Salem: The Fracture
I don’t dream of Salem anymore.
Age has stolen that much from me, at least. What remains is quieter: small flashes of memory that surface when I’m tired or when my magic fails in ways I could never have predicted.
I didn’t go there on the night of the ritual.
People still ask why, as though there’s an answer that would make the choice sound noble. The truth is far simpler: I didn’t believe the ritual would work, and I didn’t believe I deserved to stand among those willing to die for it. Pride or cowardice - take your pick.
And so I stayed here, on the other side of the world, pretending distance was a kind of duty.
But distance doesn't matter.
Not when a Nexus breaks.
Even now, thirty years later, Salem's pulse reaches this far. Not constantly; just in faint, irregular waves that run under the skin like an old injury warning you the weather will change. Some nights the air tastes more metallic. Some nights shadows bend and observe, more alive than the ones that cast them. The Veil is thin everywhere now, but the disturbances that carry Salem's signature have a particular feel: a low pressure behind the sternum, a hum too soft to hear but impossible to ignore.
The younger mages call these sensations "aftershocks,” symptoms of rampant Wyld Surges. They’re wrong. They never learned to recognise resonance. They never knew what magic once was. Aftershocks fade. This doesn’t. It’s more like the land trying to relearn its own shape and failing every time.
I haven’t seen Salem since before the Cataclysm. I rely on the accounts of those who pass near it - scavengers mostly - though fewer each year. They describe the ground split into layers that shouldn’t exist, trees twisting into angles that make the mind recoil. Some say the grove is gone. Others swear it is still there, only inverted; like a reflection left behind after the mirror of reality broke.
Reports never agree, yet all of them mention the same thing: a sound that isn’t a sound at all. A vibration. A pressure. As if the hill is breathing, as if the Paths are trying to knit themselves back together.
Sometimes I wonder what became of the place that once held all four Pillars in harmony.
I try not to imagine it. I’m not sure I could face it now. I’m not sure anyone could.
There was a time I thought Salem would never break.
Now I am no longer certain its shattered pieces will ever rest.
-Lavrentios, matter mage of the Ashen Circle
Autumn 30 PoC, zone-32
Where the paths failed
There is a particular kind of silence that comes only after a collapse - a hollow stillness that drapes itself over a place like mourning cloth, the kind of hush left behind when the world loses a sound it was never meant to live without.
Salem carries that silence now. It is shaped by it. Haunted by it.
When the Cataclysm struck, Salem became the axis of ruin; the point zero of civilization's annihilation. The mages’ final attempt to erase the Immortals did not simply fail; it shuddered. Violently. Catastrophically. No written account survives of that moment, yet the scars that cover the continents complete the story with cruel precision.
The Aether Paths broke.
One by one they flared, and the nexuses were extinguished like lights going out in an endless, descending corridor.
Where their crossings once steadied the land, their sudden absence tore a cavity through the Veil; a wound that has remained open for thirty years. Tranquility vanished in an instant, replaced by an unending tide of raw, furious magic that swallowed everything in reach.
Peace is gone. Harmony reduced to memory. All that is left is a fault line: a red, devouring zone of catastrophe that refuses to settle.
Those who stray too close describe the same disquieting impression: as if the ground remembers movement but no longer remembers how to move; as if something underneath is trying to breathe but has forgotten how breath works. What stands there now is the echo of a marvel, lingering in the space where its body failed.
And still, none believe Salem is dead.
The Nexus persists, twisted and alien, changing with every passing year. Even the strange silence that clung to it in the first aftermath has begun to peel away, revealing something far more unsettling beneath it.
Anticipation.
QUICK FACTS
- Type: Broken Nexus
- Designation: One of the Five Great Aether Convergences (Pre-Cataclysm)
- Primary Pillar Resonance: None
- Surge Profile:
- Wyld Surges constant and unpredictable
- Full-spectrum magical fracturing
- High fatality risk for unprotected mages
- Location: Ruins of Salem, Massachusetts, USA. Coordinates unreliable due to spatial drift
CUSTODIANS
- None (presumably the Children of the Armageddon)
ACCESS
- Level: Forbidden
- Survival Expectation: Low
- Order Classification: Red Zone (Absolute Avoidance)
NOTABLE PHENOMENA
- Veil-touched wildlife
- Veil tainted nature overgrown
- Fragment spirits
- Nightmare horrors manifested
- Veil breach visible
- Soil heat irregular, rising and falling like fever
- Petrified trunks warped into non-Euclidean spirals
THE COVENS FOR SALEM
- The Verdant Chorus: "We knew harmony could die. We did not know it could rot."
- The Silent Order: "Salem demands restraint. Even silence is too loud if spoken from ego.”
- The Ashen Circle: "We knew Salem would fall. Yet, we did not expect it to survive the fall.”
- The Harbingers: "All wounds close. Eventually. What heals this one will not be merciful”
"I knew Salem when it was alive. Now? I don’t know what that is, but it isn’t death. It’s whatever comes when death forgets you.”
The Broken Nexus
What broke in Salem wasn’t the city. It was the rule that the world should make sense.
It wasn’t destroyed in rubble, ash, and fire the way the rest of the world fall. The failure of the ritual felt quieter here: a collapse without debris followed by the stillness that comes after the shock and before the pain. Now, approaching Salem feels like walking toward the single living memory of a fractured mind.
At first it feels like distance collapsing, as if every place you’ve ever stood folds into a single point behind your ribs. The landscape holds together, but the space between things drifts. Small, silent betrayals of logic, carried on a pressure so thin it barely qualifies as touch - like the pause before waking, when you remember the ghost of a dream but not its shape.
Nothing moves and nothing feels fixed on the same time.
The soil shifts between heat and cold without reason. Scorched sand beside frost-bitten earth. It is not random. Yet, it is not patterned either. Just inconsistent, like an emotion the land can’t regulate.
Sometimes the ground hums, and in that hum between breaths, people swear they feel something like sorrow.
One that is not theirs.
It is subtle - just enough to make you wonder whether you’re hearing the earth or whether you’re hearing yourself echoed back through something that no longer filters sound the way a world should.
The sky above the grove carries a visible wound. a vertical scar stitched badly into the firmament, rejecting both daylight and night.
Look too long and the mind buckles, crashed under the effort of holding two truths at once.
Further in, the grove appears in fragments: a branch paused mid-decision, a trunk angling toward something absent, roots braided in a geometry too careful for chance and too incorrect for intention.
None of it moves aggressively.
None of it warns you away.
And still, the air feels occupied, as if a presence taking inventory, measuring what stands before it, adjusting itself in small, reflexive ways like something asleep rearranging its limbs.
Travelers speak of an unspoken boundary. It's not a barrier though. More like a thought that isn’t theirs nudging the edge of their awareness. Most turn back without deciding to. Their bodies understand first. Later, they struggle to describe the realization: It did not push them away. It did not draw them closer.
It simply noted them down; quietly, like an archivist recording a curiosity.
As if what remains of the ancient Nexus was quietly taking notes on them.
Tainted Nature
Nature survived the Cataclysm around Salem, but not as it was. Forests grew too quickly, too densely, overtaking the ruins in months instead of years. Pines stretch taller than they should, oaks hold their leaves long past their season. Nothing looks monstrous at first glance.
But the longer one watches, the more the world slips.
Leaves shine from within, as if lit by an inner pulse. Flowers bloom in colors that don’t exist on any mortal spectrum, shifting subtly as though correcting themselves.
Animals seem ordinary: a deer, a fox, a cluster of birds. Yet their attention lingers too long. Their stillness feels rehearsed. Some swear these creatures aren’t alive at all; only memorized shapes the land repeats out of habit.
Deeper in, the geometry turns stranger. Trees bend inward rather than upward, their branches forced into painful loops. Roots surface in braids too intricate for chance, too intentional for comfort.
Places like this are called Veil-Groves - twisted ecosystems born from tears in the Veil, growing impossibly fast and always in patterns that feel almost designed.
And Salem’s grow a little larger every passing day.
Children of the Armageddon
Rumor casts the Children as a coalition of mages, survivors, and even Immortals; not united by ideology, but by the conviction that something must be done before the world fractures beyond repair.
If they exist, their greatest work lies beneath Salem, buried within the ruins of the shattered Nexus chamber. They call it the Chronovault, a machine or ritual, no one knows which, meant to offer a permanent solution.
Whether that means healing the world, resetting it, or ending it is fiercely debated. Whatever the truth, scavengers who approach the grove report the same phenomenon: a low metallic hum beneath the soil, pulsing in a rhythm that feels deliberate.
One thing is certain: something is working in there.
And something is waiting.
What Lingers Beneath
The world above Salem has learned to look away.
Mortals fear the stories.
Mages fear the silence.
But the earth remembers.
The pilgrim stones still lie beneath the grove - thousands of them - each once carrying breath and blood, each meant to anchor harmony and protect the world. Now they sit cracked among twisted roots, scattered through the broken chamber like relics of a prayer the world can no longer translate.
Some say the stones still hold the echo of those who left them behind.
Others that something has claimed them, used them, altered them.
And on certain nights, the soil around the shattered chamber seems to tighten, as if the earth is testing a new breath - or a collection of them.
A shape without shape.
A thought without form.
Something that did not die with the mages.
Something that did not break with the Nexus.
Something that does not belong to the living, or the dead, or the world that came before.
But if something is learning to stand inside that wound, if the fracture is shaping a mind of its own...
Oustanding!
Thank you <3