Blackmouth Unveiled

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Strangeness on the Broken City

The City of Arches

The city’s gothic architecture is run through with fragments of the grand plan of the Rebirth, pieces of a complex occult mechanism scattered like an immense model kit cast aside half-built. It can be found in the alignment of streets, in particular buildings and statuary, the reshaping of rivers and the number of bricks used to form the archways of the bridges. And none of it makes sense. There are clusters of streets geomantically aligned to channel leylines that never existed, statues with subtle occult symbolism found in odd and alien alignments, grant sigils formed of road and steel and pipe beneath, and every span supported by sweeping archways formed of a prime number of stones.

The nature and purpose of all these fragments are unknown and can only be guessed at by context. Decades of analysis by magical Scrutiny has worn the mysteries like the patina of a centuries of pilgrims hands polish a saint’s statue, such that detail and understanding have been wiped away by curiosity, benediction and time. Stranger still, the Awakened have continued to find more occult details in the city’s fabric, even now more than a century since the Rebirth faltered or in parts of the city that were not even built until decades later. Sometimes it is subtle, like fresh eyes noticing the recurring motifs in a section of street, and sometimes it is stranger, like a statue of a sleeping woman dug up like a time capsule from beneath a burned tenement.

Examples

• The streets in Merritt, all angled slightly out of sync with the adjoining neighbourhoods and focusing toward the small park in the centre.
• The Five Circles of east Ormwood. An arrangement of five small circular parks, surrounded by traffic circles (a one-way traffic flow, like a block-sized roundabout). Each has a statue of a founding figure of the city - Andrew Nathaniel Saul, Jonathan Sherburn, Sebastian Moth, Daniel Niven, and General Emile Lachance. Each statue is posed in a subtle and slightly warped representation of one of the Watchtowers, all of them standing and looking directly away from Arkwright Park that stands equidistant between the Five Circles. The parks and statues were built in the 1870s, long after the Rebirth had collapsed.

The Broken City

Blackmouth is a broken city. Other supernaturals and even Sleepers can feel something is wrong about the city, though most put it down to economic depression, the cold north Atlantic climate or the odd architecture. The Awakened feel it more keenly, the city’s broken geomancy pressing on their Peripheral Mage Sight in a thousand subtle ways. The most common forms these take are odd synaesthetic sensations or faint kinesthetic disturbances that pass as swiftly as they arrive, but some mages experience stranger sensations or find that they linger longer than most.

Deeper analysis by Focussed Sight and Unveiling spells reveals a world that is somehow cracked. The city’s leylines are so tangled and broken that the world seems to have cracked around them, bleeding curdled resonances and conceptual fragments through hair-thin cracks like spiderwebs from edges and corners throughout the city. The effect is most prominent where the leylines should be, but the cracks may be found anywhere and do not always remain in the same location.

The synaesthetic disturbances to mage Sight are stronger and more common near these cracks and other phenomena may also occur, often in the form of sleep disturbances, hallucinations, intrusive thoughts and emotional instability. Disruptions in the boundaries between worlds can also occur around these cracks, creating verges and irises where spirits, ghosts or other stranger entities may more easily slip through into the world or an unfortunate Sleeper may wander into an otherworld.

There have been many theories about these cracks since they were first discovered in the wake of the collapse of the Rebirth, but none have proven conclusive. Arguments over what the cracks are and how to deal with them were among the multitude of causes for the Upheavals of the 19th century, and they continue to be a Mystery worthy of obsession. The currently prevailing theory is that they are scabs where the Tapestry is healing from the wounds wrought by the Rebirth, not inherently dangerous but may act as a weak point where infection may penetrate the Fallen World from Outside.