Leviathans

The Leviathans are not well understood, in the sense that anything that kills reliably and at scale is not well understood — there is data on the outcomes, and very little on the cause.

What is known: they emerge from the deep water each wet season, between the first heavy rain and the turning of the tide that the sailors call the second flood. They move toward the Walls. They assault them with a methodical persistence that has led several generations of scholars to debate whether methodical and persistent are words that apply to something that appears to have no discernible brain structure. The debate continues. The Walls hold, mostly.

Leviathan Blood

When Leviathans die — which they do, given sufficient organized effort — their bodies begin to dissolve within hours. The process produces a substance that soaks into soil, stone, and water with a permanence that cannot be reversed by any known process. This substance is the biological source of everything the empire understands as class ability: the paladin’s endurance, the druid’s communion with vegetation, the bard’s capacity to make sound that acts, the rogue’s ability to move in ways that shouldn’t be physically possible.

The distribution is uneven. The Outer Tier, closest to the coast and the site of most Leviathan landings, is the most saturated. The effects there are more pronounced and less predictable. Plants grow wrong. Wounds heal strangely. People who live near the Wall for long enough develop abilities that city-dwellers of the inner tiers would classify as extraordinary.

The Leviathans themselves may be the source of something the empire has built its entire social structure around. No official doctrine addresses this directly.

The Wet Season

The wet season’s arrival is predictable within a window of a few weeks, which is enough time to prepare but not enough time to feel safe. Brinegate’s particular tension in the days before the first rain is the tension of a city that knows exactly what is coming and has made its peace with not being able to stop it — only to survive it, again, as it has before.