The delicate traceries of crystalline trees rise from the glass-covered loam of an ancient forest. They glimmer, refracting sunlight until it dances across the earth around them, shimmering in their vitreous leaves. It is dangerous to walk among the trees with eyes or skin uncovered: many have been blinded by the brightness of the Stone Trees or burned when a leaf’s lens seared their flesh, and the fine-crushed debris of last year’s leaves will shred its way through any foot. On still and sunny days, the land around the Stone Trees smokes and bakes. On windy ones, the rainbows they cast dance.

Meditating in the heart of the Stone Trees’ glade is both a rite of passage and a form of augury for the wise ones of the local people. These practitioners say that the most potent prognostications are revealed beneath the sun’s brightest light, but they caution against the casual pursuit of such knowledge—the Sun-of-the-Trees can take as quickly as it gives, and more than one would-be oracle has fumbled their way out from the Stone Trees blind, bleeding from their dreadful stumbling.

The blood they leave behind soon disappears.

Near the edge of the Stone Trees, the glassine sheets of sloughed crystalline bark lie heavy and still amidst the leaf debris of the surrounding wood. The boundary there, between the old wood and the crystal trees which rise from their midst, is feathery and ill-defined. It wavers back and forth. Those few who’ve tried to track the edges of the stone tree grove within the vast and aged forest all disagree as to where the true edge lies. Sometimes, they even disagree with themselves. The only thing they can regularly agree on is that the boundary seems to move at times, replacing wooden giants of the forest with the refractive stands of the crystal trees. But the border shifts back as well, and a year after disappearing some massive trees thought lost to the stone and glass reappear as they were, fresh with their missing year’s growth. None have seen the border there shift and carried the tale of it back with them, but plenty have disappeared.

Those that disappear have never returned with the massive trees.

The center of the Stone Trees’ glade remains undisturbed, however. While the boundary may waver around the glade’s edges, the center does not shift. The locals say this is because the Sun-of-the-Trees—that refracted kindling glow that haunts the Stone Trees on even cloudy days, rising to blinding brilliance in full sunlight—lives there and holds the grove still in its presence. Those who doubt or discount local stories claim that the phenomenon is astrological and geological in nature, tied to the movement of the stars and the composition of the earth beneath the glade. While some have attempted to dig into the earth beneath the fractal crystal spires, to test their hypotheses, their expeditions have uniformly ended in disaster and failure. Digging through vast taproots harder than iron, facing frequent tunnel collapses as though the earth itself wished to smother interlopers… even the largest projects lose their workers when they hit the first crystals, breaking tools and hopes on the stone trees’ adamant foundations.

Most stories told of those digs ooze with the work’s dangerous drudgery. But some few shed the banal to speak of whispers down in the dark, or to hint at revelations seen in the gleam of a crystalline root. Few who’ve worked one mining expedition will ever sign up for another.

The Stone Trees have proven similarly resistant to attempts to remove them from their glade, though the acquisitive may sometimes depart with bark, leaves, or even a small branch. These artifacts and keepsakes are treasured by collectors of oddities, and have sparked the curiosity of many. But while plenty of the curious have attempted to enter the glade, far more stop at the edges, sit down, and simply listen to the music of the trees as they chime in the wind. It is, they say, the most enchanting sound they’ve ever heard: a portal to a space beyond, and a source of peace in the world.

Out on the edge of Cape Hope, the Breakers’ Strand beckons. It is a dangerous lure, a vast and beautiful stretch of shimmering sands and tufted sea grass, marred by the ruined hulks of dead ships. Though its sands are coveted by Cymearnian glassmakers, it is a desolate place: vessels’ ribs emerge from the Strand’s shoals and sandbars like skeletal fingers, waves frothing happily around the remains of their victims. The Breakers’ Strand claims many lives every year, and sailors sing of its reach. Scared, they compose poetry, odes offered to the Strand in the fervent hope that it will accept their words… rather than clutching and dragging their hulls to their doom.

The Breakers’ Strand runs at least forty miles, but its outer windswept edge reaches even further into the sea. The currents deposit many gifts upon its beaches, and the heavy waves sometimes break through the Strand’s boundary into the brackish bogs and fens of Cape Hope on the Strand’s inland side. Here and there, amongst the Strand’s small occasional inlets, those bogs and fens form estuaries and salt marshes. Locals live in isolated villages, fishing communities sheltered by the Strand, and they sail out from the lees on either side of Cape Hope. None sail the waters along the Strand itself, unless they absolutely must.

Cape Hope straddles the only sea route between the ancient and storied vastness of Cymearn and the burgeoning wealth of the Guild-Cities. All shipping which would travel between them—as indeed most would—must tempt fate and ride the strong winds and powerful currents of Cape Hope to pass the Breakers’ Strand. The only other routes around all put so far out to sea that most journeys run afoul of flukey winds, requiring more stores and fresh water than it’s worth.

Of course, those reliable winds that scour the Breakers’ Strand make it all the more dangerous. Worse, they never seem to clear the frequent fogs which rise from Cape Hope’s marshes. Ships may believe they’ve given the Strand its proper sea room only to be driven onto its shifting sandbars, or pulled into the low fog-shrouded shoreline by the sea’s currents. If such ships are fortunate enough to come ashore in fine weather, they may manage to escape before their ship is bludgeoned to pieces. But few are so lucky: most that run aground on the Strand are broken in rushing seas, beaten apart, their sailors rendered unconscious by vast waves casting them violently, again and again, against the sand of the Strand’s shallows.

Ships’ corpses are not left unattended, of course. Salvage work is common amongst the locals of Cape Hope. Many local homes are built from ships’ timbers-turned-driftwood, and beachcombers wander the Strand after any storm to pick over whatever wrecks they might find. Most finds are small things, useful but picayune, but every so often a salvager may strike it rich: a ship’s pay-chest, or rare luxuries which survived the salty sea. More often, beachcombers are paid by shipping concerns for the slow trickle of their reports or findings—whether that means confirming the loss of a missing ship, or recovering some fraction of the ship’s lost cargo. There are even those merciful (or guilt-ridden) locals who risk their lives to rescue sailors when they may, forging out into the lethal surf to retrieve those blown ashore in terrible storms. The less adventurous or driven are sometimes employed to maintain the lights built by the Guild-Cities on either end of the Strand. Useful though they may be, those lighthouses remain insufficient to their task.

Of course, those lighthouses aren’t the only lights seen at night along the Strand. In fog, or on cloudy or stormy nights, less scrupulous beachcombers turn shipwrecker, carrying lanterns along the dunes to coax passing vessels to their doom. These scavengers would speed along their work, bringing unsuspecting ships into peril at places of their choosing. None of the small fishing villages that pepper the Cape’s coast and rise from its fens boast of these practices, but they are known.

Harder to explain are the lights seen even with no shipwrecker present, emerging from the bogs or riding across the Strand. Local lore warns that one should always flee those lights, whether they are ghost ships or simple lonely spirits. This advice is doubly true for any who’ve pulled a ship ashore to pick apart its carcass. The ire of the dead is not known for fine distinctions or discretion, and enough have died upon the Strand or in its waters to muster centuries of ghosts. For every sailor rescued from being beaten to death by the sea itself, many more are never saved. They instead have added their bones to the beautiful beaches, their last passage unknown.