The Vertical Structure

Four layers, one membrane, and you live on the middle floor.

Each layer is a jurisdiction. Almost every other file here stands on one of them.

The layers

The Above. Source-adjacent territory, angelic orders, higher intelligences. Not automatically good. It looks like impossible light, and geometry that hurts to look at.

The Middle. Human consensus reality: matter, law, time, cities, bodies, taxes, grief, illness, coffee, traffic. What it looks like takes one word. "America."

The Below. Underworlds, chthonic zones, dead cities, shadow ecologies, forgotten gods, ancestral roads and old hunger. Old, close, bodily, buried, transactional, and not automatically evil. It looks like underground twin cities, root-memory, municipal dark. The True Mage line built the Belows as a refuge and appointed Hexorius to govern them. Verone enters on a warrant, like a cop, or as a visitor.

The Between. Roads, thresholds, dream corridors, GZS Radio, liminal transit, missing time, impossible hallways, wrong exits, recurring rooms. How things move. "Lit from the wrong angle." It's Verone's jurisdiction, "kind of like DC."

The membrane

The Shift sits between the jurisdictions. It isn't a layer, because it's exposure.

"Clearance, not safety." It looks like identity under pressure.

Where they meet

In Stillwell, Indiana, all five touch at once, in the chapel of an abandoned hospital.

Source of record: Series Bible. Cleared. Revised 2026-10-18.