Every map drawn by the Academy has edges. A short public reference on the three categories of Coastal ignorance — surveyed, unsurveyed, and unknown — and on the three principal regions beyond the Coast's known geography: the Outer Deep, the Deep Interior, and the Northern and Southern Extremities.
Between Karath and the isolated lighthouse keeper, the Coast contains some 180 Anchored settlements and several tens of thousands of Driftborn distributed across moving fleets.
The Inner Sea is the enclosed basin around which all Coastal civilization is arranged — retentive, low in Bleed activity, stable enough to live beside. A public reference on its three principal openings, the Shelf / Belt / Quiet sub-regions, and the central deep.
The Coast's sea moves in patterns regular enough to be tabulated — and then, sometimes, it does not. A public reference on the four-tide cycle of Karath, the Long Current, the Coast's three charted tide-races, and the small but persistent anomalies the Academy classifies as Bleed-related.
The Shifting Coast has weather, as any region has weather — and it also has the wrong weather, a category of phenomena the Academy's seasonal almanac does not attempt to predict. A public reference covering ordinary patterns, named local anomalies, and the three documented forms of Bleed-weather.
A phrase of disputed referent, The Seven Islands has appeared in Coastal sources for at least a millennium. Four scholarly groupings have been proposed over four centuries of debate; none has achieved general acceptance. Driftborn tradition holds a different view entirely.
The Wasted Shore: the Coast's longest quarantined Bleed zone. A hundred and ten leagues of cliff that no ship has ever landed on and returned from.
Eleven thousand feet down. Forty leagues long. Colder than the water around it. The Academy measures the Trench carefully. Coastal captains prefer to route around it. On one point they agree: whatever is in the Trench, it is asleep.
The two hundred and forty-seven places on the Shifting Coast where the Veil is thin enough to matter. How the Academy catalogues them, how captains chart them, and how ordinary people live around them.
The Veil is the boundary between ordinary reality and the Pallor that lies beyond it. The Bleed is what leaks through where it thins. An Academy account of the cosmological framework that underlies everything strange about the Shifting Coast — and the scholarly debates still unresolved.
The Shifting Coast has remained in a stable Bronze Age for nearly a thousand years — long enough that scholars have made the question of why its own field of inquiry. An article on what the world is made of: bronze, clay, stone, and the iron that never quite takes hold.
The largest Anchored city on the Shifting Coast — a Bronze Age port built on black basalt that has not moved in ten thousand years. Karath keeps three harbors, codified law older than the Dissolution, and an Observatory that still sets the Coast's clocks by bell.
On the eastern edge of the known world lies a coastline that will not keep still. Islands surface and sink within a lifetime. Harbors silt closed and reopen elsewhere. For the two million people who live here, the instability is not a disaster to be solved — it is the condition of being alive.
