The cosmology
Two Earths, one veil
Earth 1
Zalian's realm
Order · Law · Purity
Zalian built Earth 1 and populated it with pure humans, unmixed with anything else. She guides them at a distance, through dreams and through what they say aloud, and she does not enter a mind uninvited. Her people have never known there is another sky.
Earth 2
Balian's realm
Chaos · Will · Hybridity
Balian walked out and took followers with him. What they built on Earth 2 is the Virden — humans and fallen angels mixed together, living in permanent upheaval. Balian lives among them physically. Suffering made them fast: they outran Earth 1 by millennia.
The Barrier
What separates the two worlds is not a wall. It is the air. Zalian set the atmospheres of the two Earths against each other, so that a pure human breathing Virden air dies, and a pure Virden breathing human air dies. No fleet crosses that. No weapon solves it.
It has exactly one flaw. A being carrying DNA from both sides can breathe in either world — and across deep time, two of those came into existence by accident. That is the entire story.
