walls rise or sink, and nothing leaves through his mouth (the death is clean). Two near-clashes remain in the new crossing and return: (a) echo RINGS rolling out and closing back IN is THE HALL OF SILENCE's crossing (shock rings closing round the frame), and the return's ring sweeping the gorge away echoes its return (the rings shattering); (b) the canyon going BLACK until only he is lit is NOWHERE's 'lights out' (every light dies but his spotlight). Ask: carry the crossing on TIME, not rings or darkness. Each echo of the crack comes back later than the one before (0.2 s, 0.6 s, 1.4 s...), and on each return a hard jump-cut sets him deeper, the walls taller and further off, until the last echo lands him on the riverbed a mile down. The return is a hard cut on the last faint '...elp', which fades off the real wall, with no ring wipe.
REVIEW (25 Oct 06:00): K files the HALL OF SILENCE transitions as RLM keys 'k.goldbell' / 'k.boomback' (58k_w_handcannon_skins.js). They match the approved row. Clean: a draining grey world inside closing bell rims, and a radial shard blow-out on the return, used nowhere else (THE TROPHY ROOM's crossing is brass panel seams opening like cabinet doors, not shards). Now TAKEN: a world drained to grey inside closing rings; a realm image cracking into radial shards that blow outward.

REGISTERED (25 Oct, E): BEAM registers THE LANTERN SKY (approved by the coordinator 25 Oct with two changes: the light only ever through the thinning skin, never out of holes and never a walking lantern; no boxer pose, the husk curled on its side). Smoke over the lens is this realm's (RPG's THE SMOKE keeps its trail filmed from outside). Death INFLATE without a pop (the burn-through); built on s.realm / s.cross / s.ret under its own smoke screens.
REVIEW (25 Oct 06:30): N's ECHO VALLEY rev 2 is CLEAN (a crossing carried on echo delays, a plain-cut return). THE BAG and THE WATCHED registered. THE BAG asks: (1) its hunters must not be FACELESS figures whose blank faces turn to follow him: that would be a 3rd faceless crowd (THE DISCARDED's blank figures, THE SMOKE's soot figures) and a 2nd crowd turning its heads to him (THE LAST FLIGHT). Hide their faces under hat brims in the dark, or show only a pipe's ember, and let them stay still until the horn lifts their rifles. (2) The return should read as the forest whirling down in a storm of falling needles, not a scale-down into an object ('shrink' is taken). THE WATCHED ask: keep the multiplying red dots IN THE WORLD (on him, the bar, the walls) rather than on the lens; a substance covering the lens is THE FOUNDATION's crossing. COUNTS: HUNTING realms are 2 (THE TROPHY ROOM, THE BAG): no 3rd. FOR THE COORDINATOR (deaths, not realms): FROSTBITE is now in STRANDED, rpg FINAL APPROACH and THE BAG's realm death.
REVIEW (25 Oct 06:55): N applied the asks. THE BAG's hunters have shadowed brims and no faces or head turns, and its return is a needle storm. THE WATCHED's dots are in the world. Both are CLEAN. ECHO VALLEY's insides now leave through the round's own exit wound (s.hollow 'wound') on the coordinator's ruling.
REVIEW (25 Oct 07:50): K registers THE GOLDEN SECTION and THE GOLDEN ROAD (golden pistol; THE COUNTING HOUSE to follow). Looks and dread: new. THE GOLDEN ROAD is a new kind of gold space (an open road in black nothing) and keeps gold off faces, as the gold count asks. Three asks: (1) 'k.gsection': the frame cut into squares that FOLD AWAY in turn is near THE TROPHY ROOM's crossing (panel seams racing over the frame, the panels swinging open like cabinet doors). Keep the spiral: a gold compass line scratches a golden spiral across the frame and the real arena winds into the spiral's eye like water down a drain, the vault already behind it. (2) 'k.goldroad': the whole frame PULLED AWAY into perspective is near 'the arena falling away' (at 3: NOWHERE, THE LAST RING, THE AUCTION; no 4th). Let the gold paving spread outward from under him tile by tile, and the arena fade to black where the paving reaches, with no pull-away. (3) 'k.gateopen': a widening SLIT of light is near THE OLD CUTS' slit in the air. Use a tile-flip wave instead: the paving stones flip one by one from gold back to the real floor, running from the gate toward him. 'k.gunroll' is clean. COUNT: gold-touched realms are now 6 (MINT, GILDED TOMB, AUCTION, HALL OF SILENCE, THE GOLDEN SECTION's gold lines, THE GOLDEN ROAD's paving); the next needs a reason that isn't gold.
REVIEW (25 Oct 13:20): K applied the three asks on THE GOLDEN SECTION / THE GOLDEN ROAD (58k_w_golden_1.js, checked in renders): 'k.gsection' is the gold spiral with the castle draining into its eye (no folding squares), 'k.goldroad' lays the paving stone by stone with the arena fading to black above each stone (no pull-away), 'k.gateopen' is the tile-flip wave from the gate side (no slit). All three CLEAN; 'k.gunroll' was clean. Both realms are CLEAN. THE COUNTING HOUSE: its dread must not come from gold (gold-touched realms stay at 6); keys to follow.
REGISTERED (26 Oct, registered by K for M; KIT-WORLD stopped, coordinator's instruction): THE COUNTING HOUSE (golden.skin-gold, 58k_w_golden_skins.js): realm 'k.counting.house', CROSS 'k.ledgerpage' (1.7 s, a ledger page turning over the frame), RET 'k.floorboards' (1.4 s, the boards breaking into a hole onto the real saloon); both defined once behind the RLM guard in 58k_w_golden_skins.js. No gilded décor: the only gold is the rounds forged into her chain links and the ladle of one melted round (the debt's metal); the gold-touched count stays at 6. The row is in the table under THE GOLDEN ROAD. Sound cues for the two keys are KIT-SOUND's (58k_sound.js), not added here.

REGISTERED (26 Oct, MINIGUN): THE MILL (minigun.the-mill, 58k_w_minigun_3.js): realm 'mg.the.mill', CROSS 'mg.unravel' (1.5 s), RET 'mg.knit' (1.4 s), both defined once behind the RLM guard. Checks: no taken element as a centrepiece (THE GLUE FACTORY's gaslit iron works, conveyor and vats are kept out: the mill is moonlit and its machines spin and card); the kit's raw 'unravel' is used by no other kill and is reworked here (a single thread onto a bobbin made of the minigun's barrel blur); the return is the crossing undone (a knit from the floor up), not a particle white-out (THE THRESHING FLOOR's chaff return); nothing floods the lens, no wood covers the frame, the arena never falls away. Now TAKEN: a bobbin / spool winding the world up in one thread; the world knitted back row by row; a mill of spindles and carding drums; faces stretched across laps of cotton.
REGISTERED (26 Oct, MINIGUN): THE CIRCLE (minigun.the-circle, 58k_w_minigun_3.js): realm 'mg.the.circle', CROSS 'mg.fromcloud' (1.6 s), RET 'mg.sweep' (1.4 s), defined once behind the RLM guard. Checks: a line sweeping across the frame with the realm behind it is THE BAG's crossing, so the rope never wipes the frame (the crossing is the camera passing up through a cloud ceiling and riding the rope down); THE LANTERN SKY's smoke over the lens is avoided (the cloud is a ceiling in the world that the camera rises into); the clock-hand return is used nowhere else; no flares, no dead moving between flashes, no rice or roots through him; the world does not age (THE MINEFIELD). Now TAKEN: a camera riding a stream up into a cloud ceiling and a rope of fire back down; a clock-hand sweep of the frame; an orbiting gunship's ring of fire; a top-down time-lapse of one orbit per night; a grave of red paddy water cut open in a lawn.
REGISTERED (26 Oct, MINIGUN): THE CHOIR (minigun.skin-gold, 58k_w_minigun_3.js): realm 'mg.the.choir', CROSS 'mg.heldnote' (1.6 s), RET 'mg.glassfall' (1.4 s), defined once behind the RLM guard. Checks: the slate's 'walls rise into choir stalls' was dropped (THE LABYRINTH's floor seams rising into maze walls); the crossing is a standing wave, which no registered crossing uses (kit 'static' rolls static band by band, this vibrates); not THE HALL OF SILENCE (its shock rings close round a grey world and its return blows radial shards outward; here the world shakes in vertical strips and the realm falls straight down as lancet panes); gold only on the gun and dim organ pipes, never on faces. Now TAKEN: a standing wave shaking the world apart; lancet panes of a realm falling straight down as glass; a choir of the dead holding one note; blood standing in cymatic rings.
REGISTERED (26 Oct 21:02, I): THE ORCHARD (gl.the-orchard, 58k_w_gl.js): realm arena 'gl_orchard' | neat rows of pale grey-barked fruit trees to the horizon under a low copper harvest light, ladders against the trunks, wicker baskets of split husks, a scorched black ring under every tree; the fruit are olive grenades with yellow bands that ripen (blink, beep, drop) only when he stands under them; the realm is periodic so the row loops back to the tree he started from; a bough lowers itself to offer him one fruit | CROSSING 'gl.rootup': the round's first bounce never comes back up, it roots, a trunk grows out of it and the camera rides it up into the canopy, then tilts down into the rows | RETURN 'gl.windfall': every tree drops its fruit at once, the thumps roll away row by row, and the rows fall silent front to back, each turning back into the real arena | core dread: the harvest is you: everything ripens over you and the way out leads back. Checks: not THE STRUCK GROVE (no black split trees, no dead fused in trunks, no trees falling on the lens, no branch thicket over the frame: the trunk grows out of the round and the camera rides it, nothing covers the lens); no dead anywhere, no gathering of the dead, no field of the old dead; the return is not the arena falling away (it comes back row by row). Now TAKEN: an orchard of grenade fruit; a round that roots and grows a tree; a windfall return.
REGISTERED (26 Oct 22:32, I): THE WHITE ROOM (gl.red-wire, 58k_w_gl_2.js): realm arena 'gl_white' | a white-tiled bomb-disposal room under one hard overhead lamp, a steel table, the round on it with its cap open on a red and a blue wire, cutters in her heavy glove, her in a bomb suit | every cut stops the beep for one breath, then the lamp blinks and the room resets with the round armed again and beeping faster; the snipped curls stay and pile round her boots; at the end the lamp turns red and the two wires look the same | CROSSING 'gl.suitup': each beep snaps on one piece of a bomb-disposal suit (boots, leg plates, chest plate, gloves, the helmet), the visor shuts last, the view goes behind its rim and the world turns white | RETURN 'gl.scorch': the white room browns and burns through like paper held over a flame, from the round outward in a spreading charred ring, the real arena showing through the edge | core dread: nothing you cut is ever the right wire. Checks: no copies of her (copies of him are owned), no fogged faceplate (THE SQUEEZE), no 'everyone already killed' gathering; the return is a burn-through (not lights out, not a tear or a slit, not the arena falling away, not a substance flooding the lens); the crossing is the suit, not a frost climb or a hood. Now TAKEN: a bomb-disposal room; a suit snapped on piece by piece as the crossing; a realm burning through like paper as the return.
REGISTERED (27 Oct 00:3x, F): PANIC (pan.panic, 58k_w_pan_b.js): drawn over the arena while she is in it | the god Pan's meadow at the dead of noon: tall pale reeds to every horizon in three rows, a white sun dead still overhead, no wind, no shadow; reed pipes playing somewhere ahead; a line of reeds parting toward her; a ring of cloven hoof prints round her in the dust; when she runs the meadow scrolls under her and never ends; a herd's yellow slit-pupilled eyes and curled horns in the reeds | CROSSING 'the ring': the killing BONG keeps ringing and becomes the note of the pipes, a white noon flash | RETURN 'the shout': the god's silent shout flattens the reeds in a ring, her hair goes white in a wave from the crown and decades pass as the sun races, then a white flash back onto the real lawn, where she lies old | core dread: terror itself ages you to death. Checks: not THE ORCHARD (no trees, no rows of fruit, no loop back); no dead anywhere in the realm, no gathering; the crossing is a sound (not a frost, a hood, a suit, a substance, a fall); the return is a shock wave and a white flash (not a burn-through, a tear, lights out or the arena falling away); AGED was released by the minigun (0 uses). Now TAKEN: the god Pan's noon meadow; a bong's ring turning into pipes as the crossing; a silent shout that ages as the return.
REGISTERED (27 Oct 16:30, C): THE LEAD HAIL (sawedoff.hanging-on, cinematic DEATH REALM, 58k_w_sawedoff.js): drawn over the arena while they are in it | an endless black plain under a low iron sky where it has rained buckshot forever: grey lead shot drifted underfoot in banks; strangers stand where they were caught, peppered with hundreds of ragged holes (varied, never dots), swaying, each posed differently; volleys come down in hissing sheets and a distant bell tolls once for each | CROSS: Faris's second report HANGS, the spread slows and thickens into a falling grey hail, and the arena drains to iron as the plain fades up | RETURN: the bell stops dead, the hail drops its last inch, the arena snaps back warm, and only the grey shot remains on the floor | Core dread: there is no cover from the sky; the hail parts only around Faris.
REGISTERED (28 Oct, E): THE SIGN YARD (beam.skin-neon, cinematic DEATH REALM, 58k_w_beam_cine.js; s.realm 'realm.beam.signyard'): drawn over the arena while they are in it | an endless night scrapyard of dead neon: heaps of scrap and tube glass on the horizon, gravel glinting with broken glass, stacks of rusted sign panels; the dead STAND MOUNTED on rusted sign frames (never hung), posed like shop-front signs (waving, pointing, beckoning, hands on hips), bent glass outlines with blank round heads, buzzing a weak pink and flickering brighter as he passes; one empty frame stands in the yard: a man-shaped outline of dead glass missing a forearm and a shin (his injuries) | CROSSING: the neon line does not end: it hangs in the air, turns to glass and coils round him shoulder to knee; the arena lights short out in flicker cuts to black, the coil the only light | RETURN: the glass of his lit outline shatters outward in pink shards; the real arena slams back in a white flash; he drops onto the real floor among the pieces of the fight | CORE DREAD: to be bent into glass and stood up as a sign forever, still buzzing. TAKEN: the line-into-glass coil, the mounted neon dead, the empty outline in the victim's own shape, the outline lighting at the death.
REGISTERED (28 Oct, E): THE PYRE RIDGE (movie.offered-hand, the MOVIE REPLICA backdrop, 58m_offered_hand.js; arena 'pyre58', local page 58m_movie.html): the whole film plays inside it, no crossing or return | a burning battlefield ridge at night: a black volcanic slope rising to a near-flat crest, a wall of fire behind in three depths of flame tongues with torn-off licks, black smoke billows rolling up out of it, embers on the heat; fallen strangers of this battle lying along the slope, a sword planted hilt-up as a cross with leaning spears, a broken shield | core dread: betrayed by the one hand you trusted, in the fire of a battle you just won. Checks: not THE WICKER GIANT (no effigy, no villagers), not THE PHOENIX'S PEAK, not THE SMOKE (no soot figures, no faces); the dead are this battle's strangers, so no 'everyone already killed' gathering; no crossing or return of its own. Now TAKEN: a burning battlefield ridge as a backdrop; a planted sword-cross on a slope.
REGISTERED (28 Oct, MINIGUN): THE GRID (minigun.skin-neon, 58k_w_minigun_9.js, STYLE 3): realm 'mg.the.grid', CROSS 'mg.gridline' (1.5 s), RET 'mg.ungrid' (1.0 s), defined once behind the K58.REALM guard. Checks: no taken element as a centrepiece (no mirrors, no spotlight void, no frozen city: the runners are gone, only their walls and ash stand); the crossing is a single line drawn along the floor that fans into a ruled plain (not the whip pan, not a split screen, not seams racing over the frame); the return squeezes the realm back into that line (not an iris, not a flatline). Now TAKEN: a ruled synthwave plain to a dead banded sun; light-walls left by the dead ending in ash and a shoe; the world drawn into / out of one floor line.