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.