Twisted Trees
The dead, twisted trees of the Soul Anchor, standing among its broken monuments on iron-hard ground, held from rotting as its Echoes are held from release.
Overview
The trees of the Soul Anchor are dead and twisted. They stand among its broken monuments and shattered headstones, over ground as hard as iron, in a place with no wind, no birds, and no life. They were living trees of the burial ground before the zone closed on it, and they died with everything else.
Appearance
Each is a bare, contorted trunk, wrung round on itself as a cloth is wrung, its branches bent back and knotted, its bark split in long spirals and gone the colour of ash. Some lean over the graves; some have grown round a headstone and split it. In the Anchor's sourceless light they take on its dull grey, sickly yellow, and bruised purple, and where a trapped Echo flickers near one, its glow catches on the twisted wood.
They do not rot. The decay here is a clean one, held still, and the trees smell of old dust and of the stale incense and formaldehyde smell of the place rather than of wet wood. Beneath the zone's low drone they make no sound at all.
Habitat and Range
They stand where they grew, scattered across the Anchor's ground, thickest in old burial grounds that once had groves. No new tree grows there.
Life Cycle
None. They died when the Anchor formed and stand as they were. If the Anchor is broken and its Echoes go free, it is said that the trees at last fall and rot, but few have seen an Anchor broken.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing, not even firewood, since their wood is hard as the ground and will not catch. They harm no one. The danger beneath them is the Anchor's own: whoever dies there stays.
Lore and Belief
Those who live near a Soul Anchor say the trees were twisted by the suffering of the Echoes around them, wrung like the dead who cannot let go. Nobody knows if that is so; the Anchor's dead do suffer, and the trees are twisted. Some mourners tie cloth to the nearest living tree outside an Anchor's edge, in the belief that its Echoes can see the colour and remember the living.
Necromancers are said to cut their staves from the twisted trees, and villages near an Anchor watch for strangers with a hatchet.