Welcome to Altalia

Mirea Corvetti forced Tessario to explicitly break the spiral-eyed mask before the crowd, then led her loyalists away to hold a separate festival that twenty-three people attended. She had chosen to preserve tradition at the cost of the festival's survival, documenting the ceremony's diminishment with the same meticulous care she'd applied to every declining cycle before.

Nissa read Gavrin's letter aloud to the crowd, exposing the truth that the departed succeeded not through miracle but through forced transformation—and in doing so, revealed Pirentia's refusal to change as the real wound. The town fractured further into argument, but the remaining Pirentines could no longer pretend the departed's different reality was fantasy, only proof that staying had been a choice with consequences they were still living.

Risa Alven's confession that she medicated herself through fifteen years of judgment facilitation invalidated hundreds of carefully achieved resolutions, forcing families across Nakares to restart their exhaustive processes of mutual understanding from the beginning. Her expertise in helping others endure unbearable moments had become the very thing that made genuine comprehension impossible—for herself, her daughter, and everyone who trusted her to guide them toward truth.

Yara Zelvan spent twenty years building influence through a collection system so perfect it made important things disappear, using expertise to defend against grief after her daughter drowned. When she chose to preserve her niece's common shell over her own standards, she dismantled her entire organizational framework to privilege sentiment over expertise—destroying her achievement to build something she couldn't fully believe in, creating a new archive where loss lived in every ordinary offering she accepted but couldn't truly value.

Renzo Costavan honored inheritance law by sharing his family's plow blade with his brother Tavian, only to have the worn metal snap on Tavian's rocky eastern terraces. When Tavian sought water rights for those same terraces, Renzo used council procedure to deny him, ensuring his brother would face the same abandonment Tavian once inflicted—teaching his daughter that some fractures, like the blade's clean break, can never be mended.