Driftmats
Driftmats are rafts of floating weed that come in off the Unrun Sea after storms, from water no run has laid and no sounding house has read. They tangle oars and foul rudders, and they bring with them small things nobody on the coast can name. Gnome pilots log every mat they meet, its place and size and drift, and then strike the entry out, because a mat is never where it was logged.
Appearance
A mat is a floating island of tangled weed, from a few strides across to the size of a harbour basin, a hand to a forearm thick. The weed is olive-gold to brown, made of branching, leafy stems studded with small round air bladders the size of peppercorns that keep it afloat; it has no root and no holdfast. From a distance a mat lies on the water like a field of wet straw, and the sea goes flat and greasy inside it. Up close it smells of iodine, salt, and something sweetish and rotten underneath. Its undersides are crowded with life: small crabs and shrimp the colour of the weed, tiny fish, worm tubes, and the eggs of creatures that are not seen on the coast.
Habitat and Range
The weed lives out in the open water beyond the last beacons, where nobody goes to see it whole. Storms break it into mats and drive them south and west onto the outer isles of the Tidelace Coasts and across the Far Set of the Tidebound Reaches. It comes with the storm season and is gone within weeks, rotting on the shingle or drifting away.
Behaviour and Temperament
It grows as it floats, branching and breaking. A mat moves with wind and current, so it can lie across a strait one morning and be gone by the next tide. Inside the Lacework it dies quickly in the shallower, warmer water.
Life Cycle
No one knows how it begins, since it has never been seen attached to anything. Broken pieces grow into new mats. Stranded, it rots in a few days into a brown sludge that the shore Humans spread on their gardens.
Uses and Dangers
Its danger is fouling: oars caught and wrenched, a rudder jammed, a small craft held in it while the wind gets up. A pilot crossing a strait with a mat on it goes round, never through. Lastlight’s island households gather stranded mats for manure and burn the dried weed. What lives in the weed is the stranger part. Now and then a mat carries in a fish, a crab, or a seed nobody has seen before, and the sounding houses keep a few of them in jars; most die within days.
Lore and Belief
Gnome pilots say a mat is the Unrun Sea writing a letter that cannot be read, and the logging and striking out is a pilot’s joke about the false mark. Some families of Lastlight believe the mats come from a shore across the Unrun Sea, as the Farwings are said to fly to one, and keep the strange seeds in case one grows. Thaluren of the Outer-Route runs avoid them as water no run has come home through, and will not let their young swim under one.