Wyrdpools

Wyrdpools are standing concentrations of unstable residual magic. The scholarly consensus (a diegetic guess, not a proof) is that residual wild magic, having nowhere to go as the great enchantments fail, gathers in low places and recombines with whatever it finds there. What comes out of that recombination is never predictable and rarely benign.

They wear a hundred faces. Travellers report water gone unnaturally viscous, with a faint bioluminescence that persists in daylight. Moss patches with growth rates that no local botanist can account for. Reflective surfaces (puddles, standing basins, wet stone) that show the viewer a version of themselves distorted in ways they cannot look at for long. Dark, putrid patches on the ground where nothing grows and the smell will not wash out of cloth. Metallic-flecked puddles that flow uphill in slow, deliberate rivulets. And, at the rarer end, radiant pools that shine with colour reflecting light which is not present in the surrounding landscape. No single sign is definitive. A pool that looks like nothing may still be a pool. This is why the cordon markers exist.

The cordon markers are the first thing children in the affected regions learn, before letters, before numbers. A whitewashed post with a red band means a suspected pool within two hundred paces; two bands means confirmed; three bands means confirmed and lethal. Every region has its own additions (painted stones in Marusthali, bone-and-cord fetishes in Haritkshetra, cast-iron plaques in Pittalpradesha), but the meaning of the bands is stable across the continent, because it has to be. A traveller who cannot read the local script must still be able to read the fence.

Inside the cordons: abandoned steadings whose owners left in a week or died in an hour. Livestock culled by scared neighbours before they wandered too far. Harvests burned in fields whose drainage ran toward a pool nobody had marked yet. There is a class of person (contract mappers, salvagers; "boundary work" is the polite term) who go inside the lines because a family needs the wages and the family knows what the work costs. And on the outer edge of every settlement near a known pool, there are the wards. Small houses, sometimes only rooms, where the slowly-changing are nursed by relatives who cannot help them and cannot leave them alone. These are quiet places. The people inside them are quiet, mostly, at first.

Each region handles pools according to its temperament. Ísvaktar documentation is distant and rigorous: the archive at Iskfjendar records every pool ever found in Uttaragiri, catalogued by discovery date, marker type, and current status, and shares its findings freely with any regional government that asks. Nexipol's approach in Pittalpradesha is more aggressive — specialised facilities study the infected, categorise strains of change, and quietly recruit those whose mutation renders them useful. The Dun'elfata trade pool-maps between clans at prices that startle outsiders, because a good pool-map is worth a season's water. And in the Haritkshetra marshes, the Murelf shamans do something older: they guide the changing through it, when it can be guided, as an initiation rather than a disease.

See also: Wyrdshaping, and the field compendium for wildlife known to have adapted to sustained pool exposure.

Wyrdshaping

The disease is called Svarupaparivartana-Roga in the old scholarly registers — "the sickness of shape-changing." Everyone else calls it the wyrdshaping, or just the shaping, or, in the Haritkshetra dialect, "the turning." The vector is contact: prolonged exposure to a wyrdpool, or physical contact with a person or animal already in advanced transformation. Casual proximity is not enough. Casual proximity is usually not enough.

The incubation is the horror. Fifteen to thirty days between exposure and any symptom the sufferer can feel. During that window the sufferer is fully themselves, fully lucid, fully capable of infecting anyone they touch and of walking home and holding their child. Then the body starts fighting.

The social machinery around the shaping is worse than the shaping itself, and this is the argument that runs through every regional debate about how to handle it. Registration regimes. Worn identification markers — a bronze band on the wrist in Pittalpradesha, a coloured cord at the throat in parts of the Lohadhri Empire, a discreet tattoo behind the ear where the Nexipol scholars can find it. Exile to the wards. Families reporting families, because a family that shelters a suspected case is a family whose entire holding may be quarantined and whose surviving members may be marked for life. There are villages in the Haritkshetra where every adult has a small triangular scar on the shoulder from a childhood inspection. The scar means clean. The scar means the inspector saw the shoulder and did not see anything else. The scar is the only reason those people can trade in the market at Kunjika.

Three communities have organised around the shaping in ways that reject the standard machinery. The Reshaped, in the deep Marusthali, are nomad clans who have decided the change is the answer — that whatever remains after the shaping is what will survive the Fading, and everyone else is being sentimental about their skins. The Synthesis Collective, headquartered in Pittalpradesha but with quiet study-houses across four regions, catalogues every strain of change with the patience of professional scholars and the ethics of professional scholars, which is to say the debate is ongoing. And the Heralds of Change are quasi-religious, half in Marusthali and half further south, who preach the shaping as preparation for whatever comes after the great enchantments have all failed. The Heralds do not seek out the pools. The Heralds do not flee them either.

See also: Wyrdpools.

The Mist

The Mist is the wall around the world. It stands at the edges of the continent (north, south, and along the whole western coast beyond Sift'insa), a luminous white barrier that the eye cannot resolve into anything closer than "cloud" or "curtain" or "distance." It does not move. It has been in the same place for as long as anyone has kept records. It is not, in any measurable sense, doing anything.

The Mist works by withholding. Rivers reaching it stop being rivers. The Feyrith terminates against the Mist in a dead pool a mile wide, its water grey-green and stagnant and full of things the Water Authority prefers not to catalogue. The lesser rivers along the Prakashtat coast do the same at a smaller scale. Fish that swim into the terminal water do not swim back. Birds that fly toward the Mist turn around when they get close, without any apparent decision on their part, and if a bird is bound with a message and released nearer than half a league, the bird will die there, and the message will be found later on the beach, unread.

Mistwatch, the observatory-fortress north of Sift'insa, holds five centuries of continuous observation records. The archive is one of the most valuable holdings on the continent, and access to it has been progressively restricted for the last forty years by an order of authority nobody at Mistwatch is willing to name in a document that leaves the building. What is known publicly is that the Mist has not changed in any measurable respect during those five centuries. What is known privately (and this is second-hand at best) is that the archive contains observations which, when read in sequence, suggest the Mist has been very slowly getting closer.

Only the Furnace Fleet travels beyond. The great ironclad ships depart from Vajraban on missions that are not published, return on schedules that are not predictable, and carry back things which are unloaded at night into warehouses which do not appear on any customs manifest. The Fleet does not explain. Nobody with the standing to demand an explanation has, in living memory, done so. The captains of the Furnace vessels are the wealthiest private citizens on the continent. Their crews are the highest-paid manual labourers alive. Neither the captains nor the crews say what they saw.

Nobody explains why.