The Nameless Current

Overview

The Nameless Current, the face of the Unformed against purpose, is the absence of direction: flow from before any flow found a course.

Picture the world before the first river cut its bed, when water simply moved, with no source and no mouth. It is not stillness; it is motion with no heading, the state in which upstream and downstream, source and sea, are not yet separate. Where it runs, the name of where one was going falls away, and only the going is left.

It is "Nameless" because it has no destination to name it by, and a "Current" because it carries everything along and arrives nowhere.

Appearance and Manifestation

Nothing banks it, so nothing shapes it; it appears as a dissolution of the path.

The Visual

• Visuals: The horizon goes.
• Scale: A corridor that stretches without end both ways, or a continent turned one slow whirlpool.

The Sound

• Sound: Waterfall, wind and tide merged into one rushing roar that drowns your footsteps and your own thinking.
• The Echo: A steady rush that never quickens, never slows and never arrives.

The Feeling

• Touch: Buoyancy that frightens rather than comforts: the ground slipping from under your feet, a pull in every direction.
• Thought: Plans float off like leaves on a stream. Your destination's name slips away like something you once dreamed; "start" and "finish" run together into "Drift."

Nature and Motivation

The Nature of the Unformed

Purpose does not anger it; it simply finds nothing to grip, as with all the Unformed.

The Motivation: The Great Drifting

It wants only to wash away the destination: to leave the traveller walking with no goal, the builder building with no plan, the maker making with no purpose. Restless souls call this freedom from expectation; the Current calls it nothing, and carries as water carries.

Abilities and Powers

The Loss of Vector

It takes the direction out of a being or a thing.

• Effect: A thrown spear curves and never lands; a spoken word circles back to the speaker; a walker can no longer say where they were bound.
• Cost: The victim drifts like a leaf on a stream, aware and unable to steer.

The Drift Field

In its field directions trade places. A person sets out north and arrives south; an arrow loosed true misses by a mile.

• Transmission: The Drift moves through the intentions of those inside it as easily as through water, as Unformed fields do.
• Its victims: Beasts and people left walking without destination until they fall are the Strayed.

The River of Nowhere

It can make a being part of its flow.

• Effect: The body moves with the Current and cannot stop; the Current picks every turn.
• Effect: The swept one sees the banks go by and never reaches them.

The Aimless Tide

At full strength it would take every heading away at once, from the aims of the Primes to the roads of the Material Plane, until everything was in transit and nothing arrived.

The Threat to the Cosmos

It ends arrival.

• To Zephyr Prime: It is wind with no heading, the Unbound Gale with nowhere to blow.
• To Terra Prime: It is the slow wear that turns the Iron Backbone's roads to silt.
• To the Material Plane: Caravans set out and never reach market; a council debates for years and decides nothing.

The Cascade Failure

At the Boundary it confuses which way is "Inside" and which "Outside" (see the cascade failure).

Relationships

With the Primes

The Nameless Current flows from the same substrate the Primes differentiated out of, before anything had a direction. It is their kin and their shadow: motion that never found its own course as the Primes did.

• Zephyr Prime: The Current is the wind before the storm, the breeze before the gale: Zephyr's motion before it found a heading, close kin to the Gale itself.
• Terra Prime: The Current is the erosion before the canyon, the silt before the delta. It wears at Terra's foundations without ever building on them.
• Aqua Prime: The Current is the water before the river, the stream before anyone named its mouth.

With the Beyonders

The Beyonders are wary of it; an incursion that cannot aim is only a drift.

With the Cast-Outs

A Cast-Out pursues one goal without rest, and the Current would leave that pursuit going nowhere (see the overview).

With Other Unformed

Next to the Echoing Dark, the Current takes not every name but the name of where one is going, and with it the reason to go there. It and the Fractured Mirror pull opposite ways, the Mirror offering every path at once and the Current none; neither leaves a self that can choose a road. Closest to it lie the Rootless Tree and the Silent Tide, each with its own unanswered question; see their pages.

Encounters and Legends

The City of No Shore

A city weary of striving felt the Current's easy pull and let it take them. People set out each morning and never arrived; vows were sworn and never kept. When the Current passed, the city still stood, its people still walking its streets in circles.

The Explorer's Path

Deep in unmapped country an explorer felt the Current at his back and took it as leave never to choose a heading again. He folded his map away. He is still walking, the stories say, and has never arrived anywhere.

The Cairn-Builder

A caravan crossing open country met the Drift, and its drovers began to follow a Strayed herd that seemed to know the way. Every man who followed lost his own heading. The guide did not follow. She built a cairn, walked a hundred paces to the next rise, built another, and called the caravan to each one in turn. It took her nine days to cover a morning's road, and she brought out every wagon. Drovers on that road still add a stone to any cairn they pass.

The Last Shore

Those steered home out of the Drift sometimes describe a shore far inside it, and the few who credit them take it for the first destination ever reached.

Weaknesses and Countermeasures

The Power of Purpose

It cannot carry off someone who knows where they are going and keeps going there.

• Strategy: Name a destination, even a near one, and accept the long road to it.

The Power of Direction

A step taken towards something, a word said to someone in particular: each aimed act is a fixed point the Current must flow around.

• Strategy: Steer. Pick a landmark and walk to it, then pick the next.

The Power of the Primes

The Primes set the Resonance of Direction against it: Zephyr Prime in wind and flight, Terra Prime in structure and stability, Aqua Prime in the river and the shore.

Role in the Cosmology

The Nameless Current is the ghost of the aimless: the reminder that motion means something only when it is going somewhere.