There is another world, and it’s right next door to our own. If you go up onto the roofs, and run them like the rats do, you’ll find them getting closer and closer together until they merge; until you can’t see the houses beneath them any longer; and if you keep going, you’ll eventually reach these whole landscapes on the rooftops, strange fairylands, magical gardens, inexplicable towers, and all manner of wonders, and out there is where most of the monsters—the “Mysteries”—that the rats deal with reside.
I don’t know why this is there. I wish I did.

The Far Roofs

... what can I tell you of the Mysteries?
The rats keep books on them—stories, notes, and thoughts on them—and even so they know little more than do you. Hoop Snake lures you into following it. Sphinx scrawls riddles on the walls. Unicorn dissolves you with its presence: the moment of its existence is so timeless and real that you fade away before it like a dream. Hedge the Fang lives at the edge of the world and shapes the sea and the endless sky.

The Far Roofs

You feel it, and you can’t leave it alone. Of course you couldn’t. Nobody could. It’s like that feeling that makes people investigate spooky sounds in haunted houses, climb random cliffs, fall in love with new people, explore art galleries, or follow up on a scientific experiment’s unexpected results. It’s a summoning mystery unto you: it twists up your stomach in anticipation, terror, or delight.
You have to understand it. You have to explore it. You’re afraid of it, and yet you’re drawn to it.
Your heart—it’s in your heart. You have to know.

The Far Roofs

… you’ll just look at them, and they’ll look at you, and then they’ll grin with their little rat teeth and say, “Come on, then.”
You’ll climb up.

The Far Roofs

Eventually you will get used to it, of course. Eventually you must get used to it, if you spend time with the rats. Eventually you will feel totally at home with your shoes slipped off and the tiles of a good roof under your feet. Eventually you’ll turn into some kind of connoisseur of the rooftops, able to admire a well-turned gable, discourse on the warmth and breakability of terracotta, and giggle when you encounter a balcony railing, because, seriously? Railings? Who’d fall off of a balcony?
At first, though, it is probably quite strange.

The Far Roofs

“Come on, then,” he said.
Come on, then. I looked at the wall blankly. I looked up at the roof. I brushed at the hem of my skirt.
“It’s not much of a calling,” Evans said, “if it won’t get you up the wall.”

The Far Roofs:
”The King of Shadows”

The rats’ll tell you that Karme Kaoru fought here with the Mystery named Salamander, aka “Indiscretion;” it unleashed a terrible fire, but she caught it up, transformed it, and used it to re-fire the terracotta of the rooftop tiles. Ever since, they’ve been indestructible, like rat-gum-treated rooftops, and just a little bit warmer than you would think they’d be.

The Far Roofs

In the central cote of Wingmaidens’ Reach live the seven ternmays, rat heroines cursed by Malambruno to adopt the skins and wings of terns.

The Far Roofs

One interesting feature of the rats’ native language is that the word “blind” refers equally well to losing the speaker’s primary sense, or the listener’s primary sense. If you stop up a rat’s sense of smell, the rat will say, “I’m blind!” (I have lost my primary sense!) Conversely, if you blindfold them, they may report blindness, or they may say something inexplicable like “My eyes have gone deaf” or “I can no longer use my eyes to see.” This is further complicated by the rats’ nominal immunity to the curse of Babel; c.f. Matthews, Lloyd and Neall, Henrietta Undifferentiated Bidialectal Syntax and the Afferent Metahuman Self, Applied Linguistics, Volume 40, Issue 4, September 2017.

The Far Roofs

Some things you might do when the characters cross the boundary to the Far Roofs:

• ask them about the roofs where the change happens—the shape and the material, the feel, the view

• ask them about the weather at the moment when they cross

• ask them about the sky

• if they turn questions back on you, encourage them to mark Being There or Wonder

• for animate landmarks, ask them about how real the actual point of transition is—if they pass through Vikenti Haru’s statue, for instance, is it a statue? A bunch of buildings that look sort of like Vikenti Haru? A bunch of buildings that cast a shadow at a certain hour shaped like a rat? A random roof’s shadow that people say is Vikenti Haru’s? …

  The Far Roofs