The places where the Veil is thin enough to matter.
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A Bleed zone is any region where the Veil is thin enough that its effects are regularly observable at the surface. Every Coastal resident knows the term, even if only from the warning signs and buoys that mark such places around ports. The Academy maintains a running register of all known zones on the Shifting Coast — currently numbering, in the most recent public edition, two hundred and forty-seven — and publishes updates twice a year. Captains, traders, and settlement officials pay closer attention to these updates than to almost any other Academy publication.
A zone is not always a place to fear. Some produce nothing more dramatic than a mild temperature anomaly or a patch of water that gives peculiar echoes. Others have killed ships full of sailors within minutes. The practical problem, and the reason the Academy's registers exist at all, is that it is difficult to tell the two apart by looking.
Types and Classifications
The Academy divides Bleed zones along three axes: stability (how long the zone has existed and how predictable it is), intensity (how strongly the Bleed manifests there), and character (what kind of effects the zone tends to produce). The combination of these produces a typology used in nearly all Coastal scholarship.
Stable zones have been documented for at least a century and behave consistently across that span. The Bellings, a stretch of open water two days' sail east of Karath, has produced the same kind of anomaly — a faint ringing sound in the ears of anyone who crosses it — for as long as records have been kept. It is harmless. It is charted. Ships cross it routinely and call it unremarkable.
Drifting zones move. The Second Ward Drift, off the southern atolls, shifts position by several leagues every decade or so, and the Academy updates its coordinates when it can. Drifting zones are among the most difficult to manage, because a chart more than a few years old may be actively misleading.
Opening zones are newer and less predictable. They may stabilize and become permanent fixtures of the Coast, or fade back into ordinary ground within a season, or behave erratically for years before one outcome or the other. The Academy monitors opening zones with particular attention, and ports near them often issue local advisories during the monitoring period.
By intensity, zones are graded in six registers, from trace — detectable only with instruments — through mild, moderate, strong, and severe, up to quarantined. A quarantined zone is one whose effects are severe enough that the Academy, in coordination with local authorities, has declared the surrounding region closed. Four such zones currently exist on the Shifting Coast. All are marked on every official chart. None are approached deliberately.
By character, the Academy distinguishes zones whose effects are primarily environmental (weather, tides, geography), biological (creature mutation, plant growth, illness), cognitive (disorientation, memory loss, perceptual anomaly), or structural (objects and materials behaving unusually). Most zones produce more than one type of effect. A handful produce effects that resist classification.
How They Are Mapped
Every Bleed zone of moderate or greater intensity is marked on the Academy's official navigation charts, which are the charts most Coastal captains carry. Stable zones are shown in fixed position with a standardized symbol — a circle enclosing a wave, a now-universal Coastal convention. Drifting zones are shown with a dashed perimeter indicating the zone's range of recent movement. Opening zones are shown with an open-ended perimeter and a year of first observation.
Beyond the charts, physical markers exist at sea and on land. Bleed buoys — painted in the Academy's distinctive pattern of black and ochre bands — are anchored at the edges of stable zones near major shipping routes. Some buoys are equipped with bells that ring on the tide, giving sailors an audible warning in heavy weather or fog. Onshore, zones are marked with waystones set into the ground at their perimeters. Travelers walking unfamiliar country learn early to respect a waystone, even when the ground beyond it looks perfectly ordinary.
The Driftborn maintain their own zone-knowledge, which overlaps with the Academy's but is not identical to it. Some Driftborn fleets carry charts that mark zones the Academy has never catalogued, and the Academy, when it learns of these, sometimes investigates and sometimes does not. Exchange between the two systems is cordial but limited.
Living Around Them
For most people, a Bleed zone is an abstraction — a symbol on a chart, a bell ringing in fog, a waystone at the edge of a pasture. The practical impact is managed through habit. A fisherman knows which coves not to fish. A merchant captain knows which straits to route around. A farmer knows that the field on the far side of the waystone is not, in fact, available for planting, regardless of how good the soil looks.
In places where zones sit near population centers, the Port Watch enforces exclusion around the dangerous ones. This generally takes the form of patrols, posted notices, and, where necessary, fines for trespass. The Watch does not usually need to use force. Most people who try to enter a quarantined zone do not need to be made to come back. They come back on their own, if they come back at all.
Not everyone avoids zones, of course. Academy field researchers enter them routinely, with careful instrumentation and strict protocols. Certain kinds of scholarship cannot be done anywhere else. The Order of Aethis has its own reasons for visiting specific zones and does not explain them to outsiders. Smugglers sometimes use the edges of mild zones as cover — pursuers tend to turn back where honest captains would not follow.
And there are always a few who go looking for zones on purpose. The Academy records them too, when it can. Most return. The ones who do not are added to the registers at the end of each year, without comment.
