Iron interrupts a practitioner's connection and can kill them, and there's almost none of it. The Deepening is sealed but real, it leaks where the seal wears thin, and it cuts a practitioner off from their Source for good. Protection thins out the further you travel from people, because protection follows population. Things do get through. It's mostly safe out there, and it's mostly safe because somebody is standing somewhere.

Iron

A practitioner in contact with worked iron is cut off from their Source until they let go. Raw iron is less predictable and does worse. In the worst case it kills them, and an army carrying it can threaten practitioners it would otherwise have no business threatening.

There's almost none of it, and I mean that more strictly than people usually do when they say it.

It falls. Nobody has mined iron since the Age of Earth. It comes down on the void-touched edge of the Chiming Snow, roughly once a season, landing hot and burying itself, and it's dug out under Ironvale licence by pickers who work three grounds between them. The whole year's yield for the Dominion is a few stone.

Somewhere between nine and fourteen people alive can work it.

The entire trade is run by mundane people out of plain physical necessity, since a practitioner can't handle the stuff, and apprentice smiths are chosen from families with no practitioners in living memory. So the material that matters most to practitioners can only be handled by people who aren't one, and nobody I mentioned that to found it the least bit remarkable.

The Deepening

This is the one truly dark thing in these pages.

The Deepening is what pooled in the wounded places of the world before the Four sealed it away. The seal holds, but it's imperfect, and where it's thin the Deepening comes through and gathers in wounds: broken ground, severed connection, betrayed trust.

It's the opposite of Aura, separating wherever Aura joins.

What it does to a practitioner is cut them off. It tears the glimmers out, and the connection never comes back. A severed practitioner is mundane for the rest of their life, and there's no recorded case of anyone recovering.

It's rare, and it keeps to particular places. Most people will live out their lives without ever coming within a hundred miles of a seam, and wouldn't know one if they did. Most of the accounts I've chased turned out, on inspection, to be a bad year or a bad person. The ones that hold up are very bad indeed.

What lives out there

Most of it's animals, and most animals are dangerous the way a bear is, without anything personal in it or any interest in what you are.

It took me a long while to establish that ordinary animals carry no Aura whatsoever. There's nothing in a wolf to read or push against, and no practitioner's sense will tell you it's there when your eyes can't.

Things that come down off the void-touched edge carry something, and so do things that have been near a seam or sat in ruins for a very long time. I can't tell you what that something is, and neither can anyone else. Whether it's the same kind of connection a person has, or something else entirely that we've lazily given the same name, is well beyond anything I'm equipped to find out. It's rare, which is why those creatures stand out.

The edges, and how far away they are

Danger in the Heartlands isn't spread evenly. It gathers at the edges: the outer forest, the void-touched north, the deep bayou, the low places, and ruins of every age.

Protection thins as you go outward, because protection follows people. The practitioners are where the population is, the population is near the seats, and the further you travel from either, the longer it takes for anybody to come. A notice filed in a Seated district gets answered in hours, while the same notice at an outer holding gets answered when somebody happens to be passing.

Nobody planned it that way, and it follows from where the offices are.

Things do get through

I have one well-documented case. A holding called Ashlow, in the autumn of 851, eleven miles past the last well-covered district. A wet year had ruined the crop, and four raiding bands came in off the margin together, which they don't normally do. The notice was filed properly on the second day and answered on the eleventh, because the district's posts had three notices open and one licensed practitioner between them.

Ashlow lost its winter stores and both its grain barns, and a boy of fourteen who went out to the near barn on the fourth night.

The practitioner who arrived on the eleventh day settled it in an afternoon without any violence, and is on record saying it would have gone exactly the same way on the second.

Procedure worked perfectly in that account. Ashlow got exactly the service its grade promises, the grade was printed on the district map, and anyone in the holding could have told you what it meant.

Old accounts I cannot verify

There's something I keep finding in the margins of other people's records, and I don't understand it.

There are old accounts of awakenings shaped by the place where they happened, more than by anyone who was present. Older ones still talk about ground that was already wrong, and what came out of children who broke open standing on it.

I've verified none of it. All of it is old and thirdhand, and the accounts contradict one another on almost everything except the fact that they exist. I'm not going to name what they name, because doing it from a single copy would only spread someone else's guess.

The honest summary

It's mostly safe.

I've spent four years looking for the exceptions and found fewer than I expected, along with a great many places where nothing whatever happens and the people are quite content about it. Travel the Boundary Lands for a year and the worst thing likely to happen to you is the weather.

It's mostly safe because somebody is standing somewhere, though, and that somebody is one of very few, and they can't be everywhere at once.