Before the valleys had names, the land was alive. No one raised its mountains or set its rivers running. It grew, the way a tree grows, in a pattern all its own, and the old carvers called that pattern its grain.
The land remembers its grain still. Cut it and it closes. Burn it and it greens. Whatever is broken, it heals back toward the shape it grew.
All but one thing. Far below there woke something the land has no memory of, and where it rises the land turns violet and does not come back. The ward-builders called it the blight belowNor-vesh. A thousand years ago an alliance of peoples drove it down, and the ward-builders copied the land's own healing into standing stone to hold it there. Every people still tells of the first of them to cut the grain into stone: Arudael, the first maker.
Then came the long quiet. Nobody could read the patterns any more. The stones were good stones, square and strong, and they went into walls and wells and hearths. In the valley's old mine, the miners dug too deep.







