The Lapse

The event that ended the Era of Containment and reshaped the world into its current form.

The Teleportation Device

Among the era’s greatest undertakings were attempts to solve the wizards’ most persistent practical problem: physically moving themselves and their belongings. Multiple groups banded together to build a device that could temporarily join two locations — pulling the underlying fabric so that two distant points sat close together, bending it several times in the process.

The Malfunction

The device worked at first. Then something went wrong — a permanent wrinkle formed in the fabric and the teleportation process halted midway. That wrinkle immediately set off a chain reaction across many other teleporters, cascading the failure to a world-altering scale.

Auto-Correction

The world cannot sustain bent fabric — it seeks to flatten itself. That flattening is how teleportation was supposed to work: bend, move, flatten. A permanent wrinkle broke the cycle. The world forced a correction. At the most severe bends, the fabric tore. Those tears left multiple layers of reality stacked in the same place — also an invalid state. The world resolved this by merging the overlapping layers into one. Once flat, the fabric was stable again.

As with all things governed by the magic system, the world sought the lowest-energy resolution. Collisions would have meant massive destruction and wasted energy. The merging process avoided them where that was the cheaper path. Perception merged along with reality: for a time, emotions stayed muted — no shock, no upheaval.

Implications

• Geography is layered history. Any given location may contain merged geography from once-distant regions. Culture, ecology, architecture — even the buried dead — can originate from completely separate places.
• Magic re-emerged. The broken remnants of old magical infrastructure and the merger zones now act as localized sources of magic. Magic is not freely available but can be found where the world was most disturbed.
• Combined beasts. In some merges, the lesser energy state was to combine rather than separate — where spare magic was available, the cost of splitting outweighed the cost of fusion. The result: strangely amplified joint creatures.