Editing Levens (section)

=== The Doctrine of the Confused Natures ===
The prevailing scholarly account across the River holds that the four natures are disordered upon Levens, each having taken the property of another. The doctrine is recited in a fixed inverted form, and is repeated by '''[[Queen Bayar]]''' at the brink of one of the crowns:

{{Quote|My father once asked the magisters the same. Their answer was this: the force that betrays steel here is the same that forgets the earth below. The four natures are confused. Fire flees, earth sinks, steel slumps, air forgets — but here, the earth forgets, steel sinks, fire slumps, and the air flees.

Have you not felt it? How every breath tastes lacking? The locals do not notice. To them it is only life. But to the rest of us… it is a world that has misremembered its laws.|[[Queen Bayar]] to the [[Fendril King]], upon the edge of the crown}}

The doctrine's chief virtue is that it accounts for three separate observations at once — the failure of steel, the suspension of the crowns, and the thinness of the air upon them — by a single cause. Its chief error is the same: it assumes one force where there are two.

A common corollary among smiths and soldiers holds that ''finer'' steel sinks more than crude, since a well-forged blade is felt to misbehave worse than a rough garrison weapon. This is a false inference drawn from a true observation, though it is near-universally believed and is repeated in armorers' guild instruction across several spheres.

The '''[[Fendril King]]''' rejected the doctrine entirely, holding that no engine bears the isles at all: that they float because the nobility wills it so, disdain made flesh, and that the law of Levens is neither physics nor gods but distance.