The world of The Meidlands plays host to many dangers. Plagues, famine, highwaymen, petty wars between imperial vassals… these weigh heavily on most people living in the Empire. However, as you travel to the wilder and more remote reaches, other threats are more present.
Of course, there are the mundane natural predators on the edges of civilization: in the Meidlands, wolves, goblins, and occasionally trolls hunt or raid at the forest’s edge, but in all three cases, none have a particular inclination to raid near villages for more than livestock, although goblins will raid for man-made goods, mostly food and tools, trying hard to not get entangled with farmers defending their land. These are often only dangerous to people if you venture into their neck of the woods.
Then there are the Great Beasts, rare in settled lands, but deadly in ways most hunters cannot readily contend with. Gryphons are the most common in Meidish mountain footholds and every settlement has at least one tale of a unicorn deep in the nearby woods, whether or not one has been spotted in decades or centuries. On far islands and shores, pockets of sirens, harpies, sphinxes and lamiae still hunt. And any report of a wyvern is likely to bring the attention of more than the local lord, but often the provincial king or prince to ensure its eradication and to ensure no eggs remain hidden on some cliff side.
More worrying still are the fae, which often seem to lurk on the very borders of every forest, brook, and valley. Some appease them, almost all avoid, since even the helpful ones can prove fickle and dangerous company.
And in the dark moors, marshes, and barrows, people tell tale of ghostly spirits and the returned, those bound by magic, curse or even their own will to remain.
Although the Inquisition has long had to suffer remote heretic hermits or mad country anchoresses causing Sin, these were occasional and easily remedied affairs, regardless of how monstrous the results. But since the Sundering, the Inquisition and certain offices in the Collegia have larger instances of reality corruption.
The results are collectively called chimerae. They may have once been a plant or animal, or worse yet a person, but unrestrained otherworldly ingress can warp what was once biological into something twisted, unnatural and unreal. The scholars theorize that these mishappen things are essentially the same in nature to fae or great beasts, at least when comparing remains, so perhaps the latter were once chimerae given millennia of settling into reality and their biological nature. Either way, there are more of them. So many more.
It could start with a festival folk dance or an old superstition regarding a local standing stone and end with an entire remote village consumed: livestock now mutated, multi-limbed monsters; the residents themselves killed or no longer human. A cancer which grows on reality and bursts into chaotic malignancy and annihilation.
Even the cells of hidden worshipers of the old gods fear this. Worship of divine powers can be a very delicate thing, requiring not only faith but practice, patience, cleansing. If an old misunderstood fragment of divine truth long hidden is rediscovered (or remained in form, but didn’t function due to the Sealing), the earnest call for divine blessing may prove disastrous.