Salem: The Nexus
I arrived in the city at noon, though I barely remember the drive.
Salem is loud this time of year; tourists and locals spilling over the streets, tripping over plastic cauldrons and paper ghosts. The irony is almost unbearable. For generations they have come chasing witches that never lived, while real magic lies just beyond their sight.
I slipped away from the noise and followed the route marked on the old map folded in my coat pocket. The path begins innocently enough: along a narrow street, past antique shops and cafés, before turning toward the city’s edge and into a strip of woods the townsfolk call Witchwood. They tell stories of trees twisting into the shapes of those burned here - entertaining, perhaps, but false. No one burned in Salem. The truth lies beneath those tales, and it is better kept that way.
The grove has been hidden for millennia. It rests behind a natural slope; an unremarkable rise the people dismiss as another hill. So ordinary they never bothered to give it a name. Conveniently, all their myths cling instead to Gallows Hill, and so their eyes stay fixed where no truth waits.
I followed the trail down the far side of the slope, where the earth dips into a dense tangle of pines and red oaks. I knew I had crossed the threshold when my heartbeat changed. It slowed - aligned - as though something in the land reached up and gently set its rhythm against my own. Then the air shifted: colder at first, then folding around me like warm water. A subtle pressure gathered behind my ribs, familiar and reassuring in its strangeness. The taste of metal touched the back of my tongue. Damp stone. Old leaves. Memory. A few more steps, and I found the entrance: a break in the ground shaped like a half-collapsed cave mouth. Roots hung from the ceiling like fingers, brushing my shoulders as I ducked inside.
The descent is short - no more than ten meters - yet it feels deeper, as though distance bends. Time stretches softly here. At the bottom, the chamber opens into the old grove, what remains of it at least, preserved in shadow. Thin threads of light seep through the fractured stone above. Moss carpets the floor. Ancient trunks, long petrified, spiral in silence.
I knelt. I didn’t need to be told.
Matter settled into my bones, steady and patient.
Spirit eased my thoughts, soft as breath across water.
Continuum slowed, letting each moment linger.
Chaos lay dormant - vast, dreaming beneath the stone.
It is humbling to stand in this silent chamber, knowing it is one of the five great Nexuses of the world. Stranger still is to realize that mortals walk above it every day, unaware of the harmony folded beneath their feet. They say Salem’s pulse is strongest at dusk. I felt it in the half-light; ancient, tranquil, always awake.
The world may change.
Its guardians may fall.
But Salem remains.
And it will never break.
Where the paths meet
"To guard a truth, sometimes one must let a lie live.”
Among mortals, Salem is remembered in fire and theatrical fear. They speak of pyres and screaming witches, of smoke twisting into the night as the righteous watched the sinners burn. Yet no such flames ever touched this ground. What truly happened was quieter, cruel in its own way: fear dressed as justice, hysteria tearing families apart, lives taken because someone pointed a finger. This is the story that deserves remembrance, yet mortals are drawn to the ones that blaze.
And so the myth grew louder.
And the mages preferred it that way.
A loud lie draws every curious gaze toward itself, and leaves the ground beneath it blessedly forgotten. While mortals argue over ghosts that never walked these hills, the true Salem breathes undisturbed; hidden, protected and perfectly attuned.
QUICK FACTS
- Type: Nexus Point
- Designation: One of the Five Great Aether Convergences
- Primary Pillar Resonance: Full Harmony (all four Pillars in accord)
- Surge Profile:
- Wyld Surges rare to nonexistent
- Zero surges for mages casting within their attuned Pillar
- Location: Beneath modern Salem, Massachusetts, USA
CUSTODIANS
- Verdant Chorus: Ancient stewards; pre-Inquisitions era
- Silent Order: Secret keepers; post-Inquisitions era
- Access: Restricted pilgrimage
THRESHOLD \SIGNS
- Heartbeat alignment
- Sound dampening
- Faint metallic taste
THE COVENS FOR SALEM
- The Verdant Chorus: "Salem cannot be commanded. Here the earth hums whole, and we hum with it."
- The Silent Order: "Salem demands restraint. Even silence is too loud if spoken from ego.”
- The Ashen Circle: "Balance is a blade. Salem keeps its edge toward the world and dares us to stand upon it.”
- The Harbingers: "Even stillness casts a shadow. Salem’s is long and dreadful.”
- The Eternal Axis: "The calculus of a nexus is elegant. Immutable. It outlives every hand that tries to measure it.”
The Nexus of Salem
Before the Cataclysm, Salem was not a place of wonder so much as one of peace.
Beneath the roots of its forgotten hill, countless Aether Paths wove through one another until the noise of their crossings fell silent. Of the five places where magic breathes in perfect accord among the Pillars, this was the calmest, the most complete.
Those who stepped into the grove felt it before they saw it: that moment when the noise inside one’s head goes still. The untrained called it clarity; the attuned, harmony; the masters, truth. Whatever name they gave it, all felt the same quiet certainty: here, magic did not need to be commanded.
It simply existed in its purest form.
There were no Wyld Surges in Salem.
No recoil.
No correction.
No punishment for wonder.
Magic did not fight the will that shaped it; it moved with it - briefly, perfectly - like two hands meeting in prayer.
Throughout history, those who left the grove struggled to describe it. Some returned changed, some silent, and a few never returned at all, content to vanish into the stillness that had made them whole.
It was not holiness that kept them; it was recognition.
Salem saw them, and in its embrace they saw the world as it truly was - becoming one with the quiet beneath all things, if only for a heartbeat.
On Nexuses
The convergence of Aether Paths is not rare, but harmony among them is. Most lesser nexuses breathe unevenly; their pulse stutters before it can become one. But a perfect nexus - rare as it may be - is pure and silent, its resonance so complete that even the power of the Chaos Pillar lies subdued within it. Such places have always been regarded as sacred among mages.
They are the world as it is: unfiltered by reason, unsoftened by will.
The Fifth Pillar
They say Salem hums with a frequency beyond the Four Pillars, a harmony no theory can chart. The old texts call it the lost Fifth Pillar: Aether. To attune with it, they say, would be to transcend the limits of all others, to weave every strand of magic without fear of Wyld Surges, without cost.
Of course, as every mage knows, this is only a myth. Yet, if the Fifth Pillar ever lived, its breath lingers at Salem.
Salem Through History
Age of Roots
Before ships crossed oceans and maps learned the shape of the world, Salem was a grove without a name.
The Verdant Chorus watched over it as they did all living things - quiet stewards bound by reverence. They never sought to wield the power of Salem; they merely listened. The grove responded to their presence like the world answering prayer: leaves whispering without wind, water running clear even in drought. No temples were built. No wards inscribed. The Chorus - at the time druids, shamans, animists most of them - believed the place needed none. The nexus was its own protection: pure, balanced, untouched by the surges that haunted lesser paths.
They respected it for what it was, believing that to disturb it was to offend the world.
They tended it in silence for centuries, vanishing into mist when the first settlers came. Under their care, the grove endured: unseen, sleeping beneath the noise of axes and sermons.
Age of Fire
When the Inquisitions swept across the old world, the covens shattered.
The Verdant Chorus were hunted almost to extinction. The Ashen Circle burned in their pride. The Harbingers lingered at the edges; doom-sayers of calamities yet to come.
From that ruin, the Silent Order rose as keeepers of what remained. They claimed Salem as custody, not prize. Beneath the hill they wove wards so clean they fooled even the air; a breath taken at the slope would vanish before it fogged.
To the town, it was only a hill.
To those who knew, a sanctuary: one of the last.
Once in a lifetime, if the Order deemed them ready, an attuned mage was summoned to walk the grove. Not to ask, not to take, but to stand within unbroken magic and remember that the world had not turned away from them.
For the Order, Salem was both refuge and warning: what endures must be hidden; what is hidden must be spared.
The Age of Silence
Centuries passed. The Nexus kept its pulse. The Order kept its silence.
When the wars of the Immortals began to spread, the covens convened beneath Salem for the first time in generations. The outer wards were strengthened and the inner ones awakened. The records speak of months spent measuring resonance and modeling what lesser sites could not bear. One line repeats across hands and inks:
"If any place can hold the weight of all Pillars at once, it is this one.”
They did not choose Salem for their grand plan out of faith.
They chose it for its tolerance.
If a ritual could touch all creation at once and remain whole, it would be here.
The hill had always hidden them.
This time, it would hold them.
Salem's Pirlgrimage
The Order admitted one pilgrim at a time, and never by petition. Some waited decades for a summons; some were never called.
- Preparation: Before entering, the pilgrim undertook three days of silence - no speech, no spellwork. It was said this quiet unbound the mind and steadied the rhythm of one’s aether. On the fourth dawn, they drank a draught brewed from the roots of Salem’s soil: bitter, metallic, and faintly luminous, enough to loosen the will from its anchors. Only then could they walk the path.
- Conduct: The pilgrim crossed the treeline alone. All tools, foci, and reagents were left at the threshold. No wards, no sigils, no symbols of command were permitted within the grove. The place itself determined how long one remained; time folded strangely there - minutes stretching, hours vanishing.
- Risks: While Salem was stable, it was not entirely safe. Prolonged exposure to perfect harmony could fracture an unsteady mind. Some pilgrims emerged hollow-eyed and voiceless, drained of all emotion - a condition called Aether Burn. Others vanished entirely: peacefully integrated, as the Order’s records name them.
- The Return: Upon leaving, each pilgrim sealed a single breath and a drop of blood within a hollow stone prepared by the Silent Order. These relics were buried beneath the grove, woven into a greater ward said to protect the site from catastrophe. In what manner, nobody knows.
What Sleeps Beneath
The world above never learned what truly slept beneath Salem’s soil.
Those who wander too far into Witchwood sometimes speak of warmth underfoot, like the heat of a dying ember still searching for air.
They call it imagination.
Mages call it a Nexus.
No pilgrim has entered since the sky broke.
The wards have quieted.
Yet, deep below, peace waits; wounded, remembering what was taken from it.
Wonderful article, inspired as always!! I often get lost fantasizing about the universe you’ve built! Truly amazing work! Just a tiny remark: in the Author’s Notes there’s a minor typo in the word 'Catacltsm'.
Thank you so much! I am very glad to know you enjoy my writing :) I fixed the typo, thanks for pointing it out!