You can kiss someone at a younger age, and it is encouraged, albeit in chaperoned or tightly controlled events. So at least when you do get married – the only way for a young person to get laid – they have some idea of what their other is like physically.

You stay married until your kids are married, with exceptions made for infertility and children who make an oath to never marry. But once your obligation is up, once your kids have left the nest, you must separate from your spouse, and have no intimacy for one whole year, while you consider who will join you in the next marriage. Which is bloody annoying if you choose the same person again. And they choose you again.

Extramarital affairs are rampant. Put it this way, nobody ever says “you have your fathers eyes”.

A visitor from a far off land (not completely unheard of) might describe the Emergery as a place where everything is prohibited and therefore anything goes.

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Spring has babies and autumn has leaves. Winter has snow and for the most part everyone stays at home, all rugged up, and we eat from the bountiful produce reaped during the year. Even the poorest of people have plenty, and for some the darkest days of the year are called “the fattening”.

Summer is the worst, and also has a nickname, “the shedding”. While in winter you can simply pile on jackets and blankets, in the summer, with its relentless heat, there is a limit to how many clothes you can remove. Nakedness occurs in varying degrees.

We also have a fifth, irregular season, The Grimming. It doesn’t appear on any calendar in advance, nor does it appear to be triggered by the sun or moon. But we all know it when it comes, there are tell-tale signs that are beyond dispute: short-tempers, grumpiness, grizzliness, irritability and the like affect humans and animals as well. Divorces are well up. The wind is up, the trees groan, and “acts of God” are plentiful. And the colors of the world become muted and dull, affecting artists doubly. It tends to last a moonth or so, and for many it is a time of hibernation and contemplations at home, no matter what the regular season or what needs to be done. A few revel in it, their true natures coming to the fore, and those grimy people become known as such. The Liftening is when the consensus is that things feel like they are getting better. Newspapers mostly call it correctly. It is a time for very muted, slightly grumpy, minor celebrations.

If you die during The Grimming, your soul will linger until the darkest day. And if you happened to be born within that malignant period, the least of your worries is that you are more likely to be named Raven than Joy.

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But inland, too, there is an Edge, a straight line that runs perfectly North-South, beyond which nobody from the Emergery has managed to venture. It is not a matter of desire, or strength, or determination, preparation or ingenuity. This edge is invisible to the eye, but by all other reckonings it is a wall, of sorts. You can throw things through it, and even reach through it with arms or outstretched legs, but your torso cannot. All living things, their torso, cannot pass the invisible line, they get gently stuck in place. Birds occasionally get caught, mid-flight, and pry themselves free with their little legs, as if from vertical quicksand. For the most part they steer well clear.

Near that Edge, there is not a lot going on, few reasons to be there. Without being able to range in all directions, animals and people prefer to locate themselves somewhere else. The lack of activity means thereabouts is mostly barren, and what lives there are the darkest and spiciest plants, with poisonous berries and twisted little creatures in burrows beneath.

Sometimes it has been fashionable to study this zone, and derelict viewing platforms can be found. On the other side of the Edge there is more of this world, but always in night or mist or shadows. The seasons are the same but subdued. Aside from bracken and dead limbs, there is nothing to see – no clouds, no grasses, nothing that feels warm or alive. But on rare occasions, for the patient observer, pairs of eyes come close for a moment, and in the distance, perhaps reflected, perhaps not, are lights, lights that are indications of structure and purpose, of sentience, far, far away.

Not surprisingly the margins of our society can often be found near that Edge, the Eastern Edge, the Cursed Edge, the Edge of Life. Bandits retreat to the Edge when they are incapable of planning ahead. Bootleggers and murky stills, absconders, illegal brothels, counterfeiters and spell-casters can all be found in that zone, where law enforcement mostly avoids, leaves them to their grubby dark deeds. And so it is that running up the Edge of our world is the easiest, albeit riskiest way to avoid the Sprites, who also have an aversion to that stateless strip, and get from Eastern place A to Eastern place B.

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The name was meant to reflect the sheer number of creatures who are either evolving or coming out from the shadows, which was their inspiration to begin with.

The Royals name their lands (often the whole continent) after themselves, while common-folk have no use for naming the continent, for few understand that it is a continent and fewer have ever spoken to someone from abroad, or even read a book.

The Emergery has also become a science, as the philosophers try to understand why all the changes are occurring.

The animals, birds, fishes, trees, monsters, microbes and whatever else can talk have their own name for their world, the old name, which translates to something like The Edge Of Everything Turned Inside Out.

The Poultice twins did not complete their bestiary in their lifetime, but some of their grandchildren did, with the help of many brave souls (and lucky accidents) along the way. Saying that lives were lost would be an understatement, but the rewards offered by the Royals were very tempting. Many tales of discovery were recorded in a companion piece.

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It appears to have no direct effect at all, with crops that are sprayed with it neither wilting or flourishing. And it harms not the people or animals that it touches. It doesn’t even want to touch them, for it slides off them and sinks into the ground or pavement or sea beneath.

Scholars maintain that the rain is becoming more voluminous, but it is hard to measure. It will not stay in any cup or container. It is alive and heads ever downwards, even if that means going up as well.

God’s blood it is called by some, despite no good coming from it. Devil’s blood say others, and they might be onto something, because with each dose of red rain the new creatures emerging in our world, whether out of the ground or shadows, increase by range and numbers. The Emergery is evolving rapidly and the red rain cannot be a coincidence.

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In the middle of all that is a dark, treacherous swamp, which is out-of-bounds for all sane people. It has quicksand and pythons, rotten matter and twisted trees, and lots of black gloop. Numerous nasty creatures lurk in its depths. Sunlight rarely gets in.

The surrounding towns are prosperous from the flood plain agriculture, and they have news services who are well-funded and short on stories, so that annual wizard pilgrimage is predicted, reported on, and then reviewed, making sure that the one-weekend event provides stories across many months.

Of the magical folk who enter the swamp, wizards are the easiest to identify, but all sorts attend the whatever-it-is. Few regular people have dared to investigate, and all those who tried and made it out again, tried following the pilgrims but quickly became lost. Once they are within the swamp, the wizards seem to disappear, or at least move a lot faster than you’d think from looking at them.

Legend has it that a device exists that can track people who travel in magical ways, because it picks up on their trail of fairy dust (or something like that anyway). If someone had that, and lacked commonsense, then maybe they could discover what goes on in there, once a year…

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