Overview
Most people in Eryndor believe the world is dependable. Roads connect one settlement to another. Buildings contain the same rooms from one evening to the next. A person has one name, one history, and one place in the memories of those who know them.
Most of the time, they are correct.
Sometimes, however, reality appears to loosen around the edges.
A road returns a traveler to the place they just left. A room vanishes while its key remains behind. A written name changes beneath a witness's hand. Two people remember the same event differently, and physical evidence supports both accounts. A place briefly overlaps with another version of itself before one version is forced away.
These events are collectively described as reality instability.
No single explanation has been accepted. Scholars disagree over whether instability is magical, planar, temporal, psychological, divine, or some combination of all five. What is known is that the effects are real, they can spread, and they do not always erase every trace of what came before.
Archivist's warning: Contradiction is not proof that one witness is lying. During an instability event, several incompatible accounts may each be true.
The Three Common States
Stable
A stable location behaves consistently. Distances remain measurable, memories broadly agree, written records remain unchanged, and magical examination reveals no unusual overlap.
Stable does not necessarily mean safe. It only means the place is currently behaving like one version of itself.
Unstable
An unstable location displays active contradictions or distortions. These may be subtle at first:
- Clocks losing or repeating a few seconds
- A familiar path taking longer than it should
- Names appearing differently in separate records
- Reflections moving a moment too late
- Sounds coming from rooms that are not present
- Several witnesses remembering different versions of the same event
Instability may fade on its own, intensify, or move elsewhere.
Confluence
A confluence occurs when two or more possible versions of a place, person, object, or event overlap.
During a confluence, impossible things may briefly become accessible. A missing room may return. A road may lead to more than one destination. A person may encounter an echo of someone who never arrived, already died, or made a different choice.
Confluences are rare, dangerous, and difficult to document because evidence often changes after the overlap ends.
Common Forms of Instability
Spatial Distortion
Space stops behaving according to ordinary measurements.
Doors may open onto the wrong room. Hallways may lengthen. Exterior and interior dimensions may contradict one another. Roads may loop, split, or forget their destination.
Temporal Echo
A moment repeats, arrives early, or leaves an impression that can be witnessed later.
Temporal echoes are not always complete visions. They may appear as repeated footsteps, a conversation heard before it occurs, an object returning to an earlier state, or a person briefly occupying two different moments.
Memory and Identity Drift
People may forget a place, remember a different history, or become uncertain of a familiar person's name.
Identity drift is especially dangerous because it can affect records as well as memory. A ledger, map, letter, or official document may change to support the corrected version of events.
Language Glitch
Speech and writing may fracture under instability.
Words repeat, change meaning, arrive in the wrong voice, or become impossible to remember after they are heard. A sentence may contain information the speaker did not intend to reveal. In stronger events, a person's name may be replaced by a title, description, or blank space.
Echo Manifestation
An echo is a person, creature, object, or place produced by overlap with another possibility.
Some echoes repeat a limited action. Others appear aware of the present. The most dangerous echoes can imitate familiar people, use remembered voices, or behave as though they have encountered the witnesses before.
Known Anomalies
The following incidents are documented within the public archive. Each remains under investigation.
Thornreach Crossing
Witnesses reported a distressed man appearing near the center of the crossing while his body and voice seemed to skip between moments. He died before a coherent account could be obtained.
Additional irregularities included:
- Tracks that appeared to double back without turning
- Conflicting impressions of the bridge's age and condition
- A traveler sketching a version of the crossing that did not match the structure before him
- Brief timing discrepancies between witnesses standing only a few feet apart
Current status: The crossing remains passable, but travelers are advised to record their departure time, arrival time, and route independently.
Seren Vell's Workshop
Seren Vell's workshop displayed evidence of tampering alongside severe spatial and material distortion. Pages, maps, threads, and architectural details appeared to shift in relation to one another.
A hostile manifestation, later described as an Unspooled Thing, emerged from the disturbance. Its form resembled material pulled apart from a larger pattern and forced into a temporary body.
Current status: The workshop has been partially secured. Maps and documents recovered from the site should be compared against older copies before being trusted.
The Missing Room Six
Nessa Quill reported discovering a dead man in Room Six of the Bent Nail Inn.
When witnesses later entered the upstairs hallway, the doors were numbered Five and Seven with an uninterrupted wall between them. Nessa retained a key stamped with the number Six, and the guest ledger still contained an entry for the missing room.
Observed irregularities included:
- The ledger changing from ORREN VALE to ORREN VELL, then to SEREN VELL
- Cold, sound, and movement detected behind an apparently solid wall
- Magical traces located inside the absence rather than on the wall
- Room Six temporarily returning during a musical and mnemonic event
- Evidence remaining after the room disappeared again
Current status: The wall between Rooms Five and Seven appears physically ordinary. Nessa Quill strongly disagrees.
The Roads Outside Briar Hollow
Travelers have reported signs facing the wrong direction, repeated landmarks, and routes that return to their starting point without an obvious turn.
Most incidents are dismissed as poor navigation. A smaller number include details that are harder to explain:
- Travelers arriving with memories of roads absent from all current maps
- Milestones showing names no local resident recognizes
- Journeys taking different lengths of time for members of the same group
- Familiar roads becoming unrecognizable after sunset
Current status: No single affected route has remained unstable long enough to study consistently.
Corrections
A Correction is the apparent process by which reality resolves a contradiction.
During a Correction:
- One version of an event may replace another
- Physical evidence may rewrite itself
- Witnesses may lose or gain memories
- A person, object, road, or room may be removed from ordinary access
- The world may begin behaving as though the missing thing never existed
Corrections are not clean. Keys remain after doors disappear. Songs preserve names absent from ledgers. People grieve homes no map acknowledges. These remnants are often the first indication that anything was changed at all.
Practical Guidance
When encountering a possible instability event:
- Do not separate unless necessary.
- Record names, times, and locations immediately.
- Compare observations before agreeing on a single account.
- Do not assume a familiar face belongs to a familiar person.
- Preserve physical evidence outside the affected area whenever possible.
- Use shared memories and personal objects to reinforce identity.
- Leave before the environment begins removing exits.
What Your Character Knows
A resident of Eryndor may reasonably know that:
- Strange roads and vanishing places appear in folktales throughout the continent.
- Most authorities publicly treat instability as isolated magical accidents.
- The Cartographers' Guild tracks routes and structures that do not remain consistent.
- The Axiom Ward investigates dangerous distortions near settled communities.
- Songs and oral histories sometimes preserve events missing from official records.
- People who experience repeated anomalies are not always believed.
- Contradictory memories should not be dismissed too quickly.
Characters directly involved in the incidents at Thornreach Crossing, Seren Vell's workshop, or the Bent Nail know considerably more than the average citizen.
Open Questions
The archive has no confirmed answers to the following:
- What causes instability?
- Why do some places become unstable while others remain unchanged?
- Why can certain witnesses remember Corrections?
- Are echoes independent beings or temporary possibilities?
- Where do erased places go?
- Can a Correction be reversed?
- Is Ashwater a real destination, a confluence, or a name given to many different phenomena?
Until those questions are answered, the most reliable protection remains simple:
Remember carefully. Compare what you remember. Write it down before the world changes its mind.