The Displacement
The Displacement--the "official" term for the phenomena that causes people, places, entire communities to "blink" out of existence--offers a serious threat to the Free Cities of Marlock, if not the entirely of Gavros.
These occurrences must be investigated to understand how to cease it happening. Or, failing that, how to at least exert some sort of control over the seemingly random circumstances in which this Displacement occurs.
Structure
Exposition
The Skein is Unraveling
Rare Zoramar lit his pipe, took a healthy pull of Sweetburn into his chest, and stared at the various reports arrayed on his desk. All these papers, like the same story told a dozen times by a dozen drunks—a chef dematerialized during dinner rush, a merchant caravan disappeared mid-transaction, a dragon vanished while laying waste to a ship convoy. The same words rising again and again—fade, evaporate, lost. Gone. And, perhaps more troubling, reports of objects, people, places, reappearing. A bride taking her place back at the altar moments after disappearing, aged at least sixty years. A whole hamlet, gone in an instant, then returned without any of its villagers. Documents and whispers of these events all up and down The Dog Coast. More troubling still are the accounts of things which were not lost now showing up. Things that have no place in the Free Cities. Things that, perhaps, have no place anywhere. Things beyond the concept of place. Of home. Rare has a desk full of troubles, a nearly empty pipe, and disturbing suspicion that tenuous knots that keep, well, everything, intact are fraying and have been doing so for some time. He sighs, reaches for quill and paper, and begins to write. INTREPID ADVENTURERS WANTED…
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