The Far Reaches
You must be brave indeed to venture beyond even the outer wards! Here the storms rage in their full, glorious power. Their passage rewrites the land, crafting mountains or valleys with no regard for the poor souls caught in that maelstrom.
Here roars the primal memory of Seln, still crackling with the power of creation.
There are two methods of survival: to flee before the frequent storms or to hide from their might. The storms have less effect on the depths and large bodies of water, so these become safe harbor.
Still, life endures. Here aethervores dominate the ecosystem, creatures that consume the raw elements directly! These might be trees that transform with every storm; or predators that use the storms to flush out prey; or gulls that ride the storms and sip their energies like a fine wine.
Most aethervores are unnamed and unknown to the Kingdom (save perhaps the Whistlers).
For the brave and the foolhardy, the Far Reaches offer unparalleled beauty and power.
The real questions
What cultivator can hear such creatures without thinking about the important questions: What kind of crazy powers could I get if I snorted its horn?
Well, only one way to find out.
Fae domains
As you know, the Grand Fae were banished or destroyed millennia ago. Despite this, there are rumors of vast domains in the Far Reaches where shadowed masters plot against the Kingdom.
Should you find an island of stability among the Far Reaches, you had best ask what power rules there.
Before the only question you can ask is, “What is your wish, master?”
Lost fragments
Seln is a distant shore, and sometimes strange things wash up.
Sometimes the Akashic Sea tosses fragments of other worlds into Seln. The smallest of these distortions are trivial: an unfamiliar sign in the middle of a forest or a rotting tire beneath a tree stump.
Larger distortions, however, become very obvious. Homes, offices, buildings, roads, highways, hospitals, strange technologies, crashed satellites, fragments of castles built of crystal, bodies of impossible creatures, hidden lairs, factories of mental sentinels rendered mad by the elements, haunted schools…
All abandoned, nary a soul in sight. Some intact with rare materials to make a man’s fortune; others carelessly littered with poisons to kill even a Path master.
When you need the impossible, you must seek the lost fragments.
As to where they come from? How the Akashic Sea chooses them and from where?
Oddly enough, the hints may linger in Whistler songs…
Wild settlements?!
As far as the Kingdom knows, there are no folk living in the Far Reaches.
A handful of powerful, cultivated parties have managed to explore, and the Whistlers are rumored to know Arts enough for the outer wards. However, if such people do venture out, they keep their secrets close at hand.
Still, very rarely, someone manages to explore the Far Reaches and return with wild rumors of settlements in that land! These stories tell of cunning nomads, building and abandoning in rhythm with the storms.