Places Where the Currents Go Wrong

For all the careful diagrams and doctrines, most of Duskfall is—mercifully—ordinary.   The Worldstream flows unseen, feeding roots and hearts. The Tapestry hangs taut beyond the sky, answering those who dare Pull. Gods mutter to their favorites. The land hums with small, local bargains. The currents cross and touch and rarely do more than whisper.   And then there are the places where something broke.   These are the sites that fill the Order’s vaults with red-ink reports, that haunt Druid dreams, that priests quietly reroute pilgrimages around and guild-masters factor into their prices for stone and labor.   Places where the Tapestry is snarled, where the Worldstream is wounded, or where both seem to have gone missing.

Tapestry Snarls – Rift-Scars

A Rift-Scar is what happens when the Tapestry takes a wound and never quite heals.   Some are obvious: stagnant tears in the sky where stars show through at midday, crater-lakes where gravity forgets which way is down, towers half-phased into some Elsewhere and frozen there like teeth in a broken jaw. Others are subtler: a valley where sound arrives a heartbeat late, a street where shadows always lean in the same direction no matter where the sun stands.   What they share is a sense, to those who can feel such things, that the Tapestry has knotted itself in self-defense.   Where a normal Arcane working might slide along smooth threads, a working in a Rift-Scar catches on snarls, doubles back on itself, or splits in two.   To Pull in such a place is like trying to cast a fishing line through a room full of spinning wheels.

• Spells stretch, gaining too much range or too little.
• Energies meant to manifest as fire come out as sound, memory, or impossible ice.
• Some patterns simply refuse to resolve; the caster feels the Tapestry “skip” and the power leak away into nothing—or into somewhere.

The Order of Magi treats Rift-Scars as both laboratory and plague zone.   They build observatories on the safer edges, bristling with wards and measuring rods, to watch how the Tapestry shifts. Apprentices are sometimes brought there to learn humility; a single miscast can make clear, forever, that their precious formulae depend on a pattern that can change.   Deeper in, the Order posts warnings, wards, and, when it can get them, soldiers. “Unauthorized” Arcane work is forbidden within so many miles of a major Scar. That rule is broken constantly, of course—by Warlocks trying to strengthen pacts, by rogue scholars convinced they can “smooth” a knot, by desperate rulers who see in such chaos a weapon.   Other traditions feel Rift-Scars differently:

• Primal workers often find the Worldstream uneasy near such places, its local branches kinked around the wound like muscle braced around a broken bone. Animals avoid the area or behave strangely within it. Rain falls wrong.
• Divine casters report mixed experiences. Some patrons seem to delight in showing power over such anomalies, granting unusually vivid miracles just to prove that their will overrules broken pattern. Others refuse to touch them, declaring such wounds “outside our domain.”
• Artificers are wary. Devices built too close to a Scar can inherit its instability, becoming unreliable or downright treacherous far from the Rift that birthed them.

Legends say that the oldest Rift-Scars were made not by mortal folly, but by Titan blows, each one a place where reality was hammered too thin. Whether that is true or temple myth, no one knows. What is certain is that some Scars are growing, very slowly, and no agreement has been reached on what to do about that.   The safest advice remains the simplest: “If the sky looks wrong, walk the other way.”

Worldstream Wounds

Where Rift-Scars are tears in the Tapestry, Worldstream Wounds are places where the river of life has been gouged, poisoned, or cut off.   From the outside, they may look like nothing more than blight: a patch of forest that never quite recovers from being burned, a stretch of river where fish are always thin and sickly, a hill where crops struggle no matter how diligently they are tended.   To anyone attuned to Primal power, they are screamingly obvious.   Stand in such a place and the Worldstream feels… thin. Not gone, not usually, but stretched like cloth that has been torn and roughly stitched, or like a voice gone hoarse from too much shouting.   The causes vary:

• Clear-cutting an ancient forest in a single season, without rest or recompense.
• Waging war in the same valley for generations, burying it in blood and iron until the land forgets anything else.
• Binding too many spirits into service, leaving the local branch of the Worldstream clogged with oaths and chains.
• Certain kinds of Artifice that treat resonance as fuel to be burned, rather than as a current to be guided.

In the wake of such acts, the Worldstream may:

• Withdraw, leaving the place spiritually anaemic. Primal workings there falter; even simple blessings come out thin and grey. Plants and animals survive, but without flourish. These regions feel dull, as if color has quietly faded from more than just sight.
• Twist, holding on to a single dominant emotion—fear, rage, sorrow—and replaying it over and over. Magic that Draws from such a branch comes out tainted: healing that leaves scars, protection that hardens into paranoia, growth that smothers rather than nourishes.
• Congeal, forming dangerous eddies where all the pain or waste that should have been carried away instead accumulates. These are the sites of hauntings, twisted beasts, and phenomena that look like curses but are only memories gone septic.

Primal circles treat Worldstream Wounds as both shame and duty.   They organize long, slow restorations: seasons of careful planting, offerings, the breaking of old iron, the unbinding of spirits. They teach local folk new rituals of restraint and reciprocity. They refuse—absolutely, sometimes violently—to allow certain kinds of building, mining, or magic to continue.   They do not always succeed. Some wounds are too deep; some communities too desperate or stubborn. There are places in Duskfall where Druids have walked away in tears, declaring that the land “does not know itself anymore,” and that only time measured in centuries can mend what has been done.   Other traditions view these wounds through their own lenses:

• Temples might declare them cursed, seeing in their blight the hand of enemy gods or the punishment of their own. Pilgrimages may be organized to “reconsecrate” such places, with varying sensitivity to the Worldstream’s actual condition.
• The Order of Magi sometimes sees opportunity. A Worldstream that has gone thin is less likely to interfere with delicate Tapestry-work. More than one tower stands on ground Primal circles would have preferred to leave fallow.
• Artificers are learning, slowly, that Weave-work built atop a wound is unstable. Devices anchored in such echoes may draw on pain and emptiness in ways their makers did not intend, becoming tools of despair or numbness.

For ordinary folk, the signs are simpler. They say:

• “No one laughs right in that town.”
• “The trees on that hill never leaf as full as others.”
• “Animals go mad if you graze them in that meadow; better to take the long road.”

They may not know the word Worldstream. But they can tell when a place that ought to be alive has forgotten how.

Dead Zones & Overlaps

Rarest—and most feared—are the places where it seems that both Tapestry and Worldstream have been shaken at once.   Scholars call them Null Interstices or Confluence Failures. Everyone else calls them dead places.   A dead place is not simply lifeless. There are plenty of deserts, mountaintops, and deep caves where the Worldstream runs thin but true, and where the Tapestry hangs farther than usual from the skin of the world. Life can cling there, and magic, though different, still flows.   A true dead zone is where nothing answers properly.

• Prayers go out and do not return, or return as a faint, hollow echo.
• Primal calls meet a flat blankness, as if speaking to a painting of a forest rather than a forest itself.
• Arcane Pulls slip but find no purchase; the Tapestry feels slick and distant, as if greased fingers were trying to grasp glass.
• Artifice fails in strange ways: devices that ought to function simply… don’t. Songs that always moved crowds fall flat, as if the air itself cannot be bothered.

In such places, even non-casters feel wrong.   They describe a sense of being unobserved, not merely by gods, spirits, or the Rift, but by the world itself. Wounds seem to hurt more and heal slower. Food fills the belly but not the spirit. Dreams are dull or absent. The ground feels… uninvested.   Theories about how these places form are as numerous as they are disturbing.

• Some say they are the scars of ancient catastrophes where all four currents were forced to their extremes at once: Divine miracles, Primal wraths, Arcane surges, and Artifice engines tearing at the same patch of reality until nothing coherent was left.
• Others whisper that they are signatures of Titan deaths—places where a being great enough to grip both Tapestry and Worldstream in its hands was torn apart, taking a piece of both with it.
• A few Magi quietly wonder if they are not wounds at all, but glimpses of baseline reality, a state of the world before currents were laid upon it. They rarely share this theory; it is not popular.

Whatever their origin, everyone agrees on one thing: dead places are contagious.   Not in the simple sense of a disease, but in the sense that behavior learned there leaks outward.

• A priest who spends too long trying to pray in a dead zone may return home with a quiet question lodged in their heart: “What if no one is listening?” That doubt can spread faster than any plague.
• A Magus who discovers that their most cherished patterns mean nothing in a certain valley may become reckless elsewhere, trying to prove to themselves that they still matter.
• A Druid who hears only silence in the land’s voice may start to act as if nothing they do has consequences, good or bad.

For this reason, many cultures treat dead zones as taboo.

• Temples mark them as forsaken and forbid worship there.
• Primal circles rope them off with circles of bone and wood, warning anyone who can listen that “the world is not itself beyond this point.”
• The Order of Magi posts wards and watchers and sometimes lies on its maps, pretending the places do not exist at all.

And yet, they draw people.   Rulers who dream of being free from god or fate. Scholars who want to know what the world looks like without its currents. Warlocks whose patrons go ominously quiet at the edge of such zones, as if unwilling or unable to cross.   Some see in dead places the ultimate freedom. Others see the ultimate prison. The currents themselves, if they have an opinion, do not share it.   They have the rest of the world to attend to.   Between Rift-Scars, Worldstream Wounds, and dead zones, Duskfall is a map of not only where magic is, but where it has gone wrong. To walk it with open eyes is to see, in every miraculous river and every haunted hill, the mark of choices made long ago:

• Who Pulled too hard.
• Who Drew without giving back.
• Who accepted gifts they did not understand.
• Who tried to Weave a better world and tore something essential instead.

The currents remember. The land remembers.   And in the spaces where memory itself falters, something else waits to see what mortals will do next.