the world
Vael
/VAYL/
The name has no etymology within the world's lore — it is simply the name of the place, as old as the gods who made it. One syllable. Easy to say. Easy to mourn.
“a sentence with pieces missing”
The gods are gone. What they made remains — barely. You are the Arcanist: read the Facets, raise the Pillars, and answer the Aporia for as long as the world will hold.
The name has no etymology within the world's lore — it is simply the name of the place, as old as the gods who made it. One syllable. Easy to say. Easy to mourn.
The world as the gods wrote it — full, coherent, every thing true because the things before it were true. Not paradise. It did not end with catastrophe. It ended with the gods dying, slowly, under the weight of what they had made.
Not a being. Not a force with intent. A question — the gap the gods' argument could not close. It does not send the Echoes. It questions things until they stop being true, and what stops being true keeps moving.
The last self-evident truth in Vael. The point where the gods' argument is still so strong that the Aporia cannot yet find the seam to pull. The Arcanist did not build it. It simply remained.
Aphilosopher-combatant. Once a scholar — someone who studied the Facets and understood the world's argument from the inside. That life ended when the gods died and the Aporia spread further than faith or scholarship could hold.
What remained of that person became something harder: a defender who uses knowledge as a weapon rather than a relic. The grief is real. The choice is made anyway.
They are ancient — older than any text still in Vael. They cannot tell you how old. Most of what they have lived through they no longer remember, and they have noticed that the forgetting is not random. Holding the Facets is also a search.
The Arcanist reads the Facets the way the gods wrote them — as text, as argument. Every Pillar raised is a truth made structural. Every Facet spent is a paragraph turned into a weapon.
They are not keeping Vael in amber. They are fighting for what remains of it with the only tools available — even when those tools are the last fragments of what they are trying to save.
The skill tree is not training. It is memory returning. Every Truth learned was once known and is now found again — rebuilt through study and survival. Progression is recovery.
Carries a nullfield. Pillars within range fall silent — not destroyed, only unable to speak.
A bloom shield protects every Echo near it. AoE softens to a touch; chain-hits glance off.
A regeneration field stitches its fellows back together. Damage that does not finish them, does not last.
A slipstream pulls those around it forward. Slows soften; the Dasher itself cannot be slowed at all.
Imposes a freedom-field: those near it shrug off the first effect cast on them. The bearer itself is forever uncontrollable.
Heavy plating. Slow. Reads simply, demands answer.
A bottleneck made of flesh — fills the path, blocks the line.
Pure HP bulk. Four times what comes before it.
Steals confluence on death. Kill it cleanly, or kill it slowly — both cost.
Absorbs hits until the well runs dry. Poison and bleed go through.
A Giant that also regenerates. Endless only — never the campaign.
Wrote that endings are not destruction but clarification. The world becomes truer when what is finished is allowed to finish.
Wrote that loss is the cost of transformation. The thing that decays becomes the ground for what grows next.
Wrote that stillness is not absence but the held moment in which truth becomes visible.
Wrote the relationships between things, not the things themselves. The world holds because truths hold each other up.
Wrote that depth is not a quality but a precondition. Nothing of consequence is shallow.
Poison bypasses armor entirely, and reduces target max HP permanently for the wave.
Splash explosions apply slow to every enemy in radius — the rupture and the held moment, together.
Confluence leech multiplied by the number of active Facet Pillars within three tiles.
Crits apply a bleed stack; at three stacks the enemy explodes on death, dealing AoE damage.
Confluence leech per kill increases for every ten kills already banked this wave.
Amplification bonus scales with maximum confluence pool capacity. Depth makes the network louder.
Suppressed and frozen enemies below 15% HP shatter outright — Eirene's argument completed.
Two Greater Truths sharing at least one component, combined at grade twelve or higher, produce an Ascendant Truth — the seam of the original proof where two gods' arguments intersected. The rarest light Vael still holds.
Splash explosions apply armor-ignoring poison, slow every enemy in radius, and strip armor from everything hit. The Aporia's silences spoken back in full.
Confluence leech scales simultaneously with kills this wave, nearby Pillars, AND pool capacity. All three multipliers stack.
an argument made structural
Holds Facets and channels them outward. Without a Facet, it is silent — no Facet, no shot.
light without aim
Casts effects in radius without targeting. Its strength is in placement, never aim.
a truth pressed into the path
Embedded directly into the path. The Echoes cannot avoid them. Every crossing is contact.
concentrates adjacent truths
No combat function of its own. Pure Synne energy — makes the arguments around it burn brighter.
the rupture, accumulated
Gathers charge from nearby Pillar shots. When the threshold is reached, releases it all — armor-ignoring.
not this way
Redirects. Does not destroy, does not damage, does not slow. Simply insists: not here.
the last self-evident truth
The defended object. Not built — it simply remained. If it falls, the last answer falls with it.
Spend a smaller truth to reach a greater one.
Sacrificing a Facet to the confluence pool destroys it permanently — and grants three lasting deepenings of the world. The Facet does not return. The depth does. The deeper the pool runs, the more of the gods' argument the Arcanist can speak.
Choose the question before the question chooses you.
Five traits, three levels each, selected before the run starts. Traits do not sprinkle bonus stats across the Echoes — they introduce entire new wave types into the rotation, and at higher levels, pure waves composed of nothing else. Every level chosen is a louder argument, and a larger XP reward for surviving it.
Every Pillar has nine ways to see the field.
Each Pillar carries a priority — the way it reads which Echo to fire on. Set it on placement and switch it mid-wave when the field changes. When a single threat demands every Pillar's attention, click any Echo on the battlefield: every Pillar in range locks to it instantly, overriding their set priority until the kill or the click that releases them.
Spend a smaller truth to provoke a greater one.
The Arcanist drops a Facet into an incoming wave — a piece of a god's argument fed directly into the Aporia's current. The Aporia cannot ignore a truth placed in its path. The response is fiercer. The Echoes come harder, with the kind of threat the spent Facet's god embodied. The defeat generates deeper confluence than the Facet was worth — if you survive.
One week. One seed. One attempt. Every Arcanist plays the same ground.
At the start of each week a single battlefield is generated server-side and given to every Arcanist alive. The same seed. The same Facet locks. The same curse waves. The same modifiers. One attempt — no retries, no second readings of the question. Your score sits among everyone who answered it that week.
Every record becomes a challenge. Every challenge can be Exceeded.
When a record is set, the snapshot is preserved — the maze the Arcanist built, the Truths they held, the Refutation tier they reached. Other Arcanists see it, and have two choices. Exceed: start from that Refutation profile pre-loaded as a floor, and go further. Play it Free: blank slate, own strategy. Facet builds are never shown — what powered the record stays private. What's preserved is the argument, not the answer.
In rhetoric, an eclipsis is a deliberate omission — a gap where something has been left out, implied rather than stated. Vael is a sentence with pieces missing.
As old as the gods who made it. Short, slightly hollow — the sound of something that was once full and is now less so.
The age before. The world as the gods wrote it — full, coherent, every thing true because the things before it were true.
A question that cannot be resolved. Socrates led his students to aporia as the beginning of inquiry. Here, the question has been given will.
A self-evident truth that requires no proof. The ground on which all other arguments are built. In Vael — the last such ground.
One face of a cut stone, one surface of something that has many sides. Each Facet is one face of a god's argument, still burning with the logic of creation.
The flow of residual god-logic through Vael. Where rivers meet is a confluence; where the gods' arguments touched, the current still pools.
To disprove with counter-evidence. The Arcanist drops a Facet into a wave — a truth placed in the Aporia's path. The response is fiercer. The cost is real.
Eclipsis is in active development — a solo project, built deliberately. What you see on these pages is the world bible: the foundation the game is being shaped against, sentence by sentence and system by system.
Below is where the build actually is today. For the longer account — every dispatch, every change, what came before this — the full devlog lives at its own folio.
The full loop walks. Place Pillars, socket Facets, hold The Axiom against twenty waves — then keep holding, into Endless.
Eclipsis is a dark fantasy tower defense, a spiritual successor to GemCraft, being made in the open. The Steam page goes up when the work is far enough along to deserve one — until then, the devlog is the place to follow along.