The Bramble Hills

A thorned ridge country that once lay between Drelmere and the southern Vale, where the brambles grow thick enough to swallow paths and reroute caravans by morning. Older maps still show a four-day route through the Hills to Drelmere; current travel rarely matches what the maps promise. Hunters speak of crossing the same gully twice in a single afternoon, then arriving somewhere they had not been heading. Within the Bellroot Vale, this site sits in the wider network of villages, ruins, and Pattern-touched places that radiate out from Drelmere and Bellroot Crossing. The Vale's relative stability since the Second Shard was recovered from the Bell Tree is felt here, but the Loosening and the Fray still leave their fingerprints — old paths that no longer match the new ones, names half-remembered, the occasional warm wind out of the wrong season.