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 unclosed dead are more awake here than anywhere in the Narrows.

They cut it when the sea still had a name the living remembered, and laid their dead upright in the stone with salt packed into the shroud so the sea could find them even high up in the rock. The salt-kept dead are not soft like the drowned faithful below; they reach, and they remember their rite — nobody ever spoke the closing words over them, so nothing about their ending was finished. A cracked seam where brine seeps through the wall makes any sound in the chamber come back wrong, thick, behind your teeth. The Coward's Field-Guide says: do not.