Pressed Beyond the Veil of Time

Cost: 60m
Target: Area

This incredibly powerful spell shoves an entire region from Creation into Elsewhere, rendering it immune to invasion as long as it remains there. The sorcerer may target any region that goes by a single name, such as a manse, city or mountain. Affected Dominions may not exceed Magnitude (Essence . 2).

Before casting the spell, the sorcerer must create a perfect miniature model of the targeted area out of Malfean porcelain (a difficulty 5 Craft [Fire] roll). When the Solar shapes the spell, the entire model must burn to ash in a supernatural flame. First Age Solars might have commanded a Fire-aspected Dragon-Blooded to destroy it. Contemporary Solar sorcerers must probably resort to other sources of magical fire, such as elementals. The ritual of burning takes one entire night, at the end of which the sorcerer performs the Cast Sorcery action and identical but ghostly flames consume the target area. When the region disappears, the Shaping of this spell replaces it with something natural for that area. Somewhere in this replacement exists a door, gate or path that leads into Elsewhere and the protected area. Wearing a ring or pendant of Malfean porcelain lets one pass through this invisible door, and the sorcerer herself can enter or leave any time.

Without an appropriate token, other people can enter or leave the affected region only when it reappears, once every hundred years, to join with Creation for a single day and night. Anything in the part of Creation where the hidden realm reappears vanishes for the duration and returns afterward, with no one aware that anything happened. The territory that replaces a location affected by this spell always has an uncanny air that subtly discourages renewed settlement, though, so these places seldom gain significant populations—whether it's a hill no one cares to farm or a lot in Nexus that somehow remained vacant for centuries.

Within Elsewhere, the vanished land fades into misty wastes: Anyone who tries to explore beyond the spell's border finds himself turned around and walking back into the territory in five minutes or less. Time also passes more slowly in Elsewhere. Roughly, for every (caster's Essence x 10) days that pass in Creation, one day passes inside.

Solars of the First Age used these redoubts as safe getaways—and as secure prisons for difficult captives, and some of these prisons still exist. (Such First Age prisons often had other spells or automatons scheduled to activate and keep the prisoners busy so they could not escape to Creation during the centennial day of return.) Even hideaways in Elsewhere could not save Solars during the Usurpation. At the Sidereals' urging, the Dragon-Blooded stormed Malfeas for its porcelain. Equipped with those trinkets, they had anyone who had fled to such a retreat cornered. A common bogeyman story in the Realm suggests that sometimes, the heroic revolutionaries only managed to destroy an Anathema's porcelain passkey, making it impossible for the Solars to leave. until the next centennial.

A region can stay bound in Elsewhere indefinitely, but the spell can be ended in two ways. A Solar who masters the spell may craft another porcelain model of the hidden place and, destroying it in the same ritual, reshape it back into Creation. At the caster's discretion, doing so may shift the land currently in that location into Elsewhere or merge the two locations as if they had grown up that way.

Adamant Countermagic destroys the spell of displacement suddenly and disastrously. The Storyteller rolls one die: Failure means the hidden land is severed from Creation and drifts free in Elsewhere. Reaching or leaving it is now an epic adventure all by itself. Success means that, instead of being severed from the land that was shaped to replace it, the two exchange places. The land that replaced the original territory takes its place in Elsewhere as if Pressed Beyond the Veil of Time had been cast on that area. The area is subject to Adamant Countermagic as if the spell were still active. Two successes means that, in a stroke of luck, the land in Elsewhere and the land that replaced it in Creation merge, settling around and into one another as if the caster had used another casting of the spell to merge them consciously.