The same treatise that denies will an opposite also slips in a warning about the Strata: the world holds shape because minds insist on seeing it that way. The text frames Strata as the layer that remembers, while the Ether below keeps shifting. Every creature that perceives the world adds another thread of expectation, and the weave becomes harder to change. “Without substance, substance wouldn’t be,” the scribe jokes, but the line carries teeth, and it’s the natural counterpoint to the responsibility I outline in Will Against the World.

When I map historical accounts of grand workings, the timeline tracks with population curves. Sparse eras brim with miracles, dense eras with bureaucracy. The book predicts that trend outright, more people mean more shared assumptions, and those assumptions calcify the Strata until Expression feels like trying to sculpt granite with breath alone. The magician doesn’t just fight physics; they wrestle with consensus reality.

The Ioma is the most vivid counterexample because its perpetual mist and len cycle blunt the Strata’s gaze. The fracture behaves like a river of condensed fog that shields entire districts from constant observation. When half the day disappears into vapor and ritual sleep, the world forgets itself just enough for Ether to seep through. That’s why folktales stay stubbornly alive there, and why visiting practitioners swear their sigils bite harder in the mist. The Strata can’t fix what it cannot clearly see, a phenomenon I circle back to in Mist-Engine Weather and Culture Woven from Mist.

That idea guides how I design cities and cultures. A remote enclave might still coax the Strata into flexing, while imperial capitals drown every anomaly in collective skepticism. Magic doesn’t fade because the rules tightened. It fades because belief became a prison of its own making.