The Meanders
The Reckoners' maze: the Wayfinder Cord at a Gauge Stone, the thread back, the Recount of the passages, the Descent Gate, the Summing Lock on the Wheel of currents, traps, the loop's guardians and rewards.
The Meanders are where the flux of the world does not run straight but goes round in loops. In its bends the Reckoners built the Counting Ways — a maze of measuring corridors and counting chambers where every current was set against every other. This is where the order split. You come here for things found nowhere else: one more Hubstone, Reckoner Records and the coffers of their storerooms, the dark stone of the Meanders for building, and the story of why the Reckoners parted into three creeds.
The world is not one big maze but many loops. A loop has an end: a maze of 9 × 9 cells, 16 blocks each, on two levels, and you
can walk it to the end. All the Gauge Stones of one land of the ordinary world (1280 × 1280 blocks) lead to one loop; the stones
of the next land lead to another. The Codex entry is 
The Meanders; it opens after Reckoner Records and the
Quickstream.
The Wayfinder Cord
The way in and out is the Wayfinder Cord, the Reckoners' thread of Ariadne. It is made at the Flux Workbench from
three 
Knotted Cord, a 
Tally Tablet, an opaline and an antimony regulus.
- Descent. Hold the cord (right button) on the head of a living
Gauge Stone for three seconds: the cord
winds round the stone, knots light up along the pillar, the stone's flux goes into its head in a funnel of sparks — and you go
down into the loop of this land. Let go of the button, step more than five blocks away or take a hit, and the descent stops with
the knot intact. A fallen stone will not do: it has no head and does not remember its loop. - Knots. The cord has 12 knots: a descent takes one, an emergency pull two. Mend it with Knotted Cord on an anvil.
- The Thread screen. While the loop arrives, brass lines draw the maze by themselves on dark parchment, a golden thread with an opaline bead runs through the passages and ties itself in a knot in the Heart of the loop.
- The thread on the floor. While the cord is in your hand, golden beads run along the floor from you — the shortest present way to the Tether Hall where you came down. The thread shows the way back, not the way on: the way to the Heart you find yourself.
- The way out is at the Tether: press the brass post in the middle of the Tether Hall and stay close for two seconds — the cord winds back and you come out at the foot of the Gauge Stone you tied it to. It costs no knot.
- Emergency pull: crouch and hold the cord for six seconds without moving and without being hit — anywhere in the Meanders.
- No one sleeps or sets a spawn point in the Meanders: the walls go on moving while you dream. There is no sky, time stands still, the passages are dark — bring light.
The loop: two levels
- The Outer Ways are the upper level. In the middle is the Tether Hall, where you arrive. In one of the quarters is the Keyhall, a round hall with door niches; at the far edge from it is the Descent, a well with a spiral stair down. The wing with the Descent is locked by the Descent Gate: seals and a socket for a Knot Key.
- The Heart of the loop is the lower level. In the middle is the Summing Hall, 3 × 3 cells; the Summing Lock holds the way into it, and behind the hall lies the Vault of the loop, a cast cell behind seals.
- Rooms stand in dead ends: counting chambers with tally boards, record rooms with shelves of ledgers, measure storerooms, cisterns, counters' cells, cave-ins, workshops of unfinished automatons, chapels of the Sum; the rooms hold Reckoner coffers and journal pages on lecterns (hints for the locks and guardians).
The creed of a loop. Each loop is held by one of the three creeds — or by none. That decides its colors, residents and trap:
| Loop | Whose | Residents | Its own trap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reckoned Loop | no one's, as the Reckoners left it (one in five) | Lock Tenders, Laggards | Miscount Tile |
| Stilled Loop | the Order of the Still Hour | Clockbound, Bellringers, Vowkeepers | Rime Tile |
| Tolled Loop | the Tollkeepers | Toll Collectors, Bursars, Bailiffs | Toll Wire |
| Sunken Loop | the Sunken | Sodden, Keeners, Mirebearers | Murk Breath |
The residents guard the rooms and the dark passages. Each loop has a Skein or two in its halls: Still and Tempo threads in a Stilled Loop, Want and Alloy in a Tolled one, Murk and Grave in a Sunken one, Lattice and Mind in a Reckoned one.
The Recount
The passages of a loop move. Every two and a half minutes the loop recounts: in some doorways a shoal grows from the groove in the floor — amber and lilac of stilled flux — and in others it melts away. Ten seconds before, the Counting Bell tolls: the doorways about to close shimmer amber, the shoals about to melt shed lilac grit. The signs show at every level of "Mod graphics".
- The loop never locks you in. In either phase of the Recount there is a way to the Tether Hall from every cell: the passages change, but there is no dead end without a way out. The cord's thread follows the new way from the next second.
- A shoal will not rise on someone standing in the doorway — it waits.
- Shoals and cast walls do not break: this is a maze. Go round.
- Where the guardian of the Heart falls, the Recount stops for good: the loop is "summed". The entry is
The Recount.
Traps
A trap always shows itself in advance and strikes only in its own phase.
| Trap | Where | Sign | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tally Scythe | every loop, in the passages | a brass pendulum with a blade under the vault, a shadow running on the floor, ticking | every 4 seconds it sweeps across the passage: 6 damage and a knockback; run through on the beat |
| Miscount Tile | Reckoned Loop | floor tiles with cracks like tally marks | stepping on it wakes a patch: it cracks for a second, then drops one block (4 damage and slowness); jump out, and in 30 seconds the floor sets back |
| Rime Tile | Stilled Loop | rime and an Hour Dial on the tile | stand on it for half a second and you freeze for two — not a step |
| Toll Wire | Tolled Loop | an ankle-high brass wire across the passage, with a tag | whoever touches it takes bolts of the local current from horns in the walls (3 damage) |
| Murk Breath | Sunken Loop | a grate in the floor with mire bubbling under it | every 6 seconds (bubbles a second before) a puff of murk: Silting for 4 seconds nearby |
The Summing Lock
The Meanders' own puzzle is on the Wheel of currents: to pass, you have to know what a current is made of. The entry is
The Summing Lock.
- A Summing Plaque is a brass plaque by the way into the Summing Hall and by the Summing Niches. Its sum burns in it — the rune of a compound current.
- Beside it on the wall are two to four Tally Dials. An empty hand turns a dial to the next rune of a Spring or a Pole (six round).
- To reconcile the sum, press the plaque. If the runes of the dials together are the primal currents the sum is made of on the
Wheel, the seals crumble. For example:
Brew = 
Shift + 
Ember =
Tide + 
Fray + Ember, three dials. - If the dials add up to another current — "the sum does not reconcile": the plaque strikes with that current (4 damage) and stays dark for three seconds. If they add up to nothing — only a harmless puff of murk.
- A sum is what it is made of, not what it looks like. Keep the Wheel open: Currents and the Wheel.
- Summing Niches are small rooms on both levels with a coffer behind the same kind of lock, of two or three dials.
The Descent Gate
The wing of the loop with the Descent into the Heart is locked: the Gate has seals and a key socket. The 
Knot Key
lies in the pit of the Keyhall under the seals of its guardian: the seals crumble when the guardian falls. A key set in stays in the
socket. Any Knot Key opens any Gate: a lost key does not lock the loop forever — take another from the Keyhall of another
loop.
The guardian of the Keyhall
the
Keyed
The guardian of the Heart
the
Audit
8
4
Rewards
- Room coffers — Quickdust, opaline, antimony regulus, Knotted Cord, shards of the Springs; record rooms hold Tally Tablets and Reckoner Records; counters' cells hold candles, bread and the counters' notes.
- Summing Niches — opaline, fluxsteel, Lattice and Fray shards, drive drawings, the
Summary Record. - The Vault of the loop behind the seals of the Heart's guardian — fluxsteel, opaline, speculum, shards of every current,
a
Toll Reliquary, a Summary Record and an armor trim smithing template. - The Summary Record gives notes for every chapter and opens the entry The Schism — what happened in the
Meanders.
- Meanders decor is a dark set found nowhere else. You mine it from the furnishings of the rooms (the cast walls and floor of
the maze do not break) and cut one from another on a stonecutter:
Meander Bricks,
Polished Meander Stone, 
Meander Pillar, 
Notched Tile,
Ink Glass, 
Loop Lamp, 
Ledger Shelf.
What next
- The Stillness — the world of the Great Stilling; the Meanders' Hubstone is useful there.
- The Quickstream — the main channel you pass through on the way to the Meanders.
- Reckoners in the world — the Gauge Stones you tie the cord to.
- Currents and the Wheel — what each current is made of, for the Summing Lock.