Character
19Almira Finch
A physician who has lost more patients to scabbies than to the invasion
The coalition's physician, and before that a frontier doctor who spent fifteen years watching scabbies take people she could not help. She i…
Cutter Boyle
The man who raided the homestead, riding in the coalition under Wayne's code
Cutter Boyle led the unsanctioned cell that hit the West family homestead twenty years ago. He is now a respected raider in the coalition, o…
Della
West's mother, holding a farm that everyone keeps leaving
West's mother, and the person actually running the homestead, before East died and after. She married a man who talked about the west and sh…
East
The father whose dream became his son's inheritance and his wound
East was a homesteading farmer who never once set foot in the country he spent his life describing. Everything he knew of the west came seco…
Ekari
A war leader who negotiated the alliance and expects to regret it
One of the leaders who brought his people into the coalition, and the man who wrote the terms. Ekari did not join an alliance. He concluded…
Ema
A mixed-heritage survivor caught between worlds, running from her past toward an uncertain future
Ema is a woman of mixed heritage—the daughter of a cowboy frontier settler and a member of a Native American tribe. She is strong, stubborn,…
Ema's Father
A settler who went west and left the proof of himself behind
A cowboy and frontier settler who took up with a woman of the tribe, fathered a daughter, and left. He is defined in this story entirely by…
Ema's Mother
A woman who could not look at her daughter without seeing the man who left
A woman of the tribe who fell in love with a frontier settler, bore his child, and was left to raise that child among people who had warned…
General Elias Corbin
The officer who has to hand his war to people he was authorized to hang
Brigadier General Elias Corbin commands what is left of the territorial army, which is four understrength companies, a supply depot he canno…
Generals/Military leaders
Career officers commanding a war their training does not describe
The military contingent of the coalition consists of officers from scattered garrisons and campaigns, men who arrived on the frontier with a…
Reverend Simeon Pike
A preacher whose theology did not survive first contact
A circuit preacher who served a dozen settlements before the sky opened and now travels with the coalition, performing a function nobody has…
Sheriff Hollis Gaines
A lawman keeping a ledger he intends to settle after the war
Sheriff of a county that no longer meaningfully exists, and the senior lawman in the coalition. Gaines is the man the alliance sends when tw…
South
The sibling who stayed, and was never asked
West's younger sister, named by a father who gave his children directions instead of names and clearly intended to go in one of them. She wa…
Tsaya
The scout the coalition depends on and does not consult
The finest scout in the coalition and the person most responsible for the fact that it still exists. Tsaya moves through country the invader…
Vahl
The commander who replaced Zeem and understands nothing she found
The ranking commander of the invasion after Zeem's death, and the purest expression of the species that produced it. Where Zeem was a resear…
Wayne Anderson
The bandit king who keeps a code he is too large to enforce
Wayne Anderson commands the largest criminal organization on the frontier and spends most of his authority trying to keep it from becoming w…
West
A frontier dreamer haunted by childhood trauma and the weight of his father's legacy
West is a cowboy driven by his father's stories of the western frontier—tales of mountains, ocean, and the freedom to build whatever one des…
Xee
The Alien Enforcer
Xee is the deadly enforcer and lieutenant of the alien invasion force—the relentless hunter tasked with eliminating threats to the invasion'…
Zeem
The commander who learned affection from human movies and taught it to a killer
Zeem was the head of research for the invasion and one of its ranking commanders. Her assignment was to study the species occupying the targ…
Creatures
1The Beast
What Xee's mother fed him to, and what it explains
A predator of Xee's homeworld, and the animal his mother handed him to as a child on the entirely rational grounds that she could produce mo…
fifteen years of frontier practice, largely against scabbies
— Almira Finch
Races & Cultures
1Coalition Signals
How five peoples who cannot talk to each other run a war
The coalition operates across at least four languages, several mutually unintelligible dialects of frontier English, and a set of profession…
Location
8Ardent Wells
The town that became a capital because it had water
A middling frontier town of no previous importance that became the coalition's de facto capital for one reason: reliable water, in quantity,…
Canyon Country
Broken ground where the coalition can still be invisible
The canyon systems of the middle frontier: a region of deep cuts, blind draws, and side channels that the coalition converts into its primar…
Fort Calloway
Corbin's garrison, and a monument to the wrong war
The territorial army post Elias Corbin commands, built two decades ago to project force against the Nations and now sheltering their fighter…
The Council Ground
Neutral ground, chosen by the only party with experience of treaties
The site where the coalition's terms were negotiated and signed, several hours ride from Ardent Wells. Its selection was Ekari's condition a…
The Homestead
The farm where West learned what he believes about himself
The West family homestead: a working farm on the eastern edge of the frontier, prosperous enough in appearance to be worth robbing and margi…
The Landing
Where the sky opened, and nothing has grown since
The primary alien site on the frontier, and the point from which the invasion spread. Nobody in the coalition has been inside it. Four exped…
The Promised Land
The west as East described it, and whatever is actually out there
The destination. Mountains, ocean, freedom to build whatever a person wants, and gold running in the veins of the earth. It exists in this s…
The Salt Flats
Open country where the coalition cannot be, and has to cross anyway
A wide pan of alkali flat lying between the canyon systems and the western routes. It is flat, bright, waterless, and completely without con…
original residents hosting an armed alliance they did not invite
— Ardent Wells
Factions & Groups
7Alien Species (Xee's people)
A civilization that solved survival by removing everything that made it worth surviving
The invaders are an old, disciplined, technologically superior civilization organized around a single principle: the continuation of the spe…
Bandits
Outlaws who turn out to have been training for this war their whole lives
The outlaw contingent of the coalition is not one organization but many: road agents, rustlers, deserters, remnants of gangs whose territori…
Homesteaders and Settlers
The people the war is fought over and around, who signed nothing
The civilian population of the frontier: farming families, small ranchers, merchants, and the towns they supply. They are the largest group…
Native American tribes and peoples
Sovereign nations entering the alliance on their own terms, and not for the first time
The tribal nations of the frontier enter the coalition as the only member that is not improvising. They are peoples with existing government…
Sheriffs
The law, holding an authority that now depends entirely on consent
The lawmen of the frontier territories: sheriffs, marshals, and deputies whose jurisdictions were rendered meaningless within a month. They…
The Coalition
An alliance with no name for itself, held together by arithmetic
The joint body formed by the territorial army, the frontier law, the Eastern Bandits and independent outlaws, the tribal nations, and whatev…
The Eastern Bandits
A large, organized criminal empire with a strict moral code
The Eastern Bandits operate as a large, organized criminal empire spread across the frontier. Despite their size, the organization is decent…
Artifacts & Relics
2East's Rifles
The guns an eight-year-old did not bring
Two rifles kept in the house at the West homestead. On the night of the raid, East called for them and his son did not move. They are the mo…
Zeem's Archive
A dead alien's collection of human films, scheduled for disposal
The body of human material Zeem assembled during the pre-invasion study: recordings, films, and the annotations she made while working out w…
presents as a skin complaint, progresses inward over weeks
— Scabbies
Belief Systems
2After the Sky Opened
What the frontier believes now that catastrophe has arrived without a message
The frontier's religious life did not survive the invasion intact, and what has replaced it is not one thing. The Sky Opening presented ever…
The Code
A criminal ethics that outperforms the law it competes with
The body of rules governing the Eastern Bandits, authored and enforced by Wayne Anderson. It is not a pose. It is a functioning ethical syst…
Events
5Scabbies
The frontier disease that was killing people long before the sky opened
Scabbies is a wasting sickness endemic to the frontier settlements, common enough that most families have buried someone to it and ordinary…
The Council at Ardent Wells
Three days that produced a treaty nobody fully wanted
The negotiation that formed the coalition, conducted at the Council Ground outside Ardent Wells over three days, roughly two months after th…
The Death of Zeem
The most justified killing in the story, and its worst outcome
West and Ema kill Zeem, the invasion's head of research and its ranking field commander. It is a legitimate act of war against a senior enem…
The Homestead Raid
Four minutes that built a man
The unsanctioned raid by a cell of the Eastern Bandits on the West family homestead, twenty years before the invasion. Nobody died. It is th…
The Sky Opening
The arrival, which came with no message
The beginning of the invasion, named by settlers rather than by anyone official, and referred to by every faction in the same words. It is t…
Lore & Foundations
2The Frontier Under Siege
When the Old West collides with an alien invasion, survival demands unity
The world exists in the grip of a brutal alien invasion that has fundamentally transformed survival on the frontier. The aliens are not peac…
The War So Far
The shape of the conflict from the Sky Opening to the present
From the Sky Opening through roughly the fifth week. Territorial authority ends, communications fail, and the initial band of settlements is…
Story Structure
1The Road West
The middle of the story, from the meeting to the Salt Flats
The stretch of story between West leaving the homestead and the coalition's present equilibrium. It is where the two protagonists meet, beco…
Scene
5Scene — After Zeem
The night they are congratulated
Ardent Wells, the evening after word arrives. The largest gathering the coalition has permitted itself since the Council, and the only unamb…
Scene — The Meeting
Two strangers decide the other is worth the risk
Open country, roughly a third of the way west, some weeks after the Sky Opening. Both of them have been alone long enough to have stopped ta…
Scene — The Second Night on the Flats
The crossing where the rule is that you do not turn back
The Salt Flats, second of the three nights. Dispersed crossing, small parties, no fires, no mutual support. The doctrine is Tsaya's and it i…
Scene — What She Told Him at the Fire
The exchange of the two lies, neither of them recognised as a lie
A cold camp, deep in the journey, before the coalition. The first night either of them has felt safe enough to be bored.
Scene — What Xee Sees
The enforcer lets them go
The end. Circumstances open, and they should stay open until the route to the promised land is decided.
Custom Entries
2Alien Technology
Weapons that do not threaten, because there is no one to threaten
The invaders' technology is superior in every dimension the frontier can measure and several it cannot. What unsettles people most is not it…
West and Ema
Two people who each left first, convinced they are the one who gets left
This is the story's central relationship and it runs on a mechanism neither of them can see. West's entire self-concept requires him to leav…