The Grey Sea

An expanse of white gold sands sweep across the rim of a tepid brackish hole. A caustic well of standing water, ancient and dead calcified pillars can be seen rising from the bottom of the depths, like pallid bodies dangling in an abattoir waiting to be let free.

This stellar body is a land without sky. In truth is a place of land and sea where the horizon never begins. It is a unchanging, endless shoreline and a muted vast ocean whose fathomless depths can be circumnavigated, but whose center is impossible to traverse. The great shoreline is a rim to this deep bitter drink and also acts as stellar constant. Exiting this barren world is an act so simple on the rim, simply walking through the mists into the dunes will bring one of the various shards that periodically connect to this body.

A great omnioptic rim that runs the circumference of the great sea. At each point of the shoreline an observer can see every other point on the barren, flat beaches that expand in front of them, behind them, and reach above them. Used extensively, this shore is host to a great worn path, made of rough hewn sandstone and packed dirt. For many denizens of the Nebula this is the safest way to travel between worlds. Danger can be spotted and mobilized against with great speed and precision as clouds rarely blot out the lands above. Bathed in the Nebula's light, the place is a land of salt, lye and dryness that cannot sustain life and so it has become difficult to keep under private ownership for very long.

A smaller stellar body by all accounts the Grey Sea is a constant in it's nebular neighborhood. This stability in the great chaos surrounding it has allowed it to be used in the same way a connection has. Despite being a little over a hundred miles long, travel from one world connected to The Grey Path to another takes a little less than a day. Edges from adjacent worlds connect seamlessly to Grey Path, these bonds can last anywhere from a decade to a century.

By same the same mechanism that The Grey Sea aids the inhabitants of the worlds it connects to, the Grey Sea instills a subtle quiescence onto all of the worlds that touches. The lands are tamer, and the inhabitants weaker as a consequence. Never quite reaching the potential that it could, those resident to these realms consume the insidious poison through the air, food, and water becoming a shadow of what they are and what they could be. This link to the shards, imbues them with the following Fundament for as long as they remain in it's influence.

Rumors in academic circles perpetuate several myths of the origins and purpose for The Grey Sea in the Old Nebular Empire. Long has there been observed a link between The Grey Sea and the City of Masques, capital of the Formless. With both realms overlapping and remaining seemingly indivisible, extensive evidence shows that the Formless relied heavily upon the stellar well to accellerate trade and run logisitics for large scale war campaigns. Fringe theorists suggest that the technology of the Formless at it's peak could have constructed the small stellar sea using advanced shardshaping techniques on the aether- although such magick would defy the underlying principles that limit the craft today. In more ancient times, some propose, that the well was used as a prison for some horrible godling grown out of control and that the well was created at the dawn of time itself. An ancient prison, an impenetrable panopticon could prove to be a danger to all of the worlds that fall within its influence if anything powerful enough to escape the Grey Sea become released.