A wound with a way back
A Mark is a lasting relationship between a person, an unresolved wound, and a force able to recognize it. Everrain does not invent the pain. It finds a repeated survival method—obedience, grief, performance, hunger, denial, devotion—and gives that pattern consequences in flesh, behavior, space, weather, records, or other people’s reactions.
Humans and Beastkin can carry Marks. The condition is not a species, bloodline, class, or moral verdict. Animals and Rimwise can carry residue or become altered, but Jayjo’s category Marked One concerns people. A demon is not a Marked person, though a person can be contract-bound and Marked at the same time.
How contact becomes a condition
Direct survival of a breach, recognized supernatural contract, assigned impossible obligation, or sustained participation around an active rupture can form a bridge. Casual proximity is not enough. A clerk’s assignment alone does not make a supernatural event; some impossible force must recognize the relationship.
A Mark is described through its wound, survival method, recognizer, expression, benefit and cost. Street terms run from rain-touched and seeing it through carrying, claimed, drawing weather and going-site. Clinics use trace, witness, carrier, bound, anchor and catastrophic sitehood. These describe entanglement, not strength or a fixed progression. Someone can remain stable for years or regain choices with care.
The useful part has a price
A Mark may reveal an unsafe route, preserve a body inside impossible space, or open a threshold ordinary travelers cannot use. Its benefit is narrow. The same pattern can attract predators, isolate a household, invite exploitation, narrow alternatives, or reorganize a home until it becomes unsafe.
Care depends on the individual: food, sleep, names used in several contexts, safe interruption, environmental changes, witnesses, treatment of ordinary injury, and attention to the pressure that keeps returning. Suppression can quiet a symptom while worsening the person’s condition. No universal cure follows from winning a fight.
What may end or remain
A Mark can become dormant, stabilize, change through a new relationship, be severed, or reach an ending. Transfer demands a willing anchor; forced transfer is not healing. Death may end the pattern or leave residue where an unresolved bridge still exists. It does not automatically create a monster.
Friends, work, taste, jokes, anger, and private memory remain around the expression. A person is not fully described by what their survival has become.
