The Hanging Vale

Overview

The Hanging Vale is a dry side-valley at the southern end of the inland rim of the Rimward Basins, opening west onto the Glassbelt. The Krystallis Incursion (c. 352,000-c. 349,000 BR) left everything in it crystal. It is the silent valley where everything stands still, and the only place Crystallization is still caught.

The Place

Thornscrub, stones, and grass of clear, flawless crystal, every curve straightened; a stream standing as a rod of water; a hawk hanging over it in mid-stoop, which gives the valley its name. Beasts of crystal, the Shard-Hosts, stand in rows where the breaking stopped them. No sound carries inside. At sunrise the whole vale catches the light and throws it out across the Glassbelt, a white fire on the rim that crossers see a day's ride away and steer by, and that no one who has seen it close forgets.

The edge runs clean across the valley mouth and up its walls, cracked where it broke. The lattice no longer spreads, but it still takes: a hand laid on it long, or a sleeper lying against it through a night, begins to facet. The way in is a day's walk from the southernmost of the Lastwater Wells, across stony ground where horned vipers lie buried at the edge of every shade and pan hyenas follow anyone who walks it alone.

Keepers and Users

No one holds it. The custodians of the southernmost Lastwater Well watch its mouth and turn crossers away. Edgeway circuits know it as never-touch ground. Salvagers and the curious come for its shards or its stillness, against every warning, and a few hard-handed shard-hunters make a living at the edge, chipping in gloves and leaving before dark. The custodians turn them away when they can, and bury them under stone when they cannot. Their shards go west with Glassbelt crossers and east to the strongholds, sold by relic-sellers who swear each one was broken from a Shard-Host's heart.

The Medieval Present

Households at the well hang chipped crockery and crooked charms at the door, teach children to break any clear stone forming on a sleeping animal, and their healers carry a hammer beside their knives. Crossers camping near the mouth sleep apart from the stone and wake one another in the night. Every few years someone walks in drawn by the silence; most come out the same day, and a few are found later, standing. The well remembers a herd-girl who went in after her brother and carried him out on her back with both her hands gone to crystal, and tells her story at the dry-season fires. Well children who touch a clear stone are made to hold up their hands to be looked at, and the oldest curse at the well is may you sleep where it is clear.

History

The valley was set into lattice in the Krystallis Incursion, when nobody lived in it, and has stood unchanged since.

Tensions

• Shards in the market. Shards broken from the edge sell on both sides of the Glassbelt as luck or as proof, and some buyers say a shard calls the lattice back.
• The hunters at the edge. A band of shard-hunters from across the Glassbelt has camped at the valley mouth for a season, out of the custodians' reach, and sells its shards to anyone.
• Raiders at the mouth. A raiding band from the Glassbelt edge has learned that the custodians will not follow anyone past the last cairn before the vale, and has begun striking herds near the well and running for the mouth.
• The standing ones. A few who walked in are known by name at the well, standing aware inside the edge.