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Most reach-folk will not, in their lives, have any direct trouble from the Verdant. The Bloom is a defined place — see The Bloom: What Sailors Won’t Sail Past — and most working captains pass it wide, most cargo routes never approach it, and most reach-isles are far enough from its edge that an ordinary year contains no encounter worth the telling.
This is not always true.
The Verdant does not stay neatly inside the Bloom. Driftwood with its threads in it can wash up on Quiet Reach beaches a hundred miles from any green isle. A bird-flock from a rooted-down site can carry its quiet over to ordinary forests for a season. A passing skyfarer can come back from a long Veiled crossing with something on their boot — a small green-tinged seed, a thread caught in the cloth — and not know it for weeks. Reach-folk have, over generations, worked out a small set of practical rules for the in-between cases. The rules are not formal. They are not in any almanac. They are passed, like the look-downward warning, from elder to child, from working sailor to greenhand, from grandmother to grandmother across reach-clusters.
A reach-traveller who knows the rules is, by trade-judgement, not foolish. A reach-traveller who does not know them is, in the trade’s mild phrase, unprepared for what they will not encounter often enough to learn from.
Signs of proximity
The Bloom announces itself, in most conditions, before it is in sight. The signs:
- A green tinge in the upper mist — not a colour you would notice if you were not looking for it; a slight wrongness in the white. Sailors who have learned the sign feel it before they see it
- A low resonant hum, just at the edge of hearing. Not a sound, exactly — a pressure. Stonewards (see The Skyfarer’s Trade) often feel it through the stones first and warn the captain
- An unusual stillness in the surface-mist. The Bloom calms its own approaches. A working captain who finds quiet weather thickening on a heading toward the Veiled Reaches will, by trade-instinct, come about
When a working captain calls come about — green ahead, the crew does not argue. Greenhands sometimes do, on their first encounter. They do not, on their second.
Things not to bring aboard
A reach-skyfarer learns, before their tenth crossing, what not to take from a beach or a salvage-site:
- Driftwood with green threads. The threads are usually thin — sometimes only a single fibre running through old wood — and are the most common warning sign on washed-up timber. The trade-rule is if you see a thread, leave it. Working sailors who break this rule are, by reputation, the ones who do not skyfare for long
- Cut greenery from an unknown isle. Bedding made from leaves or fronds gathered on an unfamiliar beach is, by old reach-rule, never brought aboard. If sleep is necessary, the sailor sleeps on bare deck. The rule has the practical force of trade-discipline: a captain who finds an unauthorized greenery-bed in their crew’s quarters will throw it overboard, ask no questions, and watch the responsible sailor for the rest of the crossing
- Anything that hummed when you touched it. Stonewards know this one best. A piece of driftwood, a shell, a stone, a bone fragment — anything that resonates in a way that cannot be accounted for by ordinary acoustics. The rule is plain: leave it
- A song you cannot trace. Most often a fragment — a few notes on the wind, sometimes just a word — that has no source you can identify. Sailors who hear one are taught, by old practice, not to follow. The wind carries strange things. The wind carries some of them with intent
Purification
If a reach-household suspects something has come back with a returning skyfarer — the bedclothes hum at night, a particular item of cargo feels wrong, the family’s children are dreaming the same dream — there is a working folk-rite for it. It is not formal. The temple does not bless it. The temple does not interfere with it.
The rite, in its commonest form:
- The suspected item is taken outside the household
- It is washed thoroughly in salt-water from the rain-barrel (not from the kitchen tap; the distinction matters in the working tradition, though no priest will tell you why)
- It is left in direct sunlight for one full day, turned at midday so that all surfaces have been faced
- It is brought back inside at sundown, examined, and either kept or burned. If it is burned, it is burned outside the household and the smoke is not drawn close to the chimney
Most reach-households have done this rite at least once in generations of memory. Most cannot tell you whether it works. Most do it anyway.
Walkers
The most-told reach-stories are about walkers. The standard description, repeated almost identically across reach-clusters, is this: a figure encountered at a distance, on a remote beach or a lightly-travelled trail or sometimes — in the worst stories — at the edge of the family’s own field at dusk. The figure walks slowly. The figure does not look directly at the witness. The figure has, in some accounts, the build and bearing of a person the witness once knew. In most accounts, this is unverifiable. In the cases where it is verifiable, the person the figure resembles has been gone a long time.
The folk-rules for an encounter, as taught to reach-children, are very specific. They are also strict. They are:
- Do not shout. Walkers do not respond to shouting. Walkers sometimes change pace when shouted at. The change is not in your favour
- Do not run. Walkers do not chase. This does not mean walkers cannot follow. The trade is unanimous on this point: a walker who has not been run from is easier to leave behind than a walker who has
- Do not approach. This includes do-not-help. The figure may appear injured, cold, or otherwise in distress. The figure is not. What the figure is, the trade does not name; what the figure wants, the trade does not pretend to know. The rule is the rule
- Do not cut them off. A walker who has changed direction has chosen a heading. Do not put yourself between the walker and the heading. Step aside. Let the walker pass
- Do not touch. If contact is unavoidable, by accident or crowding — this is rare, but it happens at festival-times in coastal villages — minimize it. Cloth-on-cloth is preferable to skin-on-skin. The trade has folk-rituals for after-touch (see Purification above). They are not optional
- Walk away calmly. Match the walker’s pace, increase it slightly, do not look back more than once. The walker, in most stories, does not follow. In the stories where the walker does follow, the witness lives by holding to the rules and walking the rest of the way home
A reach-traveller who has heard a walker but not seen one has, by folk-judgement, been spared. A reach-traveller who has seen a walker and walked away calmly has, by folk-judgement, kept their share. A reach-traveller who has spoken to a walker is, by old phrase, not entirely available for further consultation. The village will not press them. The village will simply notice.
The phrase
Most of the reach’s working folklore about the Verdant comes down to a single old phrase, which working captains repeat to their crews when the Bloom is on the horizon and the weather is going still. The phrase is:
The green calls. The green also waits.
The phrase is not optimistic. The phrase is, in its plain reading, advice for a long life in the trade: that the call to approach is constant and the patience of the called-to is also constant, and that neither calling nor patience is the danger. The danger is the moment the traveller forgets that both are operating at once, and walks toward the green thinking only of one of them. By the time the traveller has remembered, in the trade’s quiet phrase, the other half has them already.
“I have crossed the Bloom-edge twice in my career. The first time I was a greenhand. I did not know to be afraid. The captain did not explain afterward. The second time I was a stoneward and I knew exactly what we were doing. I was more afraid than I had ever been on any working crossing. I would not do it a third time. No one in the trade I respect would ask me to.”
— Master Hadric of Brassmarket, retired stoneward, 410 AU