Exploring the Isles

Escard used to end where the map did. It doesn't anymore. The wilds around the town now wrap it on every side, the Aetherspire Forest north of them is a place worth being afraid of, and beyond the Aetherspire stands something that was never there before at all: a mountain.

The Escard Wilds

The wilds now run in an unbroken ring around the town - forest and fence-line to the west, a cairn-marked road and hill country to the south, a river marsh to the north-west, and a coastline to the east with a jetty, a fishing village, and a fishmonger buying the day's catch. Wolves and bears roam the deeper woods and mean it when they attack. The wilds keep their own quiet corners, too - a sunken house half-swallowed by its garden, a hollow beneath an old oak's roots where the earth itself seems to answer when a sorcerer calls on it. Not everything out here wants to be found on a first walk through.

The Aetherspire Forest

North of the wilds the trees change. The Aetherspire is a corruption of nature: sparse, velvet-barked trees standing each in their own bare circle, black thorn crouched between them, sound arriving muffled as if heard through a wall, light that never sits quite right. Nothing here rots the way it should - it just goes greyer. The creatures of the Aetherspire are aggressive, unnatural, and confined to the forest for a reason; go in armed, or go in numbers. Its rarest wood grows nowhere else and never stands in the same place for long. Somewhere inside the forest, hidden from the paths, is a place where something answers to the pull of the Void.

Mount Caelahad

Past the Aetherspire, where the trees finally give out, the ground rises into a mountain that has never been on any map of Escard before now. Mount Caelahad can be reached two ways. The long way is a climb - scree, cairns, a ridge with a drop on both sides, and at the top a summit where a natural talisman of the Air waits in a silence that feels like it is listening back. The short way is a fall: a crack in the mountainside drops straight into the workings of a mine that was abandoned a very long time ago, for reasons the mine itself has not forgotten.

The old galleries run deep, in levels stacked one below the other, and three things still walk them that are best avoided rather than fought. Something was found, once, at the very bottom, behind a wall built to keep it in - a plaque of living metal, inscribed in a language that predates the Great Heresy, that hints at a practice with a name: Blood Sorcery. What that means is not yet known to anyone still living. It will matter eventually.

Mining, A New Way to Gather

The mine's galleries hold real ore - iron up through mithril, the same materials the forge has always smelted - sitting in seams that shift every time the mountain settles, so no two visits find the ore in the same place twice. A pickaxe wielded or held is all mining takes: no trade to train, just mine at a seam and let strength and constitution decide how much comes loose. Buy one from Halvard's toolshed in Escard, or have a smith forge one. Deeper in, a handful of seams hold something that isn't ore at all - a living metal that moves in the hand and gives up its yield reluctantly, meant for a kind of craft nobody has learned yet.

Natural Talismans

Scattered through the wilds, the Aetherspire, and now Caelahad's summit are natural talismans - places in the world itself that answer to a sorcerer's call on the elemental forces. Three have newly come to light: Earth, hidden beneath the wilds; Void, hidden in the heart of the Aetherspire; and Air, standing in the open at Caelahad's summit for anyone who makes the climb. Finding one is its own reward for the sorcerously inclined - and for everyone else, simply a very good reason to keep exploring.