Reading Tiers
Fian Ilchruinne is one record published at four depths. A reading tier is a readership — who the pages are for, which storylines they carry, and how much of the record they show. The tiers nest: each carries everything the one below it carries, and adds its own. Nothing read on a lower rung is withdrawn or contradicted on a higher one. This page says what each tier holds and where to find it.
The edition you are reading, Fian Ilchruinne, is built at the general tier.
Threads, tiers and editions
Three words do the work on this site, and they nest the way the tiers do.
- A thread is a storyline. It is a set of whole seasons that read as one story, and every season belongs to exactly one thread. Eight are registered — the Founding Era, Tissadelle Shepherd's Arc, Undercover Pets, Orbital Five-O, Young Star Rangers, Below the Roof, The Infinite Castle and the Timeless Library, and Church Space — and the Threads page lists the ones the address you are on can see.
- A tier is a readership, and it is defined by which threads it carries. The children's tier carries two; each rung above carries everything below it and adds its own. A tier is a floor, not a ceiling: an edition on it may show more than the tier's threads, never fewer. The rungs order reading level, protagonists and depth, and nothing else: no tier is a rating, and none ranks a reader, a people or a mind.
- An edition is one address with a face of its own — a name, a palette, a tagline, a cast on the front page, a sound. Every edition sits on one tier and carries at least that tier's threads. A tier may hold more than one edition: the young-adult tier has two, and the contemplative tier has one for each of its orders. Editions can be added within a tier whenever a face, a page set or an institution warrants one, on a subdomain if the domains run out. The tiers are four, and are not expected to grow.
Inside a thread the units get smaller. A thread is made of seasons, a season of episodes, an episode of chapters, and a chapter of scenes seen from more than one viewpoint. Within a single season the story may also run as two strands: parallel storylines with separate casts and no shared scenes, each complete on its own, meeting at a point fixed before either was written. Season 1 is the model — the Threshold Station survey team on one strand, the Marsh Causeway on the other, and the two converging at the causeway. A strand is a way of reading a season, not a setting on the site: no address shows one strand without the other. And a character's arc — Tissadelle Shepherd's, say — is a trajectory through many seasons, not a reading path of its own.
The ladder
Four rungs, bottom to top. Each one names the reader it is for, how it reads, the storylines it adds to the rung below, and the address that serves it. The registers escalate in permission rather than in seriousness: a playful rung is not a shallow one, and a questioning rung is not a grim one. Every reader has a body their own size in the room: an animal for the child, a raw Deputy for the young adult, the middle-aged and the aliens for the general reader, and the oldest — and the cast in their later years — for the contemplative one.
1 · Children
How it reads: interesting and playful. Short scenes, plain words, and a story to be enjoyed rather than decoded.
Undercover Pets, Season 2: the Undercover Pets Detective Agency and the animals around it, written in short scenes and plain words. The bottom of the ladder, and complete in itself.
Beside it on this rung: Below the Roof, Seasons 11 and 12 — the Pandoids of Fliade from inside their own deep networks, the record's first storyline carried by a non-human cast. Two complete seasons, each told in two strands.
Where: two doors, each its own face, both in large type with a reading plan of their own. undercover-pets.com carries the agency. told.fianilchruinne.com carries Below the Roof beside it, and opens with that thread's first chapter. The tier carries both storylines; each door shows the one it is named for.
2 · Young adult
How it reads: more mysterious, with a sense of exploration and adventure. The reader goes out into the record and finds things.
Adds Orbital Five-O, Seasons 4 and 10 — the Governor's Investigative Task Force — and Young Star Rangers, Season 9 — Cadets and Deputies in their first field postings. The young-adult reader's proxy is a raw Deputy or trainee; older characters appear here as the people who have seen it all before, unless the chronology makes them young at the right time, as it does for Tissadelle Shepherd's cadet year.
Where: two doors, each its own face. starquest.site carries Orbital Five-O and the pets. young.fianilchruinne.com carries Young Star Rangers beside them, and opens with that thread's first chapter. The tier carries both storylines; each door shows the one it is named for.
3 · General
How it reads: deeper. The same record with its reasons under it — the institutions, the cost of a decision, and the Lore and Codex standing behind a chapter.
Adds the main sequence: the Founding Era, Season 0, and Tissadelle Shepherd's Arc, Seasons 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7 — Cadet to Line Captain to the Last Stand — together with the Lore, the Codex, the Atlas and the Timeline that sit behind it. The middle-aged carry this tier, and so do the aliens.
Where: fianilchruinne.com, the canonical address, which shows every public page of the record; sciencefiction.site, the same tier at its original address; and dermot-r-cochran.github.io/star-rangers, built from the public repository.
4 · Contemplative
How it reads: free to question everything, the record's own premises included. Questioning is not contradicting: a question asked on this rung takes nothing back from the ones below it.
Adds Church Space, Season 8 — devotional reading kept beside the shared record — and the pages of the orders that keep it. This is the only tier that holds the whole record. It may also carry additional viewpoint scenes in any chapter of any storyline: a character sitting with an event after it has happened. Those scenes are simply absent on every lower tier, and no chapter depends on them. The oldest characters belong here, and the existing cast in their later years.
Where: two orders, two addresses. fellowshipoflight.org is the Fellowship of Light's edition; church-space.site is the Communion of the Called's. Both are set for slow reading. A third address, fellowshipoflight.site, is the Fellowship's comparative archive: a shelf at this tier rather than a reading edition, and it stands outside the ladder on purpose.
What nesting means
- Climbing loses nothing. A reader who moves up a rung keeps every chapter they had and gains the ones above. The pets are on the young-adult sites; the pets and the task force are on the general sites; all of it is on the contemplative ones.
- Every chapter is complete at every tier. A scene the contemplative tier adds may deepen a chapter, reflect on it or witness it, but the plot never depends on it. The "View from" buttons on a chapter show only the viewpoints the tier you are reading carries, so the buttons and the page always agree.
- The canonical site is at the general tier. It shows everything public and keeps the Church Space thread aside by design, so the contemplative editions are the one complete view, and that is intended.
- A tier is not a page style. The Reading control in the header changes type size, measure and density, and you can set it on any address. The tier decides what is on the shelf; the control decides how the shelf is lit.
What does not change
The canon is identical on every address. A tier narrows what a domain shows, or adds reading to it, and an edition frames it — a name, a palette, a tagline, a cast on the front page — but no edition can assert anything the others deny. A page a tier does not carry still exists at its own address as a placeholder that points at the edition which does, so no link from any tier ever leads nowhere. The full list of official addresses, including aliases, is on the Official Editions page.
Choosing a rung
There is no wrong door. Start at the tier that fits the reader in the chair, and climb when you want more of the record than that rung shows — nothing you have read will be taken back. The Reading Plan on any address says where its own first chapter is, and the Threads page lists every storyline the address you are on can see.