The Lost Currents
Where the Wind Takes You
The Lost Currents take their name from the water, but the name belongs to the wind as much as the current. The region is beautiful and entirely unassuming, ordinary open water that gives no warning of what it is. It sits within the same Old Dominion Sea that keeps Seravaar's northern approach calm, wrapping the archipelago's southern half, and it is no contradiction of that calm. It is simply a different part of the same sea, and it is one of the deadliest waters on the planet.
Approach from the north, across the open Old Dominion Sea, is clear enough for any ship or airship to pass without incident. Approach from the south, the east, or the west fails, and approach from Saethera or the Saetheran Ocean is not merely difficult but impossible. The force traces Seravaar's southern coastline exactly, closing three of the four ways in and leaving only the north.
Below a threshold that carries no visible marker, the region is ordinary open water. Past it, the wind and the current fold into a single force, and no pilot has ever navigated against it or turned back from it unaided. The wind there already runs near 400 km/h, and without warning it surges past 1300 km/h for a few seconds before dropping back, the window no helmsman or pilot ever sees coming, while walls of water as tall as 2000 m rise and vanish just as quickly. Ships are overturned or carried off. Airships caught past the threshold lose the ability to hold their course against the wind, and those that keep flying are simply taken wherever the wind takes them.
The one known way out is not a maneuver. Some airship pilots have been thrown back the way they came, flung clear of the water and recovered before impact, and that is the only escape anyone has recorded once caught. Craft that are not thrown clear remain adrift, moved by the current rather than by any control of their own, and those carried on toward the Uncharted inherit its rules on top of the wind, their systems failing before they are ever heard from again. Relay footage of the conditions inside the threshold exists, and it is terrifying, and it makes plain that nothing about the water's calm surface could ever warn a pilot what waits past the line.
There are islands within the region. It has been theorized that people may have reached them, but there has never been a way to confirm it. If anyone lives there they have no known means of communicating in or out, and even if a message could be sent there is no known way for a craft to arrive at all. People do not return from the Lost Currents, and so the islands remain a question no one has been able to answer.