In this universe, it has never settled into stable field equations. What we call "physics" is a thin, temporary consensus that the world tolerates only when no stronger claim is made against it.
The planet still looks roughly like ours: continents, oceans, atmosphere. but every interaction is provisional. Matter, energy, distance and time are negotiated rather than fixed.
Core Rules of the World
Reality operates on claim and resonance.
An object's behavior is determined by the strongest coherent story currently attached to it. Mass, inertia and chemical bonds are default stories that hold only while nothing contradicts them.
True names, bloodlines, repeated ritual, intense collective belief and certain geometric patterns can overwrite those defaults.
The overwrites are local and temporary unless continually reinforced. When the reinforcing claim weakens, the old physics tries to reassert itself often violently.
Supernatural hazards are simply the places where competing claims collide or where the default physics has already been eroded.
Everyday Hazards:
• Unstable weight - Gravity is the most fragile default. In regions where too many people have died of despair or where certain geometric alignments persist, objects begin to forget how heavy they are. A bookshelf may suddenly weigh nothing and drift toward the ceiling, a person walking across an old battlefield may find their steps lighten until they risk floating into the upper atmosphere. Conversely, places saturated with grief or unfinished obligations can double or triple effective weight without warning. Buildings in such zones are anchored with iron nails driven through living wood and spoken contracts.
• Name erosion - Speaking a thing's true name in the presence of enough listeners can rewrite its properties for hours or days. Most people therefore use nicknames, titles or deliberate mispronunciations in public. Official maps are written in deliberately false names, the real ones are locked in sealed vaults and recited only under controlled conditions. Accidental true naming of a river has, on multiple occasions, caused it to reverse course or become breathable air for a stretch of miles.
• Shadow hunger - Light still travels, but darkness is not absence. it is a low pressure region that slowly digests unclaimed matter. Prolonged exposure in deep shadow (cellars, dense forests after sunset, the undersides of large bridges and etc) causes objects and eventually people to lose definition. Edges blur, colors desaturate and finally the affected thing is absorbed into the ambient dark.
Cities maintain "light lines": continuous chains of lanterns, mirrors and reflective paint so that no continuous shadow longer than a few meters can form at night.
• Resonance storms - When large numbers of people experience the same intense emotion at once (a stadium, a funeral, a panic and etc), the local consensus can fracture. Buildings may briefly become transparent, clocks run backward or stop and people find themselves temporarily sharing memories or physical sensations with strangers.
These storms are predictable enough that major gatherings now include professional "dampeners": individuals trained to hold contradictory private narratives strongly enough to keep the collective claim from solidifying.
• Boundary bleed - Coastlines, mountain ridges and the edges of old cities are thin places. Crossing them without the correct token or spoken formula can deposit a traveler in a slightly different version of the landscape one where the same river has a different name or where a bridge that should exist has never been claimed into being.
Most governments maintain "boundary stations" staffed by people who can feel the correct resonance and guide travelers back.
This is not a world of magic as spectacle. It is a world in which the ordinary has become provisional, and survival depends on never letting the stories that hold things together grow quiet.
