The Hushvale

Overview

The Hushvale is a remote basin and valley chain lost under permanent fog, at the foot of an unnamed mountain range on the cradle-facing edge of The Glassbelt Interior, where the desert gives way to the cradle-web. Outsiders call it the Hushvale. The people inside call it the Held, and no longer remember that there is an outside to call it anything else.

Almost nobody has come out of the Hushvale in more than a century, and the few who went in and came back are changed and do not speak clearly of it. Still people go: delvers after the grey salt said to keep a corpse fresh and an oath unbroken, kin looking for a pilgrim lost on the old pass, outlaws who think the fog safer than a lord's gallows, the bounty-hunters who follow them, and the kind of fool who has heard that under the mountain lies a vault of the dead older than any kingdom, full of everything they were buried with.

Lay of the Land

The Hushvale lies at the cradle-web's eastern edge, at the eastern foot of an unnamed range where the desert begins, with the Glassbelt spread east of it. Its old pass climbed west over the range towards the rough cradle country south-east of the Headwater Marches. Two or three weeks north along the desert edge, the crossing leaves the Broken Marches. Nothing nearer is mapped; see The Lay of the Land.

What Happened Here

The vale was once ordinary: villages, fields, shrines, burial caves, old roads, and a difficult but useful pass. Around c. 1,200 CR, a pass-road project triggered a landslide that killed workers, pilgrims, and villagers, buried bodies and names in confusion, and exposed an ancient Record-engine of the vanished Sepulchre-Kin beneath the mountain. The engine woke and began preserving every name and Echo in the vale, living or dead. The survivors hid from it with a concealment rite, the Wake-Seal, which hid them from the world as well and thickened into the fog. Both events are treated in The Wake-Seal.

What Is Known

From outside, very little.

• The fog never lifts.
• The people of the Held live in isolated ward-villages and know little beyond their own fields, shrines, and remembered taboos.
• Things in the fog have been shaped by the same catastrophe: hungry remnants that feed on warmth, breath, names, or recognition, and changed living, ordinary villagers whose bodies turn predator under deep fog, fear, or moonless dark.
• Gravesalt, a rare grey-white residue found where the fog, the dead, and the Wake-Seal concentrate, can preserve names, oaths, bodies, and thresholds against decay.

Edgeway Kindred circuits and the other few who make the Glassbelt crossing know the Hushvale only as fog on the horizon at the desert's cradle end, a route nobody takes, and a danger-mark that means do not go further.

Settlements

The people of the Held live in isolated ward-villages, none of them known by name outside the fog. Nothing faces the vale from outside: no post watches the fog, and the crossers who pass at the desert's end leave only their danger-mark. Crossers say lights move in the fog at night, low and slow, like lanterns carried by people looking for something. Treasure-seekers who followed them have not been seen again, and the kindreds' warning to anyone camped within sight of the fog is blunt: "a lamp in the Hush is looking for you".

The People

How many people live in the Held is not known outside the fog. They descend from cradle Humans of the old vale and from the road-workers, pilgrims, and travellers trapped by the landslide, but how they dress, how long they live, and what they call one another are left open.

What Is Not Known

Almost everything inside is deliberately left open: how many ward-villages remain, what each remembers, how the Wake-Seal is kept, what the engine is doing now and what lies in the halls around it, what became of the pilgrims' goods and the road-builders' pay buried by the landslide, whether gravesalt can be carried out without bringing something with it, and whether anyone inside still knows the way out.

Tensions

• Quiet kept for no one. The Held keep the quiet-rites and taboos of a god they no longer remember, and the reason for them was the first thing the seal took.
• Whose road. The pass-road whose landslide made the Hushvale was undertaken by the vale's own communities or by a power that ruled them, and nobody outside now remembers which.
• The mark at the desert's end. Nobody outside knows whether the fog keeps to the vale.
• A bounty at the fog's edge. An outlaw with a Headwater lord's price on his head fled into the fog at the cradle end last spring rather than hang.
• A gravesalt crew. A company of fortune-hunters from the Broken Marches has been seen buying rope, lamps, and Kindred guidance at the desert's end, and talking of gravesalt.