The Breach

A Breach is a window into the Stillness right in the world: Grain Drifts and Stillmetal Veins grow at its lips, and closed on purpose — with living flux or a Thaw Lantern — it collapses into a Still Sky Shard. But it chills the flux and the living around it. A Snarl left alone twists the flux to the very bottom, and the bottom splits: the ground opens into a Breach. Look into the crack — its walls drop away into a chasm, and from below shines the sky of the still hour: a low amber sun, stars by day, dust that hangs and does not fall.

StillHollow

Still air rises from a Breach: everything living slows near it, and whoever falls into the crack freezes. The flux of your patch of land drains down and stills; rime creeps over the lips, grass turns into still turf, water into glass. At night a Laggard may climb out of the crack.

The Stillness brings up its own: after a minute a grain drift full of still grains gathers at the lips (it glimmers), then one every three minutes; stillmetal veins show in the walls. After half an hour a Breach seals over by itself and leaves only a scar of rimed stone. Close it sooner and the Still Sky collapses into a Still Sky Shard, leaving stillmetal and rimed stone at the lips. A Breach drinks the flux of its patch of land, so hold it at three quarters of the riverbed or more for half a minute — with a Wellspring, a skein, a Reservoir — or set a Thaw Lantern nearby: it thaws the Breach, and the drifts and veins give up freshet ore as well.

A Still Sky Shard goes into the Crown of the Wheel and into windows on the Stillness: it is the sky of the still hour itself in a piece of glass. From one shard and eight glass the Flux Workbench makes eight Stillsky Glass: a window that always shows the Stillness — a slate sky with stars by day, a low amber sun, clouds that do not drift and dust behind the glass. Panes side by side join into one window.