“ The ancient prophet Oijas Bek uttered a cryptic prediction:
<i>In the time of the Floating Ships,
In the Capitol of the Shattered Empire,
The False God will draw the people to his banner,
The Blasphemer shall don robes of righteousness.</i>
No one is sure what he meant, but the various sects each have their theories, which they often fight over.”
“ Real World: some Indians in the Amazon treat their eyes with a traditional potion applied with palm leaves. Brutally painful, the drug alters vision, giving the jungle's dense green walls greater texture and dimension. You could adapt this to desert or swamps, or other hard to navigate regions.”
“ Some parallel worlds have different time-flows, like the fabled dwelling-places of the elves: those who visit them under the hill for a night return to find that years have passed in this world. Perhaps it is the gate leading between the worlds which causes the alteration. If a gate were 'misaligned', the shift from '| |' to '| \' or '| /' as it were would lead to that difference, much as a light-beam split and bent by a prism ends up taking a longer path. There might even be a mathematical function linking degree of misalignment to alteration of time-rate.”