Oypat

Oypat cannot be lived in. The Engineers have cordoned it off, and its people live scattered among others like refugees, in pockets and tiny clans.

In the account Din is given, the ruin began about eleven years ago, when an Apoth there tried to make cheap parchment by suffusing a grass to grow very fast. The grass, dappleglass, is a simple weed much like shootstraw that sprouts from tiny sporelike seeds, with white blossoms whose hearts are yellow and purple and a rather unpleasant smell. It spread far too quickly and took over every patch of soil, and when the soil ran out it grew in the wood of houses and on the sides of trees. People who bathed in the rivers downstream found it growing inside them. The Apoths and Engineers dithered over how to save the place until it was too late, and the Apoths burned it with phalm oil, the same burn used on leviathan carcasses.