Wind-Bent Trees
The trees of the two wind zones of the Unbound Gale: bowed to the ground and snapped without a sound in the Silent Gale, and grown sparse and leaning in the never-ending speech of the Whispering Winds.
Overview
The trees and grass of the two wind zones of the Unbound Gale are the ordinary growth of high, open country, shaped by winds that are anything but ordinary. In the Silent Gale they bow to the ground and snap without a crack, and the grass lies flat. In the Whispering Winds, where the wind never stops, a few sparse trees lean for ever with it.
Appearance
In the Silent Gale
When the Gale is blowing, every tree is bent nearly double, its crown dragged along the ground, its leaves stripped and streaming, and then a trunk splits and goes, all in perfect silence. The grass lies flat in one direction like combed hair. Between storms the trees stand again, but they lean: their trunks scarred, their tops broken off and grown back crooked, their branches all on the downwind side. Old ones are hardly taller than a man, gnarled and thick at the base, their bark scored by flying grit in the same parallel lines as the ground.
In the Whispering Winds
Here the trees are fewer, one or two to a slope among the jagged rock and wind-carved cliffs. Each grows in a long slant, as if forever about to fall, its branches swept to one side, its roots gripping the stone in knots. White dust lies in the cracks of the bark. The wind in them sounds like voices, because it is: the zone's chorus of the dead and the forgotten runs through every branch.
Habitat and Range
They grow where these zones form, in high passes, canyons, and open plains, and on windy peaks among ruins. The Silent Gale comes and goes with the weather, so its trees are the trees of its ground when it is calm. The Whispering Winds never cease, and their trees are the only ones that have managed to stand.
Behaviour and Temperament
They yield. A tree that bends lives; a tree that will not bend breaks. Over the years the ones that remain are the low, supple, and deep-rooted.
Abilities
Nothing more than any tree has, except what their zones lend them. In the Silent Gale their wood falls silently and lands silently. In the Whispering Winds the rock beneath them shivers with the echoes of the past, and travellers say the trunks do too.
Life Cycle
They grow slowly, as all trees in such country do, and live long if they bend well. In the Silent Gale the old are broken and the young spring from their stumps and roots. In the Whispering Winds a fallen tree is seldom replaced, and the slopes grow barer with the centuries.
Uses and Dangers
They give firewood and little else. In the Silent Gale their danger is that they fall without a sound and without warning, along with every rock and branch in the blast, and only the eye gives warning. Their use there is as a record: the lean of the trees and the lie of the grass show where the Gale has struck before and from which way, and those who cross such country read them before they read the sky.
Lore and Belief
Herders of the high passes say a stand of trees all bowed the same way is a place the wind remembers, and they do not camp there; often they are right. The Mute-Walkers, who feel one another through the ground, are said to feel the Gale coming through the roots of the trees. In the Whispering Winds some believe each tree keeps one voice in its branches, and that a listener who sits beneath the same tree long enough will hear it clearly; many who try stay too long.
Bandits of the high passes are said to camp in the Gale's edge where no shout can carry, and to use the bowed trees as their markers.