Each region carries the memory of what it was before the Silence. Some regions prefer you don't ask.
The collapsed crown of an ancient supervolcano, now threaded with Vaelborn memory-stone circuits. The Emberspire stands at its center, half-sunken, still humming. Magma channels carved by hand three thousand years ago pulse in a rhythm that matches no natural geological process — they are counting something. The Remembrancers guard the approach and will not say what approaches.
A high plateau where the battles of the Silence left the soil permanently scorched to a depth of twelve feet. Nothing grows. Nothing rots. The Ash-Walkers move through the grey haze in long single-file lines, their memory-songs carrying in the still air for miles. Three Unencoded camps have appeared here in the last month. The Ash-Walkers are quietly changing their routes.
The southernmost point of pre-Silence Vaelborn expansion, now a strange boundary zone where the retreating ice left behind a forest growing at double the expected rate. Trees here bear memory-stone fragments in their bark, absorbed during the Silence. They remember things trees should not know. Ecologists who have studied it do not publish their findings.
The active leading edge of the retreating ice sheet. Glaciers here move fast enough to track by eye on certain days — a phenomenon the Stillwalkers call the Forgetting. The Pale Reach is both the most dangerous region and the most studied; the ice here is transparent to a depth of forty feet and contains an archive of everything it consumed during the Silence.
An inland sea frozen so completely during the Silence that the city beneath it — Kael'Vor, abandoned in Year 1,200 — remains visible, perfectly preserved, through ice so clear it creates a disorienting double-ground. The Stillwalkers live on the ice surface in a culture organized entirely around not drilling through it. They have not explained why. They are very serious about this rule.
A field of natural ice towers sixty to three hundred feet tall, shaped by wind and time into structures that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to Vaelborn architecture. The Remembrancers claim the Vaelborn built them. The Stillwalkers claim they predate the Vaelborn by ten thousand years. The stones at their bases contain neither Vaelborn circuits nor any inscription anyone recognizes.