Editing Fading Sea (section)

==== Tides and the Moon ====
Just as the moon controls the tides, so also is it the harbinger of the Fade. Hazy unreality waxes and wanes, advancing and retreating with the water in the eerie hinterland where stands Galgaleth. Twice a day, islands distantly visible in the haze swim slowly from view, and twice a day, they reappear - not always the same.

A spring tide closes Galgaleth's port. As the water laps high against the ancient seawall, to venture without a rope a stone's throw into the thick miasma brushing against the harbour's stone is to risk being lost.

The moon brings the Fade and the fog; the sun stands for solid reality. It is when these two bodies are opposed overhead, the spring tide, that the battle between the Fade and reality is most pronounced, and rages furthest this way and that. The sun god, Obon, the male god of light, order, logic, truth, authority, definiteness; the moon goddess, Suthi, the female deity of darkness, confusion, madness, lies, treachery and unreality - these two do all the people of the World worship, in various guises - even atheistic ones.

But it is not only the Sun and Moon that the Fade obeys. It pulses to stranger rhythms, too, that some whisper can be read in the stars. Certainly, nobody can predict when and how it will mount or ebb; or when there will be a Fadestorm that sends the people of Galgaleth huddling indoors around bright fires, knowing that when the oily rain abates, the town - and their friends and neighbors - will, in some unquantifiable way, no longer be quite as they were before.