Six sections that walk you through everything you need to understand the world of Between Two Deaths. Not required reading. Very recommended. Read in any order.
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The Two WorldsThe First World & The Veil
Volume 0 — Section IThe Two WorldsThe First World & The Veil
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The First World
The First World is our world. Cities, small towns, schools, gas stations — ordinary in every way. Most people living in it have no idea the Veil exists. The Crossing Points are right in front of them, hidden in plain sight: abandoned hospitals, old quarries, condemned buildings where grief has soaked into the walls for decades.
Riven, our main character, lives in the First World at the start of the story. So do several other vessels. They are regular people — teenagers and young adults — living regular lives. None of them asked for what is about to happen.
The Veil
The Second World is called the Veil. It has existed as long as ours, running alongside it like a second track on the same rail — parallel, connected, but operating by entirely different rules.
The Veil is not a fantasy kingdom of castles and kings. It is a living world with towns, settlements, forests, politics, and ordinary people going about ordinary lives. The difference is that the Veil is threaded through with the Weave — a living magical energy that underlies everything and can be read and shaped by those born with the ability.
The Four Regions
The Commons are peaceful settlements where most of the Veil's population lives, connected by trade, shared Weaving traditions, and a fragile peace the Ashen Court has been quietly eroding for decades.
The Ashlands are territory the Ashen Court controls or has corrupted. The Weave here is twisted and aggressive. Plants grow wrong. The air tastes burnt. Dangerous even for experienced Weavers.
The Deep Forests are ancient, wild, ungoverned. The trees are thousands of years old and the Weave runs through them so densely the forest seems alive beyond biology. The vessels enter here first.
The Still Point is a place where the Weave has crystallized into a landscape of frozen light. The most beautiful and most dangerous place in the Veil. Where everything is heading.
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The Weave & MagicHow
power works in the Veil Volume 0 — Section IIThe Weave & MagicHow power works in the Veil
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Magic in the Veil is not the kind found in most stories. There are no spells to memorize, no wands to wave, no words to speak in a special order. Magic here is something you read — or something that reads you back. It is called the Weave.
What the Weave Is
Imagine that underneath everything — every tree, every stone, every person, every moment — there is a pattern. A living, shifting, interconnected network of energy that holds reality together the way threads hold fabric. That is the Weave.
In the First World, the Weave exists but is dormant — too thin to feel, too quiet to hear. In the Veil, it is alive. It hums in the ground, runs through the trees, moves through the air. To someone who can perceive it, the Veil looks like the world with a second layer of meaning overlaid on everything.
Spellweaving
People born with the ability to perceive and interact with the Weave are called Spellweavers. The fundamental sensitivity is innate — it cannot be fully taught, only developed. Every Spellweaver's interaction with the Weave is unique, like handwriting. An experienced eye can identify who cast a spell by its texture alone.
The vessels are not trained Spellweavers. Their powers come from their fragments — specific, focused interactions with the Weave built into the Anchor of Return when it was first created. Powerful, unpredictable, and impossible to fully control without practice.
The Cost
Nothing in the Weave is free. Every use of Spellweaving costs the user something. Minor use causes deep fatigue. Significant Weaving costs stamina and clarity — the marks on the vessels' palms bleed when pushed too hard. Full-power Weaving can cost consciousness, memory, or in extreme cases, life itself.
Dark Weaving
The Ashen Court practices a second method: Dark Weaving. Where ordinary Spellweaving reads and adjusts patterns, Dark Weaving twists and corrupts them. Faster and more destructive. Also corrosive — to the practitioner and everything around them. The Ashlands exist because Dark Weaving was used there so extensively the Weave itself has curdled. Dark Weavers don't pay in fatigue. They pay in erosion. Something in them smooths away over time. Empathy. Memory. Eventually, identity.
⬡Vessels & StrangersThe mark, the bond, the mission
Volume 0 — Section IIIVessels & StrangersThe mark, the bond, the mission
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Two words are central to understanding this story: Vessel and Stranger.
What is a Stranger?
A Stranger is a person from the Veil who has died — or is dying — and who carries a fragment of the Anchor of Return. The five Strangers in this story were each guardians of one of the five fragments, tasked with keeping their piece of the resurrection spell safe from the Ashen Court.
When a Stranger dies, their fragment does not die with them. It transfers — passing to the nearest living person, or in some cases to a person the Stranger deliberately chose. That person becomes the Vessel.
The Strangers are dead by the time Volume 1 begins. But dead does not mean gone. Each Stranger maintains a bond with their Vessel — a faint psychic thread that manifests as whispers, feelings, visions, and occasional overwhelming emotion. The Vessels can feel their Strangers. They cannot fully communicate with them. It is a relationship built on incomplete messages and a shared, desperate goal.
What is a Vessel?
A Vessel is a living person carrying a fragment of the Anchor of Return. The fragment embeds as a mark — a symbol that burns into the palm and sinks beneath the skin, invisible until it activates.
Being a Vessel changes a person in two ways. It gives them a power — a specific ability to interact with the Weave, unique to their fragment. And it connects them to their Stranger permanently, inescapably. The Vessel can feel their Stranger's urgency, grief, and need at all times.
Being a Vessel is not a gift. Most of the vessels in this story did not ask for the mark, did not understand what they were agreeing to, and are now in the middle of another world's crisis carrying the weight of someone else's unfinished business. What makes them interesting is what they choose to do with that weight.
☽The Anchor of ReturnThe spell that started everything
Volume 0 — Section IVThe Anchor of ReturnThe spell that started everything
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Everything in Between Two Deaths revolves around a single spell.
What It Is
The Anchor of Return is the only spell in the history of the Veil that can fully resurrect a person from death. Not partially — not a ghost, not a memory, not an echo. A complete restoration: soul, body, consciousness, everything.
It was created approximately three hundred years ago by a council of twelve of the greatest Spellweavers the Veil had ever produced. They spent decades working on it. When it was finished, they were so frightened by what they had made that they immediately split it into five fragments and distributed those fragments to five trusted guardians with a single instruction: never reunite them unless the need was absolute and the cost was understood.
The cost was agreed upon. It was documented. Then, over three hundred years, the documentation was lost — along with most of the people who remembered what it said.
The Five Fragments
Each fragment is a concentrated piece of the original spell. On its own, it cannot be used for anything except its single purpose. But embedded in a Vessel, it grants them a power — a specific interaction with the Weave that reflects the fragment's role in the larger spell.
The five powers — Pattern Sight, Severance, Veilstep, Echoing, Anchor Sense — are the five components the spell needs to function. The vessels are not just carrying the fragments. They are the mechanism.
The Cost
The Anchor of Return does not run on Weave energy. It runs on life-force. To bring someone back from death, it must take something living in
exchange — a soul for a soul.
The original design built in a failsafe: it would automatically draw from the weakest vessel present when it completed. The council considered this acceptable.
They were not the ones who would be dying.
There is another way. One that was only discovered much later, by someone who had two hundred years of nothing but time and a deep knowledge of the Weave. The vessels will learn all of this during Volume 1. Some of them sooner than others.
🜃The Ashen CourtThe enemy — and what they want
Volume 0 — Section VThe Ashen CourtThe enemy — and what they want
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Every story needs a force that opposes the protagonists. In Between Two Deaths, that force is the Ashen Court — and they are more complicated than most.
What They Are
The Ashen Court is a coalition of Spellweavers who believe that magic should not be shared. It should be controlled — held by those capable of wielding it responsibly, and kept from those who would misuse or dilute it.
This philosophy is not entirely wrong in the abstract. The problem is what the Ashen Court has done in service of it.
Over the past several decades, the Court has conducted a quiet campaign against the Veil's Commons. They have corrupted water-weaving systems that settlements depend on. They have killed or disappeared prominent Weavers who taught in the Commons. They have sealed Crossing Points to control who moves between worlds. They have been methodical, patient, and careful to ensure nothing they did looked like war until it was too late for anyone to mount a coherent response.
The Pale Architect
Nobody knows who the Pale Architect is. Even within the Ashen Court's upper ranks, the Architect communicates through intermediaries. Their voice has been heard. Their face has not been seen — or if it has, the people who saw it have not returned to describe it.
What is known: the Pale Architect is a Spellweaver of extraordinary ability, the originating mind behind the Court's philosophy, and has been operating for a very long time. Beneath the patience and the terrible efficiency, they are afraid of something. That fear is connected to the Anchor of Return.
The Hunters
The Hunters are the Pale Architect's most direct instrument — Spellweavers who gave up something essential about themselves in exchange for the ability to cross between worlds, track vessels, and move in ways that ordinary physics does not permit. Efficient. Relentless. Unsettling to be near. And if you look carefully enough at the right moment, still carrying traces of who they used to be.
◈Crossing PointsHow to fall between worlds
Volume 0 — Section VICrossing PointsHow to fall between worlds
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The two worlds are separated by a boundary — not a wall or a door, but something more like a membrane. Most of the time it holds. But in certain places, under certain conditions, it thins enough to tear. These places are called Crossing Points.
What Makes a Crossing Point
Crossing Points form where intense human emotion has soaked into a place over a long time. Grief. Fear. Desperate love. The kind of feeling that leaves a mark on the world even after the person feeling it is gone.
This is why Crossing Points cluster around abandoned hospitals, old graveyards, sites of accidents and disasters, buildings where people waited for news that never came good. The First World is full of them, because the First World is full of human pain.
Most people walk through or past Crossing Points every day without knowing. The boundary holds because it takes an additional force — a deliberate push from the Veil side, or the mark of a vessel — to actually tear it open.
What Crossing Feels Like
Crossing between worlds is not elegant. It is not stepping through a shimmering portal. It is the world tearing open and the person falling through the gap before it seals again.
The physical experience is disorienting and painful. Most people who cross for the first time land hard on the other side, struggle to breathe, and take several minutes to process what just happened. The Weave floods the senses — sight, sound, smell all feel heightened, wrong, overwhelming.
Every crossing takes something from the person who makes it. A small cost — fatigue, disorientation, a vague sense of loss that fades in a day. Repeated crossings accumulate this cost. The Hunters, who cross regularly, have paid a visible price: something in them has been smoothed away.
Crossing Back
Getting back to the First World is harder than arriving in the Veil. A new tear must be opened, which requires either a skilled Weaver or a vessel using their mark deliberately. This means the vessels cannot simply go home when things get difficult. Once you are in the Veil, you are there until you find a way out.