The Quiet Stone

A moss-furred standing stone in a deep Greatwood hollow where the woods go oddly, unnaturally still — pilgrims and Rootbound sit in the quiet, and no one can say why it settles here and nowhere else.

The stone predates the Imperium and the Asheni both; nobody built it and the Greenwake stopped asking who did. What matters is that within ten paces of it the wood goes still in a way it doesn't anywhere else in the Vale except the Stillwater's tarn — no birds, no wind-noise, just quiet. The Rootbound come to remember what silence feels like. The Mourners have asked Esk about it, politely, twice. She hasn't answered.