Place · Burial valley
The Vale of Echoes
“A wound in the earth between the last hills of the Line and the first moors of the lands of the Night.”
The Vale is a wound: a granite gorge about a league and a half long and never three hundred paces from one rim to the other, with sheer slopes. The graves are grey, worn, nameless stones “scattered across the slopes like teeth”, with no rows and no paths between them; among them rise natural slabs of granite as high as three or four men. By day the Sun strikes the western rim and comes halfway down, never farther. It is five days on foot from Halvar’s Tower, with no road.
For a thousand years the people of the Line and the moors brought to the Vale the dead they had nowhere else to put: the drowned with no family, travellers with no name, the poor. Since the Breaking it is also where the Echoes come. Those pushed out of Auren by the priests’ light drift by night, slowly, always toward the deepest, darkest place.
Since night 20, the Echoes of the Vale have been disappearing.