The Chromatic Chord

The Dissonance

The out-of-tune reflection of the Material Plane, held in the Veil close against it: the world's own shadow, a maze that swells and fades against the true world, known to almost no one. See The Dissonance.

Overview

The Material Plane sounds as the chord of the ten Primes. Everywhere else the Veil swallows the reflection of that chord, as fog swallows an echo. In one place it holds it: close against the Material Plane, a little out of tune and lower. That held reflection is the Dissonance, a darker, distorted copy of the mortal world lying in the Veil. It is no tier of its own and no plane among the others; it is the world's own shadow, sounding wrong.

The Dissonance is the setting's lawful door to horror. It stays shut for every story that does not open it, and when one does, it works under fixed laws like the rest of the cosmos: different from the true world, never arbitrary.

The Nature of the Dissonance

A Reflection Out of Tune

Every place of the mortal world has its reflection there: hills, rivers, towns, the inside of a house. Each is recognisable and each is wrong, lower and darker, its colours drained towards one hue, its sounds a half-step off. The copy is not a memory of the world; it is the world as the Veil holds its sound, so it changes when the world changes, slowly and never quite in step.

The Beat

Two notes almost alike, sounded together, swell and fade against each other. The Dissonance beats against the true world in the same way. Places in it swell and fade: a street is there, then thins to nothing, then returns longer than before. Corridors repeat, a door opens on the room just left, and distances never add up, so the Dissonance is an endless maze to anyone who walks it as if it were the world.

Its Physics

Every Prime's current is present in the Dissonance, but each is detuned by a different amount, and the amount changes from region to region with the beat. Fire may burn cold where Ignis runs flat, water may climb where Terra's pull is weak, and a word may be heard before it is spoken. These differences follow the beat of each region and repeat with it: a traveller who learns a region's beat can learn its physics. They are different, never arbitrary.

Crossing

Crossing into the Dissonance is exactly as hard as crossing the Veil, and under the Veil's own laws: Intention, Resonance, Cost, and Drift. What keeps travellers out is not the threshold but what lives beyond it. Its inhabitants are unimaginable, very different from anything of the true world, and very dangerous. Nearly every journey into the Dissonance ends in death, in something worse than death, or in never finding the way back, even for those who know how and where they came in.

Ways In

Off-Key Places

Where the world's pitch has been bent, the Dissonance lies closer and the threshold is lower. Such off-key places are left by atrocities and by great old workings: deeds or workings so large or so wrong that the true note of a place never recovered. Six are known on Caeldon, each by tale more than by visit:

  • The Hollow Bell (the Ironspine): a bell cast wrong to call a hold's dead back; its hall is walled up, and on certain nights the stone hums.
  • The Unsung Field (the Windscar Expanse): where a slaughtered band's names were never recited; the grass grows in spirals, and a second, lower wind blows under the first.
  • The Drowned Choir (the Tidelace Coasts): where a crew sang a storm-working out of key; at slack water the shore is heard from beneath.
  • The Turning House (the Confluence Basins): a mill that ground on an off-key working for a generation; its wheel turns dry, and every door opens on the same room.
  • The Quiet Orchard (the Leeward Folds): a Halfling hamlet dead in one winter; its trees fruit in the wrong season, and its tallies never add up.
  • The Long Stair (the Elderweald): a forest stair left by an elder working that goes down further than the hill is tall.

Others certainly exist that nobody has named, and a place the Dissonance lingers in can become one (see below).

Dissonant Magic

A working cast out of tune on purpose reaches towards the Dissonance instead of away from it. Such dissonant magic takes its cost from the caster's own Pattern: each working leaves the caster a little further from their own note, easier to hear from the other side and harder to call back. It is taught nowhere openly; the few who know it learned it from the dead, from sealed books, or from something that answered. Its known workings are listed under Dissonant Workings.

Accidental Doors

Rarely, and never twice in the same way, the beat and the world line up by chance and a door stands open for a moment. Most such moments pass unnoticed. Now and then something crawls out.

What Does Not Open It

Folk belief holds that grief, fever, the wrong song, or too many sleepless nights can open the way. They cannot. What they do is put a person off their own pitch, and a person off their pitch can hear the Dissonance, be drawn towards it, and dream of it (see below).

What It Does on the Surface

Where the Dissonance presses close, or where something of it has come through, the true world shows it in the ways a dark, distorted copy fed back into a song would:

  • Dread before sight. A pressure in the chest, an unease without cause, animals refusing a road: felt before anything is seen, as a sound too low to hear is felt in the body.
  • Dead spots. Places where light, sound, or warmth simply go out: a lantern burns but lights nothing, a shout makes no sound, a hearth gives no heat.
  • Overloaded spots. The opposite: a place where something is too much, a light that hurts, a smell that will not leave, a room that is too warm in winter.
  • Impossible phenomena. New things belonging to neither world, as distortion makes new tones: rain falling upwards in one yard, a shadow cast towards the light, a voice from an empty well.
  • Sympathetic resonance. People already off their pitch (the grieving, the fevered, the sleepless) hear it first, are drawn to it, and dream of it.
  • A new door. If the Dissonance lingers long enough, the place takes its pitch and becomes an off-key place itself.

The True Note

What holds the Dissonance off is not force but tune. It is cancelled, not drowned: the true note held against it. Names spoken aloud, a bell rung in tune, a song sung true, the right count kept, a hearth tended in the old way: whatever restores a place's own pitch thins the Dissonance there and closes what was opening. Loud noise, fire, and weapons do nothing against it; the only defence that works is to be more fully what the true world is.

Dissonant Workings

The Lowered Threshold · Listening Below · The Answering Call · Unsinging · The Put-Out Lamp · The False Count · Between Beats · Calling the Note Home

The Lowered Threshold

Purpose/How It Works
Lowers the threshold between one place and its reflection until a door stands open: the way into the Dissonance, or the way something on the other side comes out.
Notable Exceptions
It opens only where the world's pitch is already bent, in an off-key place or where the Dissonance has lingered; anywhere else it fails, and the failure still costs. The door does not close when the caster wants it to, only when the true note is held against it or the beat moves on.
Example Use
A caster who lost a child walks the Long Stair's hill at night and sings the door open, to go after a voice; the keeping grove finds the mouth too warm for a month afterwards.
Typical Cost/Power Source
Taken from the caster's own Pattern, more than any other working: each door leaves them a step further from their own note.
Casting Methods
A song sung through with every note a half-step low, a long hour at the place. A name of the place's dead spoken wrongly, over and over, through a night.
Range/Duration
One doorway, room, or stretch of ground. Until it is closed or the beat moves on.

Listening Below

Purpose/How It Works
Lets the caster hear the reflection of the place where they stand: what moves in its copy, how near the Dissonance presses, and what in it is listening back.
Notable Exceptions
What is heard is the beat, not words, and it is easily mistaken; a caster who listens too long is heard in turn, and something on the other side learns where they are.
Example Use
A keeper's estranged son, taught from a sealed book, listens at the Turning House to learn whether the wheel is slowing, and hears the grinding floor counting his steps.
Typical Cost/Power Source
The caster's Pattern, a little each time; frequent listeners begin to hear the other side unbidden, at night, as the grieving and the sleepless do.
Casting Methods
An ear to stone or water, humming one note held just under true, a few slow breaths to a minute.
Range/Duration
The place the caster stands in. As long as they hold the note.

The Answering Call

Purpose/How It Works
Calls through an open door, or a thin one, for something of the Dissonance to answer, and draws it towards the caster's voice.
Notable Exceptions
The caster chooses whether to call, never what answers: the tales say a Deepswell comes most often, slowly, and an Offnote when it is least wanted. Nothing that answers is bound by the call.
Example Use
Those who learned dissonant magic "from something that answered" learned it this way, by calling and surviving the reply.
Typical Cost/Power Source
The caster's Pattern, and whatever the answer takes; the call also tunes the caster to what answered, so it can find them again.
Casting Methods
Speaking one's own name a half-step low into a door, three times, a few heartbeats each. A long call sung into an off-key place at dusk.
Range/Duration
Whatever is near enough on the other side to hear. Until something answers.

Unsinging

Purpose/How It Works
Detunes a place from its own pitch, so that the Dissonance lies closer there: the first step towards making it an off-key place.
Notable Exceptions
Slow work: one casting only bends the pitch, and the place recovers if its people keep their true note (names spoken, bells in tune, the count kept). Where that note is kept well, unsinging fails.
Example Use
A caster unsings a rival's mill-yard over a season; the dogs stop going in, the lamps burn dim, and the miller's household begins to dream of a grinding floor.
Typical Cost/Power Source
The caster's Pattern; and, folk say, something of every person who lives in the place unsung.
Casting Methods
Its own songs and sayings, sung or said wrongly, every night for weeks. A bell struck out of tune on its threshold.
Range/Duration
A house, a yard, a field. Lasting until the place is sung true again, or for good if the Dissonance lingers.

The Put-Out Lamp

Purpose/How It Works
Puts out light, sound, or warmth in one place, as a Quencher does, and leaves a dead spot behind.
Notable Exceptions
Fire, noise, and more lamps do nothing against it; only the true note thins it, as with any dead spot. The caster cannot choose which of light, sound, or warmth goes out first.
Example Use
A thief puts out the watch-room of a tally hall, and the night ward sits beside a lamp that burns and lights nothing while the jars are carried out.
Typical Cost/Power Source
The caster's Pattern; casters who use it often carry a little of the cold about them.
Casting Methods
A hand closed over a flame while the caster breathes out against the count, a few heartbeats.
Range/Duration
A room or a yard. Seasons or years, unless sung away.

The False Count

Purpose/How It Works
Makes something impossible in the true world, as an Offnote does: a stair one step longer each time, rain falling upwards, a door that opens on the room just left. Each making follows one law of its own.
Notable Exceptions
The making has a will of its own once made, and the caster cannot always unmake it; it breaks when someone names it aloud for what it truly is.
Example Use
A caster hides a cellar from a lord's men: every time they count the doors of the house, the count comes out one fewer.
Typical Cost/Power Source
The caster's Pattern; each making is said to leave its maker a little more like the thing made.
Casting Methods
Counting something aloud and getting it wrong on purpose, as long as the count takes. A true name said with one sound changed.
Range/Duration
One thing or one room. Until it is named for what it is, or it wanders off.

Between Beats

Purpose/How It Works
Lets the caster step half into the beat, so that they swell and fade with the Dissonance: hard to see, hard to hear, and hard to find, for a while.
Notable Exceptions
Those who stay between beats too long fade further than they meant to; the tales of casters never found again begin with this working.
Example Use
A caster hunted by a hold's wardens walks between beats down a lit passage, and the wardens remember the passage as longer than it is.
Typical Cost/Power Source
The caster's Pattern; afterwards their shadow falls a little late, or their voice does not quite match their mouth, for a day or for good.
Casting Methods
A held breath and a slow pulse matched to a beat only the caster hears, a few heartbeats.
Range/Duration
The caster alone. A few breaths to a short while.

Calling the Note Home

Purpose/How It Works
Tries to pull a caster's own note back towards true, undoing a part of what dissonant magic has cost them. It is the one working in the sealed books meant to mend.
Notable Exceptions
It rarely works. It needs someone who knew the caster before, to speak their name truly, and it cannot mend what the Dissonance has already taken; casters who try it alone come back further off.
Example Use
A caster near the end of her note comes home to her fold and asks her sister to say her name at the count, every night of a winter.
Typical Cost/Power Source
Paid by the one who calls as well as the one called: both are said to lose a little sleep for the rest of their lives.
Casting Methods
The caster's own name spoken truly by another, and answered, through a long night or many nights.
Range/Duration
One caster. As long as the true name is kept.

Inhabitants

Many kinds live in the Dissonance, most born of the reflection itself and each with its own name. Three are known well enough to be named in the tales; others are left for those who meet them, and some may have an origin no one knows.

  • Deepswells: never seen first; they come as the dread before sight, a swelling pressure that rises as they near.
  • Quenchers: they feed where light, sound, and warmth go out, and leave dead spots where they have been.
  • Offnotes: the makers of impossible things, never the same shape twice, each one a phenomenon with a will.

Knowledge

The Dissonance is the least known thing within the world's reach. Even most Veil-Walkers know it only by rumour. Those who know more refuse the fare and will not speak of it unless forced, and forcing them brings its own complications. What scholars write about it is guesswork from the few who came back, and those few rarely agree.

Tensions

  • The sealed books. A few old faiths keep books on dissonant magic under seal, as a warning; every generation someone argues they should be burned, and someone else that burning them would only leave the next caster to learn it from the dead.
  • A guide who will not go. A Veil-Walker who once crossed into the Dissonance and came back is the only guide who could lead a party out of it, and is offered more than any guide has been paid to go in again; it has not said no.
  • The hamlet that is getting quieter. A Leeward Folds hamlet near the Quiet Orchard has had three winters of fewer voices at the count, dead spots in the byre, and children who dream the same orchard; its elders say a hamlet does not become an off-key place, and want no one told.

What Is Not Known

How many off-key places there are, and whether the Dissonance has any depth beyond the world it copies; whether its inhabitants were ever anything else; whether the reflection holds the past of the world as well as its present; and whether the true note could ever close it for good.

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also