"In my first universe, those world-eating monsters that pop out of the ground are called malices, and they drain... something out of everything around them. We call the something 'ground'. It's - sort of what things are. The shape of a rock or the aliveness of a tree. Everything that's near a malice for too long dies, and if they stay too long in one place or eat too much of a place's ground to use in their magic, the blight gets so bad that everything just sort of shivers apart into grey dust."