Worlds to play, cards to import

A siege-molded still holding a ruined hill fort in the Granlands, one hundred and fifty years after the order to stand down never came.

Wall-eating larvae bred to undermine Longwar fortresses, now gnawing mine props and gallery timber through the Ferruhm Reaches.

Signal-fire wisps on the Riverrun water that beckon barges toward the Longwar's old assault points — now shoals, pilings, and weirs.

A pile-boring fen borer that eats the legs out from under the Saltmarches' stilt-towns — the slow siege every fen village is always quietly losing.

The antlered apex of the deep Rootwild — the reason the marked paths bend, and the oldest thing the hollow-towns still leave the forest to.

Iron-grafted siege aurochs of the Ferruhm Reaches, bred to break walls in the Longwar and still unable to abide a flat surface standing.

A dawn haunting of the Ferruhm Quarter: boots, count-cadence, and a muster bell no tower holds, drilling in a yard that burned before the Oaths.

On the lowest spring tides, the drowned Longwar villages of the Saltmarches fill with standing ranks — and fen-folk who call the stand-down watch them disperse.

The thing the deep Rootwild shrines defer to. Every shrine faces away from one grove; no Sylvithi will bond a tree within a day's walk of it; and no one will say what 'it' is.

Whatever the deepest Deepworks galleries were sealed against. Miners knocked, the rumour runs, and something knocked back — in patterns, and always one knock short.

One fused field in the Pyrelands where arrows fall out of a clear sky — real, ancient, whole — as they have on and off for a hundred and fifty years.

A dusk haunting of the Pyrelands glass: a column of soldiers marching inside the fused ground, and travellers who fall into step above it are carried somewhere else.

Something under the Riverspine older than river-law — never seen, never named in any contract, and paid by every Maru barge at three reaches without one written word requiring it.

A vast silhouette some claim to see deep in the Pyrelands' fused glass at certain sun angles — in glass that, glassmakers quietly insist, no fire of the war could have made.

Battlefield-medic beetles of the Saltmarches that find the sleeping and treat them — with flawless sutures and diagnoses a hundred and fifty years old.

War-bred counting crows that roost over the Petitioners' Camp and count the living aloud, in the voices of dead quartermasters.

The standing centre of certain old Granlands fields, left unharvested by custom older than the Oaths — for something believed to walk the wheat the night after reaping.

A sentry haunting at a high Ferruhm pass that still challenges travellers for a password one hundred and fifty years out of date.

Rootwild pack-hunters that run the root-lattices above the forest floor and take prey from overhead — the reason travellers watch up, not back.

A cask-cracking fen crab of the Saltmarches with a genius for finding buried caches — the grey trade's most consistent loss and the excise's favourite joke.

Brine-coated wolves of the Saltmarches that dive the fen pools for the war's drowned dead — and have taught their young that the dead are a crop.

A grey moth of the Echo Halls whose wing-dust deadens sound — the only vermin in the realm that eats sung law by silencing the rooms it lives in.

A bold fox-jackal of the city margins that has moved into the Petitioners' Camp in numbers, grinning at fires and thieving from the realm's most desperate.

An eyeless, boneless-seeming thing of the Grey Cellars that eats preserved goods through their sealed casks — and is rumoured, correctly, to eat other things for pay.