Mire

Mire is what murk threatens: it silts the ground, breeds creatures and clings to your feet. Keep murk below a third of the riverbed, and there will be no mire. Past that threshold the ground silts over, stone turns porous, mire creeps up the trunks, grasses turn into threads. Mire grows down and along the water sooner than up: it runs. Every silted block eats a little murk.

Murk

Mire has a heart — the Mire Hummock: it throbs, smothers the ground around it, raises sprouts and lashes. A Mire Vent breathes in four beats and exhales gnats, a ripe blister bursts with silt or with a leech, and thick ooze gathers into a Mire Clot. Silting heals mire creatures; the living it mires and wounds.

Mire lasts as long as the murk does. Bring the murk below a third of the riverbed and the ground falls back to mud, stone to Pitted Stone, blisters run off as ooze, and ooze dries into silt. A hummock without murk withers on its own. Murk is cleared by the Purifier, lumenash, Clearwort and the Murk Druse — or carried off in a flask. The place's current settles into the pores of Pitted Stone: a pickaxe without Silk Touch now and then knocks a shard out of it.

Some places need no workshop to grow murk. In a Stagnant Backwater the water has not moved for years and the murk settles on its own: the land holds a little over a third of its riverbed from birth. Mire lives there through no one's fault, the trees stand as dead husks, gnats swarm over the water and gas bubbles up from the bottom. A cleansed backwater silts up again within hours, and the mire does not spread past its edge: the neighbors have nothing to feed it.

MurkStill