Ocanthus

The air in Ocanthus is frigid yet breathable, a biting chill that numbs the lungs while vision beyond a bowshot is swallowed in perfect black. Sound travels oddly here, sometimes carrying too far, sometimes vanishing mid-echo, shredded by the constant knife-edged winds. Beneath this endless night churns the shardstorm, a maelstrom of obsidian-hued ice fragments ranging from drifting dust motes to continent-sized slabs. The shards circle at strangely lawful intervals, colliding with one another in thunderous rhythm. Each impact cleaves the larger masses into smaller, thinner blades, ensuring that no crossing is ever safe for long.   There is no sun or stars in Ocanthus. The only light comes from the ice itself, which glimmers faintly when strained or fractured, and from lightning that carves across the dark in jagged, white-hot lines. Sound is treacherous here, carried far when it runs with the wind, smothered instantly when it runs against it.   The air is thin, bitterly cold, and laced with glittering dust that cuts like glass. Breathing it unprotected scours the lungs until they bleed. Metal grows brittle after a few hours’ exposure, while leather and cloth decay as if rotting from within.   A black blizzard of knife-thin ice the size of rooftops down to razors, howling through a starless void. The shards carry a faint, oil-blue sheen and sing when they scythe past—notes that shift with wind angle, mass, and speed. Veterans say that song is the last echo of orders, treaties, and oaths frozen into crystal, now shredded and circulating forever.   Survival here depends on preparation and precision. Veteran planewalkers rely on resonance charts to predict the shard cycles, timing their crossings for the rare lulls when micro-eddies open navigable corridors. Outposts lash themselves to the great plates with adamantine cables and anchored spikes, their structures braced against the ceaseless drift. Travelers carry crampons, mirrored faceguards, climbing gear, and silence-wards, the latter as much for clear communication as protection from the layer’s maddening winds. On rare occasions, narrow blade-edged portals to Avalas or even Mechanus stabilize along the Basis. Stranger still, thin streams of the River Styx have been seen condensing as hoarfrost deep within the black ice, only to sublimate into a dark runoff that rejoins the greater river elsewhere.   Shard squalls tear through Ocanthus without warning, a storm of razor-edged ice fragments that shred exposed flesh and armor alike. Each round of exposure brings slashing and piercing wounds, and those who fail to find cover risk far worse, for when the storm’s force aligns just so, a shard can fall with the precision of a headsman’s blade, delivering a vorpal-like strike that severs with terrifying finality.   In the lee of swiftly drifting plates, rare vacuum pockets form where the air is ripped away. These null-voids last only moments, but any creature caught within them without preparation may find itself gasping for breath, suffocating before the air returns.   Even shelter is no comfort, for the sudden transition between the knife-wind outside and the still chambers carved into the great ice-shards can trigger thermal shock. The rapid shift batters the body, inflicting searing cold damage and leaving even the hardiest traveler staggered with fatigue.   Protective abjurations and wards against cold, bleed, and fatigue are essential. Shaped wind wall or wall of force serve as temporary baffles, while air walk can be adapted to ride the lawful vectors of the wind. Even simple illusions, deployed as colored flags, can serve as lifelines in the storm.   But not all spells survive Ocanthus intact. Chaotic morphs twist and sputter, teleportation scatters travelers to lee-nodes miles apart, and broad sonic effects invite shatterback, where the echoes rebound as lethal feedback.   Survival depends on proper equipment: edge-sails, magnet skates, ceramic-sheathed ropes, heated masks, bleed-stoppers, and lawful divining rods to read the hidden law lines. Travelers also carry oath-tabs—small plates of inscribed vows—because in Ocanthus, binding your intent is not a formality, but a means of survival.  

Notable Locations

Zoronor, the City of Shadows

A half-abandoned blade-city fused to a massive shard’s lee side, its alleys roofed in latticework to shear incoming ice dust. Markets trade in resonance charts, shard-glass tools, and illegal memory-ice shavings. Population is sparse and secretive; citizenship is granted to anyone who can chart a new safe lane that holds for a full cycle.  

Mechanite Extraction Arrays

Clock-true gantries from Mechanus harvest uniform plates for experiments in lawful resonance. Their rigs hum with precise harmonics that calm local shard flow... until they don’t.  

The Choir Fault

A fracture-vault where six major plates meet. Spoken oaths here etch into the ice as faint, geometric script; breaking such vows later has been known to wake the fault and send a cutting gale after the oathbreaker.  

The Sable Gyre

A slow, city-sized vortex of interlocked slabs, Ocanthus’s closest thing to a port. Wind breaks form stacked lee-quarters where registries, factor stalls, and oath-altars cling to the calm. All commerce is measured, logged, and tethered.  

Vectorium Lantern

A fortress-lighthouse hammered into a mountain shard. Its clock-bright beam marks law lines for leagues and tolls a bronze wind-bell before major shardfalls. Pilots tithe here for up-to-date vector charts.  

The Quiet Ledger

A drifting archive carved inside a hollow block of black-ice. Names of fallen units from Avalas and patterns retired in Tintibulus are etched within. Speaking a name here stills the local gale for one minute... once.  

Needle of Stillness

A spear-thin monolith that throws a perfect wind-shadow. Duels of doctrine (and assassinations of auditors) happen here because words can be heard both ways.  

The Black Snowfield

A rare, fine-dust region where the storm reduces to sleet of memories. Scholars in heated masks sift for intact fragments: battle plans, true names, even signatures—then lock them in proof-boxes before the dust sublimates.  

Travel and Portals

Travelers from Tintibulus enter Ocanthus through vault-gates and edge-bridges anchored behind megashards, where infernal auditors conduct tether checks before allowing passage. Movement within the layer is impossible by foot; one must sail the edges themselves. Veteran crews strap vector kites and edge-sails to the larger shards, skating across them on magnet shoes, tethering themselves with pitons and grapnels to avoid being swept away.   Those who press deeper may stumble into knife-gullies, sudden slits in the ice that open into the Astral or hurl the unwary across Avalas at speeds that leave only remains. The wise hire pilots who read the law lines as riverfolk read currents, charting paths through the gale.

Inhabitants

Permanent natives are rare. You’ll find shardwright enclaves, oath-bound cartographers, and planar engineers who prize the layer’s predictability more than they fear its edges. Communities survive by timing, map-sharing, and mutual rescue compacts (contracts) that are notarized in the Choir Fault and enforced by the plane’s own cold precision.   Ocanthus isn’t “ruled” so much as charted. Pilots’ guilds, oath-clerks, vector engineers, and archivists cooperate because the storm murders lone heroes. Laws are simple: tether everything, log your vectors, speak precisely. Contracts are literal life-lines; cut corners, cut ropes, cut throatsm it all looks the same out here.

At intervals, the sky collapses in a Shardfall: Vast bodies of black ice colliding in a cascade that sweeps sideways like an avalanche. For a few heartbeats after such a cataclysm, the winds fall utterly silent, only to return with doubled ferocity.   The winds themselves obey hidden patterns. These so-called Law Lines are invisible corridors of force that dictate how the gales move. To travel along one is to find a swift, stable current; to cross one at the wrong angle is to be minced into shreds. Divinations steeped in law can reveal these vectors as faint, chalk-white threads.   Oaths carry weight here. Words carved into Ocanthic ice never fade, and to break them later is to unleash Edict Frost. The letters shatter into clouds of cutting dust that hunt the oath-breaker relentlessly, scouring flesh and memory until atonement is made.   In rare storms, the dust becomes Soul Sleet, flecks of frozen memory that fall like snow. To brush against them is to glimpse fragments of lives not your own: commands barked on battlefields, whispered names of lovers, the cries of soldiers lost. Without wards, touching them risks drift, a psychic unraveling that strips away recent memories until the victim finds sanctuary in warmth and consecrated rest.

Legends

Legends cling to the Basis like frost. Many claim it holds the stolen memories of the Styx, frozen into crystal shards. Fragments of this “memory-ice” are said to contain entire lifetimes, waiting to be unlocked, sometimes with nothing more than a simple spell of unsealing. Whether such a discovery would restore truth or unleash madness is left to grim speculation. Priests of Balance insist the River Styx is both born here and ends here, calling Ocanthus the great ledger of memory where all debts are recorded and repaid. Still others whisper of the Fifth Layer Theory: that beneath the Basis lies something else, an “Else” that even the fiends of Hell do not name aloud.