The primal energies of creation still run strong and deep in the current age. In most places, the static fabric of reality is only a thin film atop the endless potential of unformed chaos. During the Old Realm, the world was stable, but after the Great Contagion, it began to fray at the edges and in the thin spots. Tiny clusters of survivors were not enough to remember the shape of the world, and the Fair Folk opened the gates at the edge of Creation and caused great spirit-storms of mischance and unchained possibility to enter the world through them. The effect was devastating.

Vast swathes of Creation simply disappeared, and in the places where the barbarians and Fair Folk rode were sewn madness and discord, devastating not only the inhabitants but the twisting the nature of reality itself.

The further one travels from the stable centre of the Realm, the thinner the fabric becomes, until, at the edges of the world, distance and time are dim memories, and only the lunar ebb and flow remains. Further still, and there is nothing but a timeless madness, a din of potential so great it permits no reckoning and no meaning. Nothing mortal can survive unprotected in these lunatic realms - beyond the edge of Creation there lie only the high courts of the unshaped Fair Folk, where even the Lunar Exalted dare not tread without good reason.

The Wyld

For centuries, there have been places where the sky swims with ever-changing colours and the ground crawls with snow, with ash, with writhing flesh or carnivorous steel ants. Some occur naturally, but most are the remains of places where the Wyld claimed an ancient Manse or Demesne. These places shrink with the passage of centuries, but there are still large areas of the Threshold where the rules of Creation are loosely enforced, if they have any jurisdiction at all. The border marches of such places tend to resemble the areas in which they occur, save that they are rife with prodigies - crystal flowers, birds of many colours, briars which bleed wine instead of sap. As one travels deeper, the landscape quavers and shifts as if it were hallucination, and the prodigies grow marvellous and fell - dandelions whose seeds are small warriors in mail, carnivorous shadows and oak trees whose galls are full of diamonds so poisonous a single whiff from them will kill a man.

To live in these places invites a form of ecstasy, a commune with potentiality that causes one to forget limitations, to recapture lost dreams, to experience each event as if for the first time. Yet, to dwell in such places is also to invite madness and death. As the mind forgets its limitations, so does the body forget its shape. After several years of exposure to the emanations of these places, the inhabitants are often unrecognisable shambling masses of random body parts, feathers and suckers and glittering glass, all hematite eyes and cloven hooves. Lost to the ecstatic bliss of an instantaneous existence, these mutants are unpredictable, sometimes merely staring and laughing at intruders, and other times launching savage attacks. There is no known cure for this strange cancer: If removed from the Wyld, these creatures typically wither from their own improbability, as they pine for an existence without past or future.

Yet, the aura of inconstancy is not the only hazard. These places are thick with the Fair Folk, for here they are at home and can exist without dwindling away for want of dreams to eat. But Wyld places are also thick with other; less identifiable things. Animals as well as men are twisted by the Wyld’s influence, and the beasts that live in such places are often monstrously deformed. Many are quite aggressive, and the mutations are disturbingly prone to breeding true. Barbarian tribes of the far Threshold, on the very edge of reality, dwell near these places and think them holy for their plethora of spirits and the visions that shamans gain from meditating within these regions. Most dangerously, the great Wyld storms that laid the Old Realm to waste often linger deep within the largest such places, their vortices still blowing around abandoned and forgotten Demesnes.

The Shadowlands

The land of the dead lies perilously near that of the living, and in places where the boundaries have been crossed and recrossed, the dividing line often frays into nonexistence. In these places, known as shadowlands, the Underworld thrusts through, and the dead walk among the living. During the daylight hours, those who cross the borders of these places travelling outward find themselves in the lands of the living. Those who leave them during the night find themselves travelling further into the Underworld.

There is no place that the Underworld does not go, nowhere that death cannot touch. But despite their endless variety, there are certain common traits to the places where the dead walk among the living. The absence of animal life, the terrible nightmares, the tendency of those who live on the edges of such places to die early - all are common to every shadowland. But there are other, less obvious signs as well. Storms in these areas are often of unusual strength, the raindrops sometimes mixed with blood or ash or bone or sometimes, quicksilver. This, the Deathlords say, is the rotting flesh of dead gods, shed from their bodies as they lie unquiet in their tombs beneath the world.

The stone in such places is often twisted and dark, as black and reflectionless as unpolished jet. Sometimes, it is devoid of natural design but more often it bears the pointless mazy markings of the Underworld. In most places, the striation is shallow, as noticeable and superficial as the layering of sandstone. But in other places, great palaces, even cities, formed from the black stone of the Labyrinth have been heaved up into the lands where the living and the dead can meet. It is said that, to erect these structures, the Deathlords offer souls to the dead gods buried beneath the Underworld, piling offering on offering until the scent rouses a fallen god enough that it reaches upwards for the sacrifice. Their great arms crack and buckle the very fabric of the Underworld, pushing up castles and fortresses in their hunger. And thus it is that, at the centre of every Deathlord’s palace, there is a shaft that reaches into the darkness no light may penetrate, and if you listen closely at the edge, you can hear the distant dreaming of a dead god.