The Krystallis Incursion

Overview

The oldest of the three Incursions on Caeldon. Krystallis broke through the Boundary over a remote dry valley on the far side, at the edge of what is now the Glassbelt, set it into lattice, and was driven out when Ignis, Aqua, and Lux bore on it through their planes. The valley still stands as it was stopped: the Hanging Vale.

No people lived in the valley, and nobody saw the Incursion while it ran.

The Lattice

The breach opened over a side-valley in the inland rim of the later Rimward Basins. The Lattice of Silence spread down it: thornscrub and stone set into clear crystal, a stream straightened into a rod of standing water, a hawk stopped in its stoop. The beasts it reached became Shard-Hosts and walked its edge in lines: a pack of dun dogs gone clear as ice, a hawk-shaped thing that no longer needed to fly, all moving together and without a sound.

The Breaking

Ignis, Aqua, and Lux bore on the lattice through their planes at once, heat, flow, and possibility, until its edge cracked and stopped, and pressed Krystallis back out through the Boundary. How the Primes do this is told in the Primes' intervention.

What had turned did not turn back. The lattice inside the valley stayed, dead: it no longer grows, and the Shard-Hosts stand where the breaking stopped them.

Historical Significance

It is the first time a foreign law held ground on Caeldon, and the only Incursion that took no one. Its mark is older than every people now on the far side; Orc kindreds have known the valley as long as they have kept wells on the rim, and Glassbelt crossers carried it to the cradle side as the tale of a silent valley.

It is still the one place where Crystallization is caught. Shard-hunters slip past the well-keepers at its mouth after crystal no jeweller can cut, the one treasure of the valley, and some never walk out: they stand among the crystal still, clear as glass and, the tales say, still awake. Rim kindreds keep a curse from it, "may you stand in the Vale", and a lullaby that counts the stopped hawk, the stopped stream, and the stopped thief, so that children learn the valley's shape before they learn its name. Well-keepers have hanged shard-hunters at the valley mouth as a warning, and the next ones have walked in past the gallows.