2 KiB
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The ground shakes beneath your paws. Your body chooses to freeze or fly. This is normal, predictable, you knew it was coming, but it doesn’t matter because… they are still so unsettling to you. Always has been. The city quiets except the earth below vibrating its normal beat. The town will be fine. Walls may need minor repair, but we’re prepared. Larger buildings have large buttresses, upright structures are reinforced and we make seals with quality material. You’ll get through this.
In other parts of Esparia a Dryad meditates in the woods to the soothing rhythm. In the grand underground mines of the Dwarf, Midnight bridges sway on sturdy ropes, minecart tracks slide along clever bolt tracks that allow for the region’s standard vibration patterns, work hardly pauses for the clans.
Heart Quakes are reliable, consistent, you could measure a clock by them - and clever Kobolds have already begun selling watches upon your wrist that do just that. The main quakes do, at least. It has been recorded in the histories that powerful aftershocks can occur, taking people by surprise putting them in unpredictable or even dangerous situations.
Worshippers of Azhrem the Deathless > would have you believe the quakes breathe blood into the trees to encourage regrowth and life. Poets interpret the quakes as the world itself beating to a rhythm on a cosmological clock that moves slower than our own, our own heartbeat to be precise. Beasts of science interpret the quakes as standard seismic activity in a world’s undersurface that needs to be explored; by paying adventurers to descend and dwarves to mine deeper to the truth.
— Thrayne Xhraxius the Historian
Without regular maintenance buildings turn to ruins in a matter of years. A particularly lucrative notion for a group of up and coming adventurers.
…it is said severe aftershocks are the world’s heart racing in fear of something to come…
— Overheard in an Overstone Market