The Shifts
"The Shifts are not chaos. They are order—just not ours."
—Varelen Strayhand, Arc-Scholar of the Wyrmglass Collegium
No force shapes Necsis more profoundly than the Shifts.
They are neither a recent calamity nor an ancient curse—they are, and have always been, intrinsic to the world, pulsing like a second heartbeat beneath its surface.
We are taught to think of land as solid. Real. Unchanging. And in many regions of Necsis, that remains true: people build homes, till soil, pass down names carved into stone.
But there are places where even the idea of permanence breaks apart. These are the Shifts.
In simplest terms, a Shift is a region of terrain—roughly thirty miles across—where reality gives way to another. Without pattern or pity, that section is replaced by an equivalently sized fragment of an entirely different universe. For however long the conjunction endures, the borrowed land is indistinguishable from Necsis itself.
Borders, however, remain precise. The edge of a Shift aligns seamlessly with the surrounding lands—whether permanent or unstable in turn. (For reasons still unknown, Shifts tend to cluster, forming vast masses of unpredictable ground.) A stream leaving Necsis will find a matching streambed in the alien terrain, no matter how many worlds have cycled through. This harmony extends only to fixed landforms. Impermanent elements—boulders, trees, buildings—are sheared clean at the boundary. Only what lies wholly within the Shifted region is drawn through.
For a living creature, that boundary is far less forgiving.
Thankfully, shifts do not occur without warning. In the hours—or days—before a change, the affected perimeter begins to shimmer. Witnesses describe a rippling curtain of light rising from the ground, like a heat-haze given structure. As the Shift nears, the effect intensifies, warping perception and lending the air a tense, electric stillness. Then, in a moment of held breath, the veil solidifies—and when it falls, the land beyond is no longer the same.
There is no method to predict how long a shift will last. One might hold for months. Another may collapse in minutes. This uncertainty makes traversal perilous. Should the shift end while someone is inside it, they are cast adrift in whatever world that terrain originally belonged to—and return becomes impossible.
Every child of Necsis learns early: Shifts are to be avoided.
Yet more often, the tragedy flows in reverse. Someone from a foreign world stumbles across the Shift’s edge and crosses into Necsis without knowing the cost. When the curtain next falls, their home is gone—and with it, all hope of return.
These souls are known as Outlanders.
And they will never go home.
As recorded by Corven Marris, Lorewarden of the Third Vault
Author’s Note: The Origins of the Shifts
I first conceived of the Shifts as a high school student in the late 1980s. The exact moment of inspiration is lost to time—if there even was one. Looking back, it feels as though the world of Necsis arrived in my mind fully formed, the Shifts at its heart.
Because they are the heart.
Everything else flowed from them.
Imagine the world as a golf ball, pocked with tens of thousands of dimples. Only these are not evenly spaced—they cluster in some regions, spread thin in others. Each dimple is a Shift: a zone roughly thirty miles across where the very nature of reality is replaced by another. Everything outside the Shifts is stable ground. True Necsis.
And because the multiverse is infinite, so too are the laws that govern each Shift. Some follow the logic of magic. Others are ruled by psychic force, or machinery beyond comprehension. Necsis, uniquely, must accommodate them all.
To make sense of this chaos, I ultimately categorized the ways people shape reality into three broad disciplines:
Magic
Mind (psychic power)
Machine (science and technology)
These are known collectively as the Three Powers, and they are a direct legacy of the Shifts. (Much more will be revealed about them elsewhere.)
Although many on Necsis think of the Shifts as random, that’s not quite true. They follow rules—strange, but consistent.
Shifts will always Shift. The lands between them are stable and will always remain so. No new Shift will suddenly emerge where none existed.
Geography always aligns. A Shifted fragment connects to Necsis seamlessly. Mountains remain mountains. Rivers continue to flow. No voids. No sudden oceans. The boundary is clean.
Duration is unknowable. A Shift might hold for years—or hours. Some cycle violently through six realities in a single day.
Shifts are surface-bound. Below a few hundred feet, all land is stable. This is how the ancient tunnel network known as the Deeps can span so widely. But the energies of the Shifts still twist what lies below in stranger ways.
Patterns emerge over time. Some clusters seem to favor magical realms. Others draw from technological ones. And though the cycles are slow, scholars have begun to notice a troubling trend: more and more Shifts are now connecting to grim, hostile universes. Worlds of hunger and horror.
Shifts are uncontrollable. There are records that suggest otherwise—but most believe them to be myth.
But that is a story for another time.
Once I understood how the Shifts shaped Necsis, I began to explore what that meant.
How do people live beside the unknowable?
What do they make of Outlanders—those stranded souls who cross into Necsis and can never return? What would become of beings that are truly alien?
What happens to a cell phone brought into a world like this? What about when the battery dies? What about even more advanced technology?
How would a society respond, generation after generation, to an environment such as this?
These were the questions I pondered for decades.
The answers became The Infinite Saga.
And it is my hope that, in time, you too will find yourself as captivated by Necsis as the Outlanders do— as I have been, ever since that first Shift appeared in my imagination.