The Silent Tide

Overview

The Silent Tide, the Unformed pressing against return, is the absence of the cycle: water from before any wave found its rhythm.

It precedes the first turning tide, when water was a mass that moved with no rhythm. It is not calm; it is motion that never comes back, the state in which ebb and flow, high and low, beginning and end are undivided. Where it draws, the back-and-forth that lets anything recover stops.

It is "Silent" because it never breaks on a shore, and a "Tide" because it pulls everything in and never lets it go.

Appearance and Manifestation

Crest and trough would give it form; lacking both, it appears as a dissolution of the rhythm.

The Visual

• Visuals: The pulse goes out of things.
• Scale: A ripple from a dropped stone that runs out to the puddle's edge and never comes back, or a world drawn out into one long, unbroken swell.

The Sound

• Sound: Cadence goes. A song becomes one sustained note, a conversation words without pauses, a heartbeat one continuous hum.
• The Echo: A low hum that never rises or falls: a wave that never crashes, a breath drawn in without end.

The Feeling

• Touch: Drag, like a deep undertow: your limbs move as if through syrup, and something pulls you one way only.
• Thought: You try to think in a circle and the thought runs out in a line. "Repeat" and "return" lose their meaning, and only "Pull" is left.

Nature and Motivation

The Nature of the Unformed

It does not oppose return; like all the Unformed, it is simply where returning fails.

The Motivation: The Great Suction

Its drift is always towards removing the return: to draw a breath in that never turns to let out, stretch a heartbeat into one long throb, carry one season on without its ever coming round. The weary call this freedom from repetition; the Tide only pulls, and has no notion of what it frees or binds.

Abilities and Powers

The Loss of Rhythm

It takes the cycle out of a being, a thing, or an idea.

• Effect: A clock's hands run on and never come round; a fire burns without flicker; a person breathes in and goes on breathing in.
• Cost: The victim is drawn on and on, a wave that never breaks, aware of the pull and unable to turn back from it.

The Suction Field

In its field no cycle completes. The day runs on and never comes round to night; a sleeper sinks ever deeper and never surfaces; a flower opens and goes on opening.

• Transmission: The Suction works through the bodily rhythms of those inside it, breath and pulse first, as Unformed fields do.

The Ocean of One Breath

It can draw a being into its pull.

• Effect: Body and breath are carried on in a single inhalation that never turns; the Tide sets the direction.
• Effect: The held one feels the release that should come and never reach it.

The Unreturning Tide

At full strength it would draw every cycle out into one line at once, from the rhythms of the Primes to the Material Plane's seasons.

The Threat to the Cosmos

It ends the turn.

• To Aqua Prime: It draws the Surging Deep on in one swell, so the flow never runs back.
• To Zephyr Prime: It flattens the Unbound Gale's gusts and lulls into one steady drag.
• To the Material Plane: Harvests never come round, nobody rests between labours, and nothing that has gone wrong gets a second season to put it right.

The Cascade Failure

At the Boundary it turns the give and take of tension between "Inside" and "Outside" into a one-way draw (see the cascade failure).

Relationships

With the Primes

The Silent Tide is drawn from the same substrate as the Primes, before anything learned to cycle. That makes it their kin and their shadow: a pull that never settled into a rhythm of its own.

• Aqua Prime: The Tide is the water before the wave, the river before the rapids, the ocean before the tide: Aqua's own element with Aqua's return taken out of it.
• Zephyr Prime: The Tide is the air before the wind, the breeze before the gale, the storm before the calm.
• Terra Prime: The Tide is the earth before the seasons, the stone before the erosion, the mountain before the landslide.
• Aion Prime: The Tide is time before it learned to come round: the year that never turns, the hour that never comes back.
• Ignis Prime: Its renewal needs the return the Tide denies; see its page.

With the Beyonders

The Beyonders are wary of it; their own alien cycles would be drawn out into one endless line.

With the Cast-Outs

A Cast-Out holds its world to one shape, and the Tide would leave nothing to come round again (see the overview).

With Other Unformed

Next to the Echoing Dark, the Tide takes not the word but the refrain. It lies closest to the Nameless Current: the Current asks "Where are you going?", the Tide "Will you ever come back?" Against the Great Slumber it is the other extreme: the Slumber stops motion altogether, the Tide lets it run on without ever returning, and neither leaves a self that can begin again.

Encounters and Legends

The City of One Breath

A city tired of the round of birth and death felt the Tide's long pull and went with it. Its people breathed in and went on breathing in; the sun climbed and never came down; one season ran on and never turned. When the Tide drew off, the city was still there under a noon that had never ended, its people unable to tell whether they were alive or dead.

The Dancer's Step

A dancer tired of repeating her steps felt the Tide come in beneath the music one night and leaned into it. She stepped forward and never stepped back, and her dance ran out in one endless line.

The Last Wave

Sailors drawn back out of the Suction claim one wave still breaks deep inside it, the first ever to fall back.

The Drummer's Boats

A fishing fleet was caught on an ebb that ran out and never turned, and the boats were drawn seaward all one night. In the lead boat an old drummer kept the stroke, out and back, out and back, and every boat that rowed to her drum came home on the morning tide. One crew would not listen and rowed hard straight for shore. The coast still watches for that boat; it is said to be out there yet, rowing on one long stroke.

Weaknesses and Countermeasures

The Power of Rhythm

It cannot hold someone who keeps returning: breathing out after breathing in, coming home after going out.

• Strategy: Accept repetition as the price of recovery, and do the familiar thing again.

The Power of the Cycle

A breath let out, a step taken back, a task finished and begun anew: every completed round breaks the pull.

• Strategy: Count, chant, keep a beat, and come back to where you started.

The Power of the Primes

The Primes keep the world turning through the Resonance of the Cycle: Aqua Prime in the tide and the flow, Zephyr Prime in the wind and the return, Terra Prime in the seasons and the cycle.

Role in the Cosmology

The Silent Tide is the ghost of the unreturning: the reminder that what goes out must be able to come back.