The Pull of Extremes

Overview

The Pull of Extremes is what a thin place does, slowly, to the people who live beside it. What comes through such a place, a frost in high summer, a fire nobody lit, a creature from no country of this world, is the planar bleed; the pull is its long work on bodies and tempers. It is not a fever or a wound but a drift. A village beside a zone of fire runs hot-tempered and feverish; a town on a thin spot to the Scourge quarrels; a hamlet by a still spring heals slowly and changes nothing. Its people are rarely ill enough for bed; over a lifetime they grow a little more like the plane next door.

Cause

Where the Veil is thin, a Harmonic or an extreme plane presses on the Material Plane, and long exposure to one such pressure warps both the land and the minds of those who stay (see The Material Plane). A Resonant Zone that lasts for generations does the same, and so does a thin spot that leans towards a plane of lack or surplus. The body's own rhythm is pulled a little off true, year on year, towards the source's nature.

Who It Strikes

Communities, rather than individuals: harvesters who live by a zone's yield, the settlers of zones such as the Ageless Spring, and towns that grow on thin ground for the trade it brings. Children born and raised there take it most deeply; incomers take years to show it; travellers passing through take nothing. Peoples with a strong sense of vitality and rhythm, Elves above all, notice it in themselves soonest.

Signs and Course

The signs follow the source. Beside fire and the Crucible: short tempers, night sweats, low fevers that come and go. Near a thin spot to the Scourge: quarrels, startles, and the occasional fit of rage. By still water and the Frozen Moment: wounds that close slowly, slow speech, and a reluctance to change anything. Near the Dreaming Veil: vivid, shared dreams and sleepwalking. Beside places of memory or silence: forgetfulness in the old and too-long memories in the young.

The course is measured in years. It worsens while one stays, eases slowly after leaving, and often does not ease in those raised to it. Over generations a place's births can turn strange, with marks, colours, and gifts that echo the source; these belong to Ley-Warp and to the imprinted traits of Mythic Traits and Demigods, not to the bleed itself.

Contagion

Nobody catches it from another; it is shared by everyone in a place, which makes it look catching.

Treatment and Its Limits

The one real cure is distance, and it is costly, since people live beside a zone for what it gives. Families who can send children away for seasons, or send the worst-struck to kin elsewhere. Each sign is treated as its ordinary twin: cooling teas for the fevers, rest and company for the tempers, good food and clean dressings for the slow wounds (see Medieval Ordinary Access Reference). Wards and boundary rites ease the bleed at a house's walls but do not stop it. Holding back the zone itself always costs someone, whether by counter-resonance, by starving it, or by a god's help that must be repaid.

Mortality

The pull seldom kills by itself. It shortens tempers more than lives, though the fevers weaken the old, rages end in deaths, and slow-healing wounds go bad. What it leaves is a people shaped by its place.

Lore and Belief

Zone-side folk rarely call it a sickness; they call it the place's temper, and say a child "has the spring in it" or "has the fire in it". Outsiders take it for a curse on the place or for the bad character of its people. Some hold that it is the zone's way of claiming those who profit from it.

In the Medieval Era

The pull is common wherever people live by a zone or a thin spot, and is met as a local condition, not a disease. Physicians in cities on thin ground know their town's peculiar complaints and treat them as part of practice. Elsewhere it is a reputation: that valley's folk are hot, that spring's folk never change their minds.

Where It Appears

• The Material Plane (Planar Bleed, the Pull of Extremes)
• Overview: Resonant Zones
• Mythic Traits and Demigods (imprinted traits)
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Planes
• the Writers' Guide chapter Writing in the Medieval Era