Motes

A mote is a place where the veil between this world and the Inner Planes has worn thin on its own, thin enough that the plane behind it comes through into the ground and the air. Nobody cut it, and nobody opened it. There is one to each of the four elements, Air, Earth, Fire and Water, and the mixtures where two elements meet are counted the same way: a mote of Ice, one of Magma, one of Slime, one of Smoke. For the eight planes mixed from an element and a pole of energy, and for the poles themselves, positive and negative, no mote is named anywhere. Those are reached by portal, or by ritual, or not at all.

The One with Ground Under It

Of the four elemental motes only the Water one has been walked, and it was walked by men who did not know they were doing it. The Valiant Few went through the sodden stretch of Gaba Alam on a bandit hunt, took it for one more of the eastern woods’ curiosities, and came out the far side with wet bread and a cough Koa could not put down for days.

The shape of the thing arrived long afterwards, and from two directions. A relief map at the Twisted Grove laid out sacred geometry: sites on the planar boundary set at equal distances around the keep, marked with three symbols for life, for death, and for a third nobody there could identify (S3E38). Then a well-used book on that same geometry reached Mikhail from his old teacher Kadero, with a note about three gold owed, and gave the mathematics the map was drawn on (S4E41). The identification of the sodden ground rests on those two things together.

How Far Out They Are Felt

The Water mote was known for a mile or two around, which is as far as the wet ever carried. Walking the Loshev road home from the Twisted Grove with the keeps behind them, the Valiant Few picked up its wet-cold prickle from a good distance outside that, on ground that had never carried it before.

What they made of it is that the mote is getting bigger, and that it is their own doing: the positive and negative energies that had been fighting each other over Idir have collapsed in together and left more room for the planes behind the veil to press into it. That is a theory arrived at on the road home, and the plainer possibility they could not rule out is that they walked closer to the sodden ground than they ever had. They did not go in to settle it.

They do know roughly where all of the motes sit, off the maps in the keeps’ map rooms. The version of it that frightens them is arithmetic: motes that keep widening eventually reach one another, and where two meet there would be a band of ground with two planes coming through it, standing across a country that people have to cross.

Not the Nodes

A mote and an elemental node get taken for one another constantly, and they are opposites. A mote occurs. A node was built: a tapping the Mól cut so that power could be drawn straight out of an elemental plane and put to work on this side. Where the Empire wanted a plane it went and made an opening, and it did not wait on a thin place to do it. Nodes turn up across Erôth as ruin, and a few of them are still running. A mote is simply where the veil is worn, and there is nothing in one to switch off.