Magical Beast Tides

A recurring threat the Norton domain prepares for with triple ice-walls, three thousand steel wheeled crossbows, and several thousand longbowmen. The fourth-district winter tide piles corpses against Lorist's defences for days.

The magical beast tide is a periodic mass migration of wild beasts that every winter rolls across the wastes in packs in search of food and crashes against the walled holdings of the Northern Lands. By the Nortons' family records it is hunger that drives the beasts from the wilds: the ancestors even ran an experiment, laying out feed, and confirmed that the packs head wherever there is something to scavenge.

When the grazers come — magical cattle or sheep — the damage is limited to fields and orchards. But packs of winter wolves and other predators threaten the very castles, manors, and towns. The town of Beye, when first founded, was constantly battered by such tides.

The beast tide was one of House Norton's five chronic afflictions. Under Lorist it is met with triple ice-walls, three thousand steel wheeled crossbows, and several thousand archers; the winter tide in one district piles beast carcasses against the defences for days on end. As Fatty Shi observes, with proper defences the tide can be turned from a threat into a source of abundant winter furs.

Among the beasts named are mountain magical antelope, horned rams, iron-horned rhinos, single-horned creatures, and winter wolves. The tide caught Lorist unprepared in his first winter on ancestral land, since the records of it were lost among the family's other papers.