THE COMPENDIUM

Places

181 entries

Places 181Factions 59 Characters 118Creatures 71 Items 83 Events 14 Concepts 56 Texts 32

Aelvyrenn

The elder Vyr's sky-seat — a great island of pale tiered halls hung in the cold air above Caer Vallen, where the oldest blood withdrew after the Sundering and the Riven King still reigns. Most of the Vale half-believes it a myth; it is reached only by a warp-pilgrimage, never on foot.

Ashfall Town

A dozen ash-brick buildings at the end of the old Imperium road, permanently hazed by the Emberthrone — the only inhabited settlement in the waste.

Caer Vallen

The shattered seat of the Vallen Imperium under the northern Rampart, where the Sundering broke and Sunder's Echo was raised and shattered in the same hour.

Castle Sered

House Vandahl's ancestral castle on the bare crag of the Sered Spur — proud, ceremonial, and three-quarters shut.

Correth, the Bronze Seat

The Imperium's far capital, west beyond the Rampart and the inland sea — a city the size of a nation that the Vale only ever heard about. Whether it still stands is the oldest open question in the world; no Vale-dweller alive has been there or met anyone who has.

Crowsnow Hollow

A wind-scoured tundra cave below the snowline — the one reliable shelter on the long climb between the pass and the Deep, contested between a Frost Shrike rookery above and a Rime Stalker's lair below.

Dabbeth's Roost

A wash-cave under the Unhushed Tower where the hermit Old Dabbeth lives — smoke, a strung line of wind-chimes tuned to the Tower's note, and forty years of listening.

Dustmere Hollow

A sheltered green hollow where a failing spring crosses the barrow road — the one liveable fold in the Eastern Crags and the last place that sells water before the delves.

Greywater Hollow

A tiny Stoneborn quarry-steading folded behind the eastern ridge in the Hollow Vale — three slab-roofed stone houses, a forge, and a cold black tarn — the only hearth and roof in the Rampart Foothills.

Gull's Watch

A leaning Imperial beacon-tower over the Tidewrack narrows where the Mirrenmere drains to the open Pacific, now a Silt Hands signal-tower.

Hessa's Reek

A smoke-stained fissure above the Frostmaw where the Rime-Skinners cure pelts and render frost-glands — the stench carries downwind and warns the wise off the den.

Hewngate Keep

A House Vandahl toll-keep on the vale road that the Broken Lances were hired to garrison and simply kept — its gate now a chain across the road and its cells full of the people who used to pay it.

Highbridge

Humanity's great city in the Vale — a true city, terraced up the south bank above the Vellen gorge where the imperial span carries every road east. The latecomers' free crossing: a human-run market and guild hub the old Houses tax but no longer hold, the Vale's de facto capital, where every great power and every guild keeps a hall.

Hollow-Pines Camp

A sheltered hollow off the NW Imperium fork where Marrow Lances escorts and College diggers winter before the climb toward Caer Vallen's foothills.

Hollowfold

The only living settlement on the Sered Spur — a small grazing-village of dry-stone steadings huddled in the largest sheltered hollow below Vandahl Keep, threadbare and proud, paying tithe-silver the house can barely protect them for.

Karth Bridge

A lonely watch-tower and timber ford where the north road crosses the Karth — House Vandahl's last post before the tribes' country.

Marrek's Roost

Old Marrek the Wallwright's hut wedged into a crag-nose above Hollowfold — walls he has mended into a one-man warren over forty years of not being paid properly.

Marrowfold Cairn

A pre-Vandahl chambered cairn behind the second ridge — older than the house, older than the cut stone of the catacombs that were sunk into it without ever reaching its bottom.

Oakwatch

The Greenwake's camp at the Hollowing Oak — warden-shelters, drying-racks, a charm-cutter's lean-to, and the one place in the Greatwood you can resupply without being watched as a threat.

Pinefall Barrow

A low cut-stone barrow in the dense pinewood on the old Imperium line, half-excavated by relic-runners who stopped coming back.

Pinewatch Camp

A relic-runners' cold camp under the boreal canopy, watching the column-fields for what the College's diggers leave behind.

Reedmother's Sink

A canopy sinkhole in the reed delta where the reeds drink — a green flooded shaft dropping into a warm underground pool, sacred to the delta-folk and dumping-ground both.

Saltreach Spring

The only standing settlement in the Southern Flats — a handful of mud-and-rib-stone houses hidden in a sheltered hollow around the region's one living spring.

Saltwidow's Roost

A wreckers' hermit-perch on the north headland, a roost built from one wrecked hull, where an old wreck-picker reads the tide and the fog and sells what she knows.

Siltmouth

A reed-and-plank fishing village on stilts where the Vellen spends itself into the Mirrenmere, quietly in the Silt Hands' pocket.

Sorrel's Glade

A glade off the Hollowing Oak's path where Sorrel stands rooting, bark climbing her like a slow tide — the living proof of where the Rootbound road ends.

Sresh-Dar

The Silt Hands' walled free-port on the south shore of the Mirrenmere — the vale's only real city, answering to no banner but its own ledger.

Stocktarn Drown

A sunken steading-chapel beneath the upland tarn, swallowed by the rising water generations past — you swim it: surface to breathe, dive under the low roof to the drowned altar where the Kneeling Drowned have left their mark.

Stocktarn Shore

The reed-ringed upland tarn at the heart of the largest hollow — watering-troughs, a sunken bell-tower's tip breaking the surface, serene by day and the place the Drown lies under.

The Ancestor-Poles of the Far Graze

A dense forest of carved bone-white poles on the open ash, marking a graze the Bonesung have buried their dead at for generations.

The Ash-Sealed Barrow

An ash-buried barrow the Bonesung shun and will not name, holding dead older than the Echo.

The Beaver-Flats

A wide drowned flat of standing water and root-bridges in the Greatwood's middle — dark ponds strung together into a maze of dry islands, good fishing, and an easy place to lose a pursuer or yourself.

The Black Scar

A vast burn-break where last summer's fire took the whole rib-slope — black charcoal brush, bare ash, and the new green coming up between.

The Bonesung Camp

A shifting Ashari camp out on the open ash, hide-tents and ancestor-poles.

The Brazen Watcher

A single toppled Vallen Sentinel lying full-length across a terrace below the seat — dead or dormant, weather-greened, the size of a cottage — used by runners as a windbreak and meeting-stone.

The Brine Spring

A hot freshwater spring bubbling up through the salt on a low island — the only sweet water in the drowned country, so every traveller and every predator knows it.

The Brine-Cellars

A collapsed Imperial sea-customs station drowned into the south headland, its vaulted stone cellars half-full of standing brine, where the empire once weighed and bonded everything moving through the Narrows.

The Cairn-Shrine of the Watcher

Sister Velthi's lone Ashen Temple cairn on the seat-approach, hung with ash-charms and marked with the Temple's warning: the seat is Temple ground and the dead are not yours to lift.

The Causeway Rest

A Slack-Tide pilot's shack and fire on the last island before the south shore — the save-your-skin waypoint where the Sunken Stair Road makes its final crossing.

The Charm-Barrow

An Ashari ancestor-barrow grown into a Greatwood ridge, half-swallowed by roots, where the tribes laid the dead the Oak would not take — and restless wights stir where the roots cracked the seals.

The Charm-Cords

The fog-bound Mistways gorge where the Greenwake hang knotted charm-cords across the path so a traveller can feel the way they cannot see — the Greatwood's main door from the Vale.

The Cinder Throat

A lava-tube cave on the Cinder Reach seam, breathing warm sulphur air — an emberback hatchery above and the Cinder Quorum's smelter for melting down barrow-metal below.

The Cindervault

A Vallen Imperium resonance-hall sunk into the Emberthrone's north-west flank, its processional axis aimed at the caldera — sealed from the outside because what hums in its apse was too dangerous to use.

The Cinderwell

A heat-vent fissure in a burn-break where a seam of old peat-and-resin under the chaparral has smouldered for years — warm to the hand, the air bad.

The Cold Ford Stones

A cairn-line marking the safe shallows beside the Karth Bridge timber span — read them right and you cross; read them wrong and the river takes you.

The Coldhum Deep

A meltwater cavern the Stoneborn Coldhand Pans opened into a buried Imperium colonnade — half natural ice-throat, half drowned resonance-hall, fungus-lit, with one resonator still pulsing underwater.

The Counting-Floor

The Gaunt Ledger's official face in the capital — a long counting-hall under the span's first arch where the syndicate's factors weigh, price and lend against everything that crosses the bridge.

The Crookbridge

The worn stock-bridge over the Sered Cleave near the Keep — the only easy crossing of the gorge, a chokepoint on the road, and where the Broken Lances would cut the supply line if they turned.

The Cullhold

A dry ridge-cave the Cullers use as a kill-house and cache — hides curing, clean arrows in score, and a wall of echo-beast skulls, the freshest still half-crowned with crystal.

The Driftmarket

A hidden black-market under the Siltmouth wharves where the Gaunt Ledger fences echoes, relics, and worse — bright, busy, and quietly armed.

The Drinking Sink

A collapsed mesa cistern the wash flash-floods fill — the one standing water in a country that lies about water. A sunken Imperial way-shrine waits at the bottom, and the Silt Hands believe the Vault's warm runnels drain into here.

The Drover's Bones

A dry wash full of the bleached skeletons of a whole loper-herd and its drovers, unburied by Bonesung order since the Ash Famine as a warning.

The Drover's Cache-Delve

A dead-empire buried way-cellar under a rock-rib, half its roof fallen, sand pouring through the cracks — still used by the Silt Hands as a forward cache.

The Drover's Wreck

A picked-over caravan half-sunk in the salt flats, the bones of its team still standing in the traces.

The Drovers' Spring

The failing seep that feeds Dustmere Hollow, ringed by the only real green for miles — ashen loper water here at dawn, and the spring runs lower each season.

The Drowned Bell

An Imperial harbor-bell that fell into the shallows when its tower went; at dead-low slack its lip breaks the surface and the swell rings it, slow and cold — the drowned faithful answer it.

The Drowned Chapel of Vael

A Vallen Imperium roadside shrine the bog-tarn swallowed whole — a sunken nave of brine wights under black water, and somewhere beneath them a resonator that may still hum.

The Drowned Course

A length of Imperium aqueduct that fed Caer Vallen, collapsed and flooded into a still under-tarn in the Hollow Vale — a swim-through sunken arcade lit only by cold drowned-glows.

The Drowned Lances

A frozen-bog stretch where a Marrow Lances escort went under the mud in a bad winter — the spear-shafts still stand in the ice and wights walk after dark.

The Drowned Larach

A sunken Imperium-era shrine in the Greatwood's Drowned Skirts, flooded when the wood walked into the sea; you swim its nave and surface to breathe under a low drowned roof.

The Drowned Lord-Stag's Bones

The salt-cured skeleton of a great stag on the southern edge of the flats — it smelled the water it could never reach and died walking toward it.

The Drowned Shrine

An Imperial temple stranded on the largest mere-island when the valley drowned, where the Ashen Temple rows pilgrims and the Silt Hands keep dry cellars.

The Drowned Well

A collapsed Imperium hold-cistern flooded black in the far south, the only sweet water for a day's walk underground — and inhabited by something that keeps it from going stagnant.

The Dusk Camp

A moving Reshi and Wandering-Cups night-camp on the South Road — hide-tents and copper kettles that travel with the caravans and pitch at a different rib-notch each season.

The Eastern Crags

A wind-scoured highland of mesas and dead-end gorges at the far east of the Vale, threaded by the old barrow road that climbs to two things the rest of the Vale would rather forget.

The Eastern Hills

Wind-scoured ridges east of town, hiding the Echo of Vallen and older, hungrier things.

The Echo of Vallen

A barrow in the eastern hills where the wind speaks and a god-shard waits in the dark.

The Ember Waycamp

A semi-permanent Ashwalker camp at the fumarole fields' western edge — smoke-poles, fire-treated shelters, and a stone ring that has never gone cold.

The Emberthrone

A living fire-mountain in the south-east wilds — a lava lake burning in its crater crown, ash on every wind.

The Emberwaste

A black-basalt killing country of ash drifts, fumarole fields, and cinder-flash heat ruled from above by the living fire-mountain.

The Falls of Stilled Water

A hanging meltwater falls on the eastern wall of the Foothills, frozen mid-pour half the year into a blue-white curtain; frost-lichen thick on the ice, and a runner's cache rumoured behind it.

The First Sleeper

The skeleton of a colossus half-sunk in the high-desert pan east of the Vale — a man stands no taller than its pinkie finger; you can walk into the cup of its skull. The Korl name it their first ancestor.

The Foldfast Steading

A fortified hill-steading abandoned when the silver failed — its hall caved, its sheepfolds gone to nettle, and a Broken Lances squad quietly camped here to watch the castle road.

The Frostmaw

An ice-throat cave off the Karth ford where rime-stalkers den in the cold dark.

The Frozen Waystone

An old Vallen Imperium milestone iced over above the snowline, marking a road that no longer goes anywhere.

The Fumarole Fields

A quarter-mile shelf of cracked basalt north-east of the Emberthrone, riddled with hundreds of hot gas vents — the region's maze, navigable only by the Ashwalkers' stake-markers.

The Glass Wash

A dry wash floored with wind-polished mesartone that rings underfoot — a sand-lurker ambush ground where the wash meets the Hollow Cut and the singing wind is loudest.

The Greenbarrow

The one tomb the Mirrenmere's flood never reached — swallowed by canopy instead, vine-cracked cut stone strangled in root and fungus on the highest Drook ridge.

The Greywood

A stretch of Greatwood forest where an echo-beast lay too long and the land turned grey and wrong — ashen grass, pale bark, a faint ring on the air the Cullers mark and the Rootbound guard.

The Gull-Throat Caves

Sea-cut tide-caves honeycombing the rock under Gull's Watch, flooding at the make — the Silt Hands cache contraband in the dry upper galleries above the tide-mark.

The Heat Shrine

A cracked basalt slab above the fumarole fields, cup-marks and ash-channels carved into it by some old community as an offering place to the mountain — Threnn tends a fire here now that he cannot explain.

The Hermit's Rib

A sun-mad anchorite's roost dug into the north face of a rock-rib — one cell, a water-jar, a wall scratched dense with a heat-driven cosmology no one else can read.

The Hermit's Roost

A mesa-top ledge where a half-mad Finder lives off cliff-stalker meat and barrow-rumor — the only outlander who survives the wastes by knowing them.

The Hermit's Roost

A wind-blasted crag-ledge with a single dry cell cut into the rock, the hiding place where the Cantor Who Wouldn't Seal first hid before the Meltwardens found him — his half-carved silencing-glyphs still on the walls, abandoned in a hurry.

The High Room

The Resonants' seat in the capital — the locked upper floor of the Listening Post, where the College's ambitious inner ring keeps its best workings and its own counsel.

The Hollow Cut

A dry wash that runs under a mesa into a wind-throated cave system; the wind sings through it the way it sings over the Unhushed Tower, and the Cinder Quorum stages out of its mouth before a dig.

The Hollow Mesa

An Imperium resonance-vault inside a mesa the Tabled Stones grew around, cracked by the Sundering, kept shut by the Bonesung simply walking past it for a thousand years.

The Hollowing Oak

A vast hollow ancestor-tree in the Greatwood, older than the Imperium, where the tribes hang their bone-charms.

The Hum-Stone

The one fluted resonance-pillar still standing in the Leaning Columns field, canted hard to the east, that hums loudest of all on a north wind — runners navigate the maze of fallen stone by it.

The Hush-House

The Mourners' Highbridge chapter — a narrow terraced house hung with quieting bells, where the order takes commissions for singings and keeps the city's burial rolls.

The Hush-Stone

A moss-furred standing stone in a deep Greatwood hollow where the Sundering's ringing goes oddly faint — pilgrims and Rootbound sit in the quiet, and something listens back.

The Hushing Deep

A bell-haunted barrow-annex in the eastern hills where echoes still ring — go armed, and don't sound anything you can't outrun.

The Ice-Throat Sump

A flooded sub-gallery off the Karth Deep's meltwater system — a sunken Imperium shrine the river backed up and filled, swimmable under a low ice roof, with air-pockets between frozen-over chambers.

The Imperial Reach

A wind-gutted Vallen Imperium waystation astride the old barrow road, where the legion that sealed the Weeping Vault was quartered. Cut stone half-eaten by sand, a revenant or two still at post.

The Karth Deep

A meltwater cave in the high northern pass that swallows the Karth's source — older than the wights, connecting under the Rampart.

The Korl Trail-Stones

Man-tall standing stones the Korl raised along the only sane line across the upper snowfield, older than the Imperium, carved in a script the Stoneborn read and settled men cannot.

The Lance-Barrow

A Korl high-passage tomb cut into the granite above the column-fields — older than the Imperium that built its rampart to wall them out — its dead swinging like their living kin.

The Last Banner Stone

A lone standing stone on the highest grass bench where House Vandahl's first lord planted his banner — the iron socket is still there, rusted, and the view from it shows the whole Vale and the smoke of Valenfeld.

The Last Good Well

A deep imperial well that still runs sweet in a rib-notch, ringed by the scratched marks of everyone who found it and lived.

The Last Hour Glade

Sacred ground where Greenwake wardens come to give their final walk to the wood; sometimes the wood gives an amber echo back as a seed of crystallized hour.

The Last Keeper's Roost

Sumeh the Tideless's lean-to on a south-cove fin, where she keeps her skiff and her vigil between rows out to warn travellers of the Temple's coming boats.

The Last Waystone

The final House Vandahl milestone where the silver road dies and the banners stop meaning anything.

The Lava Shore

A low black-rock shelf where old lava flows meet salt water in permanent boiling fog — scorched shades are thickest here, where something came out of the sea during the Sundering and did not go back.

The Leaning Columns

A field of toppled Vallen Imperium resonance-pillars sunk in the pine duff, still faintly humming in a north wind.

The Legion's Mile

The straight, cut stretch of old Imperial road below the Imperial Reach, where the paving survives — the only place in the Crags you can see a horizon unbroken by mesa, and the wind runs the whole length of it singing.

The Lightning Snag

A colossal dead redwood split white by a lightning strike, visible above the Greatwood canopy from the ridge-tops — the one reliable bearing-mark in a place that hides the sky.

The Listening-Post

The Listening College's reading-hall on Highbridge's guild square — the arcane door into the relic war, kept where every road's noise passes.

The Loggers' Cut

An abandoned Gaunt Ledger logging adit driven into a Greatwood hill chasing iron and grave-silver, struck water and the wrong note, and left in a hurry — good steel still on the floor.

The Mangrove Maw

A sea-cave under a Drook headland where the Silt Hands cache loads too deniable for the Cove — the back floods at high water and a Tide Gripper owns the mouth.

The Marrow-Hollow

A tribal death-house cut into a granite ridge above the Karth gorge, sealed by the Bonesung and left to barrow wights — the Broken Lances have been told there is silver inside.

The Marrowhall

The Marrow Lances' chapter-house above Highbridge — a fortified war-hall, muster-yard, and the one neutral ground every Vale power has had to walk into.

The Marrowring

Highbridge's fighting ring, run by the Marrow Lances — a full circle of buttressed grey stone around open sand, where coin buys a bout, the crowd pays fame back in titles, and nobody has to die.

The Mistways Deep

A flooded cave system off the Mistways gorge where the cold beck disappears underground, with Greenwake charm-cords strung through the first galleries and lost in the dark beyond.

The Molten Barrow

An Ashwalker burial hall cut into a cold lava tube, its niches lined with volcanic glass — the oldest Ashwalker dead, and the shades of them that the sealing rites no longer hold.

The Mosswound

The shallow, looted apron of the Leaning Columns where relic-runners work the surface for what the College's diggers missed — the region's low-tier entry ruin, frost-shrike country.

The Net-Cave

A shallow dune tide-cave the wreckers use to stash salvage and dry nets — the Narrows' starter delve, mostly dry, home to mudreavers and silt crabs.

The Pale Strand

A long bleached beach on the open Pacific side of the south headland, drift-strewn and gull-loud, where the great ocean swell rolls in unbroken — the literal western edge of the world.

The Picked Wrecks

A graveyard of beached and broken hulls in the western shallows below the Cove, where the sea delivers what the law forbids and the Tide-Pickers strip what washes in.

The Quiet Door

The Finders' unmarked front off the Highbridge guild square — the stealth door into the relic war, a fence-cellar where the Gaunt Ledger keeps an ear on the crossing.

The Reclaimed Milestone

A Vallen Imperium waystone on the old graded line below the foothills, half-swallowed by pine duff, its carved distances pointing down a road the forest took back.

The Relief-Column Field

A frozen battlefield on the saddle below the Sunderfront Galleries — the Imperium relief column that marched for Caer Vallen when the Sundering broke, caught in the open and frozen where it fell, banners still standing in the ice.

The Reshi Ossuary

A rib-cut road-tomb where the Reshi caravan-folk have laid their road-dead for generations — a dry salt-barrow that preserves everything the crossing killed.

The Rootbound Hollow

A root-warren cave under the Hollowing Oak where the Rootbound give their dead to the living wood, with sap-caches in the deep.

The Salt-Choked Vault

A drowned arm of the Imperium's echo-architecture half-taken by the sea — the Sundering cracked its processional hall open and the Mirrenmere poured in, but something in the deep still keeps time.

The Salt-Pan Shrine

A sun-cracked roadside shrine on the white salt flats where drovers left offerings against the heat-thirst.

The Saltglass Vault

A Vallen Imperium resonance-hall sunk under the deepest rib, its Sundering fault flooded with brine that dried to salt-glass, fusing the apse into a cracked mineral cathedral.

The Saltless Barrow

One of the unmarked dead the Bonesung will not name — older than the Echo, cut by a making the gravesinger's prophecy does not cover. The Cinder Quorum is mid-dig.

The Saltsung Barrow

A pre-Imperial sailors' barrow in the south headland's high rock, where the drowned-rite people interred their sea-dead above the tide so salt would keep them — the Note rings louder here than anywhere in the Narrows.

The Scorched Ossuary

A lava tube on the Emberthrone's east slope, walls fused smooth by the flow that made it — used as an Imperium road-crew cache, abandoned, now home to cinder-crawlers and a colony of obsidian toads.

The Sealed Reliquary

The Choir's chapter-house and vault in Valenfeld, where bound echoes are sung quiet under stone — bright, austere, and very locked.

The Sentinel's March

A fully-collapsed Imperium hall down the slope from the seat where a severed Vallen Sentinel still walks an endless patrol with no destination through roofless arcades — open-air, deadly, and you can hear its bronze tread across the field before you see it.