One of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the inner lands, standing beneath a willow Tathann seeded before the counting of Turnings began. Its ancient grove and the Academy built around it have made the village the gathering place of the Aether-touched.
Willowdale sits on a stretch of the southern coast where the land slopes to the sea. To the east and north press the forests that survived the Withering. To the west, a chain of mountains holds the horizon. The village between is a working one, with worn stone lanes, a windmill turning over the western fields, and orchards grown old along their margins.
At its center stands a willow whose lineage traces back to Tathann’s earliest seedings. Most Heartgrove Willows planted during the Spreading Boughs perished in the Withering. This one did not. The Galadwen who tend it offer no explanation, but the stillness beneath its branches carries an older quality than any younger grove can replicate, and it is for that stillness that the Valenra began arriving within a generation of their first emergence.
What started as individual pilgrimage has since become the Academy. Willowdale has grown around this purpose without reordering its character to serve it. The lanes and market quarter remain Elunari in spirit, practical and weathered, accommodating the Aether-touched the way they accommodate everything else, in the manner of settlements that have outlasted what came to change them.
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 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.
One of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the inner lands, standing beneath a willow Tathann seeded before the counting of Turnings began. Its ancient grove and the Academy built around it have made the village the gathering place of the Aether-touched.