TRUEMAGE.COMThe Codex
Every file, A to Z. Filter by floor or search by name.
The Accords
Border law for the prison-world: who crosses, what it costs, who may contact humans, which gates stay sealed. Still in force.
The All-Star Diner
A roadside diner, home of the All-Star Special. The diner itself is the sentient one. Staff differ at every location. An entrance, and an easy one.
The Archons
The prison-world's administrators, from clerks and wardens up to correctional angels and algorithmic saints. No horns.
The Between
Roads, thresholds, dream corridors, missing time, wrong exits: the jurisdiction of how things move. Lit from the wrong angle.
Billy Grin
Local, strange, useful, and frightened beneath the grin. Tied to old roads, bad doors, and Verone's life before the mantle.
The Bort File
The whole file is one laminated card that says BORT. Sixteen folders so far, all named the same.
Club Zer0
A magick bar in a side-dimension beside the Shift. Neutral ground, black market, sanctuary, backroom court. Five laws.
The Courier
The road's own egregore: one entity on every road, made of the faces of lost travelers. Courier, Linkman, and to a stranded human, Miles.
The Demiurge
Architect and jailer of the prison-world. He built time, names, mortality and the border architecture. He's dead.
Deprecated Berlin
A near-future Berlin that retired its bodies. Five songs, a count-in, and a voice that ends on one word.
The Driver Reel
No map, no names. A reel in a mailbox with one word on the box. Sixty-three pieces, most untitled, most past eight minutes.
Egregores
A belief organism: a thoughtform a crowd feeds until it argues back. The Mantle, a corporate icon given meat, and a town's hidden underside are all one kind.
Ellis Road
A road on no map, off a green exit sign at mile marker 237. GZS Radio on a dial set to off. Every other road runs to it.
The Endless City
The True Mage line's own pocket city, for people who never existed or never had a place. The Infinite Library is inside it.
The Eye in the Palm
Verone's chest mark, and this archive's own: a white left hand on black, one eye in the palm, never mirrored.
GZS Radio
Broadcasting from gaps in the prison system: warnings, field reports, songs with instructions, ads for impossible places.
The Happy Face Monster
A corporate egregore wearing a mascot as flesh, with a yellow Happy Mart smiley for a head. Threat level Omega.
Happy Mart
The chain where this world goes wrong, aisle by aisle, under bad fluorescents. One of four roadside franchises, and a hard door.
Hexorius
A municipal underworld intelligence, the mask hidden cities wear to speak in a human shape. Governs the Belows. At Stillwell, its spirit.
How a Case Arrives
The Shift puts Verone where the case is. The Whisper is the assignment. Three registers: mundane, apocalyptic, other realities.
The Infinite Library
Inside the Endless City, a library that holds every story ever told, imagined or not.
The Infinite Mysteries Source Deck
One of one. Each card is a compressed spell, map, warning and key, and it reads the prison's architecture, not your fortune.
Jenn Zer0
Owner of Club Zer0, the neutral ground. Hospitality, debt, secrets and the emotional weather of dangerous people are her trade.
Jon Smiles
A human, and Verone's primary anchor: witness, conscience, procedural mind, human-law counterweight.
The Law of Crossings
Five rules for any crossing between jurisdictions: a threshold, a state change, recognition, a toll, and a custodian.
Lenora, Kansas
A real town on the Solomon, founded 1873. In the story Lenore, the sign reads POP. 454 going in and POP. 455 going out.
Living Sigils
Accord sigils the mantle burned into Verone: warning, restraint, weapon channel, painful legal interface. They are the leash.
The Lost Highways
Route 66, old Route 666 in Arizona, and US 70 through Waverly, Tennessee. Signs change. The record keeps the roads, and a list for later.
Lucky's
A gas station and trading post with a rabbit for a mascot. The Night Manager runs every one. Neutral ground where deals get done.
Magick Is Access
Magick is access to layers of reality you can't normally perceive. Every spell feeds something. No free spells.
The Mantle
The True Mage's office: a check from the Source, worn as belief in someone who cleans up after gods die. Verone is its current address.
The Memphis Drive
Small river towns on the road to Memphis, and a radio that played something after the stations ran out. Six tracks, five names.
Nathaniel Verone
The Last True Mage. Occult drifter, enforcer, Keeper of the Accords. Allegedly the last of his line. Not impressed.
One-Light Town
A river town with one stoplight. Four men got out. The photograph on the back of their album shows five.
The Paramentals
Spirits of a city's infrastructure, and the population of Stillwell Below. Concrete, steel, glass and current.
The Roads
Highways are liminal places you can drive. They work like the Belows, keep local custodians, and all of them run to Ellis Road.
The Sacred Bat
A baseball bat carved from the cross of reality HJ-527-Q and blessed in sacrificial blood. It morphs, and it has opinions.
Servitors
A purpose-built thoughtform with one job. Forget its kill-switch and it becomes a parasite.
The Shift
The membrane between the jurisdictions. It moves Verone across space, sometimes across realities, and it decides where.
The Starlite Motel
A motel in every city, all kept by one blind man. A door to the Above and the Below, and an easy one.
Stillwell Below
The Below-city under Stillwell, Indiana: the town's hidden underside, reached through its storm drains, sewers and tunnels.
The Stillwell Case
An impossible crime scene in the chapel of an abandoned hospital in Stillwell, Indiana. Verone and Jon Smiles meet there.
Stillwell, Indiana
A small Indiana town where all five jurisdictions touch in a dead hospital's chapel. There's a second town underneath.
Sunscreen State
Hot country, a porch, a fan aimed at an amp. The county lost the house's address in 1971. The porch is still standing.
US Highway 36
The main-story road, west through Missouri and into Kansas. The file is mostly blank, on purpose.
The Vertical Structure
The prison-world floor by floor: the Above, the Middle, the Below, the Between, and the Shift, the membrane that is none of them.
Wade Harlow
Twenty-six, two semesters of art school, day shift retail. The roads keep picking him, and a ledger at a Lucky's holds half a sentence of his.
The Whisper
The True Mage's office felt as pressure, instinct and half-heard warning. It's the assignment. At Stillwell it says one word.
The Wonderful World
A world with its calendar nailed to the late fifties. The survivor keeps inviting everybody back, like it's good news.
It has not opened yet.
A Thursday letter from the Codex is planned. The first one has not gone out. Leave an address and it comes to you.