✅ This article contains no spoilers. It's cosmology and geography — read on.
"Between the deep and the high, all things must negotiate their place."
— Common Midland saying
Trion is the name for the known world in its entirety — a word drawn from an ancient tongue meaning, roughly, three-fold. The name reflects the world's most fundamental truth: it is not one realm but three, stacked vertically, each inhabited by a distinct people, each operating by different laws of politics, culture, and magic. The surface, the sky, and the deep are not metaphors in Trion. They are geography.
The full extent of the world is unknown. Exploration is limited by the reach of current technology, the dangers of open sky and deep earth, and strange zones where magical fields make navigation unreliable. At the time of Book 1, no civilisation has mapped more than a fraction of any realm. How large Trion is, what lies at its edges, and what — if anything — connects the three realms at their extremities are questions without answers.
The surface of the world: coastlines and hill towns, open steppe, mountain ranges, river valleys, and the warm inland seas that give the known portions of the Midrealm their Mediterranean character. This is the domain of the Midfolk — humans — and the setting most familiar to anyone who begins Wingless in the Sky from ground level. The climate is warm, the landscape lush, and the sky above it very much occupied.
Gravity on the surface is approximately ten to fifteen percent lower than one might expect, which over millennia has produced fauna that trend larger and more airborne than strictly necessary — harbour gulls the size of geese, pelicans approaching pterodactyl proportions, and a general ecosystem in which flight is the dominant mode of locomotion.
→ See: Midland Empire, Maritana
Beginning roughly seven miles above the surface, the atmosphere changes. The air warms — paradoxically, given the altitude — entering a thick belt of aether where floating islands of stone and cloud hang in equilibrium and the sky cities of the Highfolk are anchored by their Cores. Gravity in the Highrealm is approximately thirty-five percent lower than on the surface, which partly explains how creatures with four large wings can sustain cities in the air, and partly explains Highfolk physiology: tall, lean, built for a world where falling is rarely fatal.
The Highrealm is not a continuous inhabited zone — it is a belt of habitable altitude, above which the air thins again into empty sky. The floating cities are islands within it, separated by open distances that require days of flight or ship travel to cross.
→ See: Highfolk, Aeloria, Tross, Zelos, Heart Magic, City Cores
Below the surface, accessed through chasms and vertical shafts that plunge through the bedrock, lies the Deeprealm — a vast subterranean world whose full extent is unknown even to those who live in it. The Deepfolk have inhabited it for as long as their records reach, building cities in caverns lit by bioluminescent growth and powered by their techno-magical engineering. The Deeprealm operates by its own logic: no sky, no weather, no seasons, vast reserves of mineral wealth, and a civilisation that has had very little reason to go up.
Fringe theories among surface scholars — largely dismissed by the mainstream but quietly taken seriously by a few — suggest the Deeprealm is not simply underground but constitutes a genuinely alternative interior world, with its own topology and possibly its own light sources. The Deepfolk do not discuss the matter with outsiders.
→ See: Deepfolk
Each realm has produced a dominant people, though the correspondences are not perfect and the boundaries are not absolute.
The Midfolk (humans) inhabit the surface. They are the most numerous, the most politically organised in the conventional sense, and the most willing to deal with the other races — partly by temperament and partly by necessity. The Midland Empire is the dominant human power. Midfolk practise mind magic through the scholarly traditions of the Mage Conclave.
The Highfolk are a winged people of the sky, divided into city-states that share a culture and language while competing fiercely in politics and ideology. Celestials (four-winged) hold the top of an internally stratified hierarchy; two-wings (two-winged) occupy lower rungs. Highfolk practise heart magic, emotion-based and instinctive. They depend on Midrealm trade for food.
The Deepfolk are a stocky, grey-skinned people of stone and forge, organised by clan rather than city-state. Their techno-magical engineering — steam-powered, gear-driven, bound into devices rather than individuals — gives them capabilities neither surface nor sky can replicate. They rarely ascend. Their reasons are their own.
Inter-racial contact exists — trade, diplomacy, occasional conflict — but cultural barriers are high and inter-racial relationships of any intimate kind are rare enough to become historically significant when they occur.
→ See: Highfolk, Deepfolk, Midland Empire
The known world is politically fragmented across all three realms.
On the surface, the Midland Empire is the dominant human power — vast, bureaucratic, held together by a combination of military reach, economic control, and the pragmatic genius of Empress Maren De Valoren. The Empire's official position is that the entire surface belongs to it by right; the practical reality is more complicated.
In the sky, the Highfolk city-states operate as independent polities sharing culture but not governance. Major powers include Aeloria (wealthy, cosmopolitan, ruling house Solanthis), Zelos (militarist, purist, currently in a tense ceasefire with Aeloria), and Tross (radically egalitarian, rapidly growing in military and diplomatic influence). Several smaller cities occupy positions of varying neutrality.
Below, the Nine Clans of the Deepfolk maintain internal autonomy and strict neutrality toward surface and sky — though recent decades have seen cautious diplomatic overtures, particularly from Tross.
→ See: Midland Empire, Aeloria, Tross, Zelos, Deepfolk
The three realms have produced distinct religious traditions and magical systems, broadly corresponding to their peoples.
The Imperial Creed is the dominant human faith — monotheistic, institutionalised, in a long and complicated coexistence with the Empire. The Mage Conclave operates in parallel, holding that knowledge and study, not faith, are the highest pursuits. The tension between the two is ancient and ongoing.
Highfolk theology centres on the First to Fly — a divine ancestor-figure credited with giving wings to his people and establishing the hierarchy of feathers. Wing-count is understood as a reflection of divine favour. Heart magic, which Highfolk practise, is considered a sacred gift. The reformist Origin faith, strongest in Tross, disputes this reading and holds older texts that suggest the world was not always divided as it now is.
Deepfolk belief is the least understood by outsiders. What little has been gathered — through rare moments of cultural exchange and careful inference — points to the worship of a Forge-God: not a metaphor or a divine craftsman in the conventional sense, but a literally sentient divine forge, a conscious creative fire at the root of existence. Whether this is a god who takes the form of a forge or a forge that is itself god is a distinction Deepfolk scholars have not found it useful to explain to surface questioners. Possibly both. Possibly neither. Clan variations exist and outsiders are not typically invited to investigate further.
Magic in Trion follows the realms in broad outline: human mind magic is scholarly and incantation-based; Highfolk heart magic is instinctive and emotion-driven; Deepfolk techno-magic is bound into engineered devices. Each system has different strengths, different costs, and different philosophical assumptions about what magic fundamentally is.
→ See: Heart Magic, Heart Bond, Highfolk, Midland Empire, Deepfolk
The structure of Trion — surface, sky, underground — draws on the universal mythological pattern of Upper, Middle and Lower worlds found across human cultures. The author's intention was to take this pattern and make it practical rather than symbolic: if three such realms genuinely existed and were inhabited, what would the economic and political consequences actually be?
The most generative question proved to be food. A civilisation in the sky cannot farm at altitude — it must buy food from the surface. That single dependency creates leverage, vulnerability, resentment, and an entire web of trade relationships and political tensions that run through the series. The Highrealm's cultural contempt for the Midfolk it considers inferior sits alongside a structural dependency it cannot escape. The Deeprealm's isolation has different causes but produces similar tensions in the other direction.
The gravity differential between realms — lighter on the surface than a comparable Earth, lighter still in the aether — was added to make the physical reality of the world feel grounded, and to provide a material basis for why Highfolk bodies and architecture developed as they did.
This article is about Cosmology — The World Structure
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| The Peoples | Highfolk · Deepfolk · Human / Empire |
| Related | The Three Races |