The Drift

The drift is the surface symptom — the only word most of Dereth has for what is going wrong. Portals have stopped keeping to their marks. They mis-aim. They open a pace from where they always opened, then a street, then a valley. It has been getting worse for a long time, and everyone had learned to live with a world that no longer arrives quite where it promises.

The budding

Then the drift began to do something it had never done. It stopped merely mis-aiming old doors and started making new ones — budding fresh portals where the lattice runs thickest, which is beneath the four great towns. A door opens that nobody set, on ground nobody warded, and it stays.

A portal is a thing a person makes. These grew.

The wrong copies

Step through a budded door and you do not arrive somewhere strange. You arrive somewhere familiar, and that is the horror of it — a barrow, a grotto, a dry well you could have named, the same stone in the same places. It is Dereth doubled: the world rethreaded off a pattern the loom half-remembers, with the wrong things living in the rooms. The longer you look, the more of it is not quite the place you know.

The things behind the doors are drift-touched — creatures caught in the rethreading and changed by it. See the Bestiary.

What can be done

The drift cannot be understood at this depth; it can only be thinned. Keep the doors emptied and they stay quiet a while. That is the whole of the work the Unbidden Doors offer a new traveller — and it is enough to be worth a coin, from people who cannot afford to pay it and pay it anyway.

Look deeper and the drift resolves into the lattice, and the lattice into the Warp. But that is a longer road. See The World is Woven.

See also

• Unbidden Doors · The Meridian · The Warp · Bestiary