Compiled from direct experience, ancient records, and magical theory
The Barrier is elemental. Natural. As old as the act of breathing. It is the thing that divides worlds: the earthly from the divine, the human from the magical, the dead from the living, the dream from the real.
It is the pattern of the world; what common mortals name ley lines, what mages perceive as current, what spirits call the skin of the realms.
The Barrier has become frayed and weak through the natural buildup of magic.
This has been a gradual process, building over centuries. It began, so far as can be gleaned from the scraps of history, during what little remains of Atlantean records, described as the war with the Darkness; a conflict not just of weapons, but of magic and will. The Darkness, the Atlanteans never called it by name in text, for fear that doing so would reawaken it.
Whatever it was… it tore through the Barrier and weakened it. And tore the world in a way that should not have been possible.
