A guide to the lands and what walks them.
What follows is a record of the explored regions of Caedhraeth - the standing places, the broken places, and the wilds between. Each entry is a short companion to the travelers who walk these lands today.
The world a traveler sees today did not arrive at its present shape by accident. Every ruin has an Age behind it, every wild place its reason. The map of Caedhraeth, its strongholds and its broken roads and its forbidden valleys, is a record of four Ages of mortal effort and the long memory of the spirit world.
What follows is a short companion to the explorer: the four Ages and what each of them left behind, so that when you find a fallen pillar in the deep forest or a sealed doorway in the mountains, you know whose hand laid the stone.
The First Roots spanned 120 Turnings. It was the age of first steps, first villages, and first warnings. The ruins that survive from this period are crude but enduring: standing stones marking the boundaries of early settlements, simple shrines where the first shamans spoke with spirits, and the overgrown foundations of villages that did not last. The Heartgrove Willows planted during the First Roots are among the oldest living things in Caedhraeth, and a few still stand, gnarled and vast, in places where the settlements around them crumbled long ago.
The Spreading Boughs spanned 140 Turnings, the longest and most prosperous Age of mortal history. Its ruins are the grandest in Caedhraeth: vast halls, engineered roads, bridges that have outlasted the civilizations that built them, libraries whose books have rotted but whose stone shelves still stand. Travelers who venture into the deep wilderness today walk through the bones of the Spreading Boughs. It was an age of wonders. Its people believed they had mastered the balance between mortal ambition and the spirit world, and they were wrong.
The Withering spanned 40 Turnings. It was the shortest Age and the most devastating. The world that emerged from it was a fraction of what the Spreading Boughs had built. Vast stretches of land that had been settled and civilized were returned to wildness, and the spirits that inhabit them now do not welcome mortal visitors. The ruins of the Spreading Boughs stand in these places like bones of a larger creature, beautiful and sad and dangerous. The Withering is why the world outside the willow groves is perilous, why knowledge has been lost, and why the mortal races live in islands of safety separated by leagues of untamed spirit-held land. It is also why, when a child is born among the Elunari with a strange light in their eyes and a restlessness that no village life can satisfy, the elders watch them carefully and wonder which way they will turn.
The New Growth is 47 Turnings old and counting. It is the youngest Age, and no one knows how long it will last or what it will become. The mortal races are rebuilding with hard-won caution, and the Valenra are the vanguard of that effort. Every expedition into the wild lands, every ruin explored, every spirit negotiated with or driven back, is a step toward a future that the Spreading Boughs’ builders would not recognize but might, eventually, respect. The world of Caedhraeth turns, the willows grow, and the Aether pulses with life. The Valenra walk the boundary between the shelter of the groves and the untamed lands beyond, carrying a gift they did not ask for.
Each region has its own history, its own dangers, and its own quiet places.
South of Willowdale's gate the road drops through sheep country and orchard rows, and ends where the Briarwood closes over it.
The space between life and return, where spirits drift in Caedhriel's essence until they find the roots of Tathann and follow them home. Every Valenra who has died describes it a little differently, and none of them describes it willingly.
East and north of Willowdale, beyond the last standing willow grove, lies the forest the spirits reclaimed during the Withering and have never relinquished. Bronwen Fellward's field journals are the closest thing to a map that anyone has brought back.
The ring road crosses high fell country between the Greymount moors and the drop into the vale. Open tops, a stony ford, a cairnfield older than the road, and the Crossway, the only kept hearth for a day's walk.
West of the wildlands the heather foothills climb to old Thalrun ore country, a mine emptied by the Withering and, on the terraces above, the village of Greyhearth, where returners have raised the first smoke in ninety Turnings.
The old Thalrun ring road where it leaves Greyhearth, climbing the mountain shoulder and running east across open moorland. Built before the Withering, never broken, and lately re-cleared, it is safe, waymarked ground the whole way to the Crossway.
The forest beyond Willowdale's eastern edge is familiar territory for berry-pickers, at least where the willows still hold influence. Deeper in, the trees twist, the shadows do not behave as shadows should, and some who venture too far return changed.
The overgrown crossing between Willowdale's western fields and the foot of the Greymounts, where the old road to the mountains ran before the Withering and where its track can still be followed by anyone willing to walk it.
The school of the Aether-touched, entered through the great willow itself. What began as pilgrimage to the oldest surviving Heartgrove has grown into halls, teachers, and a place where new Valenra learn what they have become.
One of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the inner lands, standing beneath a willow Tathann seeded before Turnings were counted. Its ancient grove and the Academy built around it have made the village the gathering place of the Aether-touched.
