Compiled from route registers, the Saltmarch mirage-charts, and independent observation Attributed to the Lorekeeper tradition

Classification

Region: The Shimmering Expanse Designation: Arid plain where the boundary between what is and what could be has worn through Associated House: Saltmarch Elevation: High, flat, rising gently eastward Climate: Hot, dry, with a hard cold at night. Almost no rain

Primary Phenomenon: The Mirages

The Expanse shows you places that are not there.

A visitor has to grasp first that this is something other than heat shimmer, or nothing else in the region makes sense. Heat shimmer distorts what is in front of you. A mirage of the Expanse puts something in front of you that is absent, in full detail and holding still, in weather that does not match the weather you are standing in.

They are shared. A party of nine sees the same city, each from their own angle, consistent with where they stand, and they can walk around it and describe the far side to each other correctly. That single fact moves the Expanse out of hallucination and into geography, and it is why Saltmarch can chart the things.

What they show

There are three kinds, and the region's whole character comes from how differently reliable they are.

Places that exist elsewhere. The commonest. A stretch of the Sablemire delta, a Chiming Snow fortress-city, a Boundary Lands market. These have been checked against the real places more often than any other claim in this survey, and they hold up, down to details the observers could not have known and later confirmed.

Places that existed once. Ruins standing whole, and settlements found on no current map and on some old ones. The Lorekeepers value these mirages most, and this tradition treats mirage-charting as a genuine historical discipline. The Expanse is an archive nobody can index or consult on request.

Places that might exist someday. This survey has to be careful here, because this is where the Expanse's reputation runs ahead of it.

Can you enter one?

No.

Walk to where a mirage stands and you find sand, with no threshold or barrier, or any boundary you can feel.

What you get is the approach. You arrive having seen the thing close up, in detail, and the detail holds up under later checking. A mirage carries information and never people. In four centuries of continuous record nothing has ever passed into one, and nothing has ever come out.

Saltmarch say this firmly and often. This tradition notes, without implying anything by it, that a House whose whole trade depends on people being unafraid to cross the Expanse would say it firmly whether or not it were true. We have checked it independently and found nothing to contradict them.

The ones that might be

Mirages of what could be are often wrong, and Saltmarch say so louder than anybody.

They are wrong the way guesses are wrong, neither reversed nor deceptive, just often different from what happens. Saltmarch's position, stated in their Code and enforced within their House, is that a courier does not carry a future-mirage as truth. Their word is what they sell, and they will not spend it on something the desert showed them.

People have still made fortunes and ruined themselves acting on them, in about the proportion you would expect from acting on guesses. It happens in every generation and will happen in the next.

The Charts

Mirages recur: specific ones, in specific places, at rates that can be counted.

The Drowned City appears on the eastern flats about forty times a year. Half of Saltmarch has seen it. It is on the charts, predicted to within a day or two. Small parties ride out on purpose to look at it, take a meal in sight of it and ride back. It is a destination.

This survey records that because the Expanse's reputation is all threat and none of the wonder, and the wonder is what the people who live there actually experience. The commonest reason to travel into the Shimmering Expanse is to go and see something beautiful that will be gone tomorrow.

Chart-keeping is a paid trade. The charts are sold, disputed, revised and stolen. A good one is worth what a good map is worth anywhere else.

Terrain and Geography

Surface

Hard pan, gravel, low scrub, long shallow rises. Easy going and hard to tell apart, which matters more here than elsewhere.

Water

Deep wells and roofed cisterns, spaced along the charted routes, maintained by Saltmarch and paid for by tolls.

The danger is that you cannot trust the sight of water, more than any shortage of it. So nobody navigates to a well by looking. Routes are walked by count and by mark: paces between cairns, bearings held on staked posts, distances memorised instead of judged. A Saltmarch route-holder can put a party on a wellhead in the dark, and would rather.

Building where sight lies

Saltmarch build so that places can be identified without looking at them, with ridged doorframes and thresholds cut in distinctive profiles, and district bells tuned to different notes. A traveller who cannot see finds an Expanse settlement easier to get around than a sighted stranger does, and Saltmarch find this extremely funny and mention it often.

What grows and what hunts

Scrub, deep-rooted and sparse. Grazing for goats along the wetter western margin.

Fauna is unremarkable and thin: reptiles, small mammals, raptors. The predators are the ones you would expect and they hunt in the ordinary way. The Expanse's danger lies elsewhere, and this survey says so plainly because the opposite belief gets people killed by making them watch the wrong thing.

Population and Settlement

Saltmarch hold the routes and the water, and everything else follows.

Settlement is strung along the charted lines: waystations and well-holdings, and a handful of proper towns at the junctions. Population is low and mobile, and a good share of it is travelling at any moment.

The House is talkative, funny and extremely good company, and bound absolutely by its Code on one point: what a Saltmarch carries is true, and the name signed on a delivery is the real one. They will cheerfully use any other name they like, several in a season. That one is fixed.

Outsiders are welcome and charged. Crossing the Expanse without a route-holder is legal and unpoliced, and a genuinely poor idea. Saltmarch will tell you so once and then sell you water at the far end without comment.

Economic Value

Passage, and the charts.

Every east-west movement in the dominion crosses here or goes a very long way round. Saltmarch sell guidance, water, escort and speed. The courier trade that grew out of it now carries most of the dominion's correspondence.

The charts are the second business and the more interesting one. A past-mirage that recurs reliably is worth money to historians and to Houses tracing lineage, and to anyone with a claim to prove.

Beyond that the Expanse produces salt, hides and very little else. It is a poor region, and one nobody can avoid.

Hazards

Heat and distance, which take more people than everything else combined.

Navigating by sight. The whole practice of Expanse travel exists to stop you doing it. A stranger walking toward water they can see is the usual way a party loses somebody.

Following something that was never there. Separate from the above and more insidious: a traveller who drifts toward a mirage of a settlement over hours, without ever deciding to.

The cold at night, which is missing from the reputation entirely and should be in it.

Open Questions

Why here? The Drifting Age is the standing explanation, and it is a name more than a mechanism.

What decides which places appear? The charts establish that a given mirage recurs and give no purchase at all on why that one.

Do the future-mirages show one possibility or many, and is there any pattern to which of them come true? Saltmarch regard this question as a trap and decline it. This tradition has not done better.

Why can nothing pass in either direction, when the images carry detail no observer had beforehand?

And the one this tradition would most like resources for: if the Expanse shows places that existed once, then somewhere in its rotation are settlements, structures and events that appear in no record anywhere. We have charted four we cannot identify, and expect a great many more.

This survey is maintained by the Lorekeeper tradition. Field corrections and additional observations may be submitted to any recognized archive.