Every harbour-master’s chart in the Reaches has, in its western Veiled-Waters quadrant, a region marked in green. The shading is consistent across all modern chart-houses. The boundary is approximate. The instruction is absolute: do not sail through it; do not sail close to it; do not, if at all possible, sail in sight of it after dark.
This is the Bloom.
The Bloom is what the Verdant has done to a cluster. There were once, before the Unmaking, an unknown number of inhabited isles on this stretch of the western Veiled Waters; afterward, an unknown number of ruined ones, similar in character to the Grey. At some point — the chart-houses do not agree on when, and the Wren Academy will not commit to a date — the Verdant came in. It came slowly. It did not retreat. It is still spreading, very slowly, at the cluster’s outer edges, year by year. The boundary the chart-houses draw is the boundary as of three or four years prior. It is always slightly out of date.
What a traveller seeing the Bloom from a safe distance — eight or ten miles’ clearance, never less — will observe: a scattering of perhaps forty isles, low, drifting slowly together in their own small currents, all of them green. Not the green of forest. Not the green of moss on stone. A particular saturated green, the colour of a leaf held up against the sun, visible across a distance no ordinary green has any business being visible across. The isles glow faintly in this green even on a grey afternoon. After dark, on a still night, the glow is visible from twenty miles out — a low pale shimmer along the horizon, the way a city’s lights are visible across a bay, except that the Bloom has no cities and no lamps.
What the glow is, the chart-houses will not say. The Spore Circle druids will say, and have published, a paper on it that the rest of the Reaches has politely declined to read. The dominant lay theory among sailors is that the Verdant, on the deepest-affected isles, has reached through the isles’ undersides into the Mistsea below, and that the glow is what its roots are doing down there. The lay theory is not endorsed by any chart-house and is not seriously disputed by any sailor.
There are no commercial routes through the Bloom. There are no surviving inhabitants, or none that the Reaches recognizes. There are, occasionally, reports.
The reports take a particular shape. A vessel, rounding the cluster’s northern edge at the legal distance, observes movement on the surface of one of the inner isles. The movement is consistent with a person — a single human figure, walking at the treeline, sometimes turning to face the observing ship. The figure does not signal. The vessel does not approach. The vessel reports the sighting at the next port, the harbour-master records it, and the entry is filed alongside several hundred similar entries from previous decades. The chart-houses have a standard term for these sightings: walkers. There is no standard explanation. There is, in every harbour-master’s office, a standard instruction to crews making such reports: do not return for a closer look.
Crews who sail the Bloom’s edge for legitimate reasons — the western Veiled Waters trade is small but real — will tell you, after a third drink, several things the chart-houses do not put in writing.
- The wind, near the Bloom, is quieter than it ought to be. The low notes navigators teach their juniors to listen for are absent. There are different notes, deeper, slower, that a careful navigator will notice and a careless one will not.
- The smell of the Bloom, at five miles out on a windward run, is pleasant. Specifically: green, warm, faintly sweet, like a forest in early summer after rain. This is the most-discussed feature of the cluster among sailors who have rounded it. Many of them will admit, if the conversation has gone far enough, that the smell makes them want to sail closer. They do not sail closer. They have learned not to.
- A crewman who has been pricked by a Bloom-thorn — which does happen, on the cluster’s outermost spurs, where unwary sailors occasionally put in for emergency repair — should be left ashore at the next reputable port and not signed for further work. This is not law. It is custom. Senior captains enforce it. Junior captains who do not enforce it sometimes lose their ships, in ways the Reaches does not publish.
The Spore Circle druids, the only formal tradition in the Reaches that studies the Verdant directly, maintain a small outpost on the cluster’s eastern edge. They do not invite visitors. The Wren Academy maintains a courteous correspondence with them. The temples of the Seven do not. Common opinion of the Spore Circle, across the Reaches: they are not helping, and they may not be entirely on our side. Common opinion of the Spore Circle, held by the Spore Circle: the rest of the Reaches has not read our papers.
“Smelled of summer. The whole crew smelled it. Two of them wanted to turn closer. I made them sit below until we’d cleared the rim. Lost a day of run-time. The two who wanted to turn closer thanked me by the next port. Sometimes a captain is paid to be the one who doesn’t smell the smell.”
— ship’s log entry, the Long Argument*, on a routine western Veiled Waters circuit, 411 AU*
The Bloom is the only feature in the Reaches that almost everyone, from temple-priest to harbour-master to drunk sailor, agrees on the same way. It is there. It is dangerous. It is growing. We do not go in. The agreement is so uniform that travellers sometimes ask, gently, whether anyone has tried — whether any organized force has ever attempted to clear the cluster, to map its interior, to do something. The answer varies by source. The summary of the answers, taken together, is the same.
Yes, several times. No, not in living memory. Yes, the records exist. No, they are not lent out.