They are bare: trunk and branch without leaf or bud, the bark worn smooth and grey, the twigs thin and pale as finger bones. Their colours are the Trace’s own, faded sepia and misty grey, as if seen through old glass, and their outlines blur where the mist touches them, so that the far side of a wood is never quite there. They do not creak or rustle. Under them the only sound is the plane’s low murmur of voices and footsteps that are not there. They smell faintly of old dust and dried flowers, and they are cold and oddly light to the touch, as everything in the Trace is.

They stand in the Trace’s misty forests, on its slopes and beside its rivers of liquid shadow, in woods without clear edges.

They fade, as all things in the Trace do unless memory holds them. A tree no one has looked at for a long while is thinner and paler than one at the edge of a path, and some stands seem to come clearer when a traveller who once knew a wood like it walks among them.

They give nothing that can be carried out, and harm no one. A wood of them is easy to get lost in, and the Trace’s danger is that a traveller lingers there.

Mourners say that every tree that dies on the Material Plane stands again in the Trace, and that a felled grove can be visited there; whether the trees are the remnants of real trees, or only of the memory of trees, no one knows. The few who have crossed the Trace and come back speak of its woods as the stillest place they have ever stood, and some say they saw there a tree they had climbed as children.

Mourners are told of the one who walked into the grey wood after his wife’s Echo and cut a branch to mark the way back; the branch is said to hang in a shrine still, and to be cold to the touch in summer.