The Rift

In the spring of 1487, a tear opened in the hills above a small town in the Kingdom of Castile, somewhere in the rocky country between Salamanca and the Portuguese border. For roughly eleven days it stayed open, wide enough for a wagon, brilliant at its edges, breathing a wind that smelled of cold iron and unfamiliar pollen.

Through it came people, animals, and things that were neither. The first Folk records (kept later, from memory) describe scholars, smiths, druids, several beasts that did not survive a fortnight, and at least three creatures that the survivors would only ever speak of in hushed corrections of one another’s stories.

Why Iberia, Why Then

The Folk arrived in possibly the worst place and time on Earth to be visibly magical.

• The Spanish Inquisition had been formally constituted nine years earlier (1478) and was at full operational pitch.
• The Reconquista was in its final phase. Granada would fall in 1492. Religious authorities were actively cataloging “secret” populations: conversos, moriscos, and now, by accident, the Folk.
• The Edict of Expulsion of 1492 would scatter Sephardic Jews across the Mediterranean. The Folk learned smuggling routes from communities who had been forced to invent them.

Within a decade of the Rift, the Folk who survived had done two things: they had stopped using their birth names in public, and they had begun to learn how to make a building, a road, or an entire valley unfindable.

What Closed It

Nobody alive remembers, and the contemporary accounts disagree. The most-cited Folk historian on the subject, Ines Aldemar de Salamanca (b. 1502, the first Earth-born child of two Rift-survivors), wrote that the Rift “was not closed by us, and was not closed for us.” Her implication, which the Concordat still officially disputes, is that something on the other side decided to seal it.

[!dm] The Rift did not close on its own. It was sealed by an entity (or council) on the Lost Realm side, for reasons the Folk have never been told. A small number of Folk are aware of this, and a much smaller number know why. Both groups are dangerous to the campus status quo.