Newcome
The world the party lives on. Its inhabitants have never needed a name for it and call it, when pressed, "the world." Three weeks after the sky changed, a survey clerk somewhere logged it as Newcome, and that is the name that will stick, because the galaxy names things and the galaxy was here first.
Continents, seas, seasons, and a moon, all exactly as they have always been. Plus, as of this spring, a second moon that no almanac accounts for and a night sky that matches nothing anyone has ever recorded.
What Changed
- The stars. Every constellation is gone, replaced by a sky nobody has seen before. Navigators, astrologers, and diviners who work by the sky are all suddenly, uniformly wrong.
- The second moon. Small, fast, and on a visibly different track from the true moon. Tides have gone strange along every coast.
- The sun. Close enough that nobody notices for weeks. Not quite the sun that was there before.
- Nothing else. Every field, road, city, and person is where it was. This is the part that makes it hard to believe.
What Has Not Changed
Magic works. The seasons turn. Prayer is answered, or answered as often as it ever was. Whatever happened, it did not happen to the world so much as around it.
From the Outside
The charts had something here already. Not a planet: a fault. A stretch of sky that instruments disagreed about, that ships routed around out of habit, that three separate surveys had marked as anomalous and moved on from. It had a catalogue number and a footnote and no explanation.
This spring the fault resolved, and there was a world inside it.