The Barrow Moors and the High Pass

Wind combs the dry grass flat across a king's grave, and frost has drawn a face on the stone at its door.

Out of the Gloamroot the land opens. The Barrow Moors are high, treeless grassland under a sky that fills most of the view, and across them lie the burial mounds of Velmarch's kings. Past the moors the mountains rise, and the road climbs them by the High Pass, up through the snow and out above the clouds. This is the third act, the Ascent; which regions sit in which act is a proposal, from the overview.

What you find

Gold and heather. Dry grass the colour of old brass, purple heather in the hollows, grey stone breaking through on the ridges. Clouds the size of counties drag their shadows over the land. The wind never stops. A party of fallen on the moor is a few small figures in a great deal of country.

The barrows are long green mounds with stone doors, laid out along the old road, one for each of the eleven kings. Aldric's is the oldest and the lowest, worn nearly flat. Beside it a spring steams in winter: Aldric's Well, where the Hearthfolk say the Ember was first found.

Then the road climbs. Grass gives way to scree, scree to snow. At the top of the pass stands Greyhallow, a stone hut where travellers once kept a fire; the faithful keep it now, for whoever climbs. There the Salt Road turns down west toward the coast, and an older track goes on up, cut into the mountain, into the cloud. Above the cloud there is only white: snow-glare, a sea of cloud below, and far across it, the first sight of something built.

What it tells you

Why the kings were buried here: it is the highest ground in Velmarch, as near to heaven as the living go. And that heaven is close. The cold is coming from above you now. The old saying holds, fire remembers and the tide forgets, and up here the frost forms in the shapes of faces and hands, and of words in a script you almost read.

Who holds it

The Heirs. On windy nights the barrows open and the kings' households walk the road in shrouds, under white banners, in step: the dead raised to march, a crusade climbing toward the gate. The unique Grave Mantle is said to be woven from those shrouds. The pass above belongs to whoever holds the gate this age.

What lives there

Rime Wraiths. Frost in the shape of a memory, what the Tide leaves when it takes one. They haunt the High Pass, where the snow keeps them, and there are more of them the higher you go. They come out of the white-out with no sound, and the cold arrives before they do. Some of them wear faces you nearly know.

How it plays

Wide, then narrow. The moors are the climb's widest ground, the marching households wheeling across it; the pass is its narrowest, a white-out where Rime Wraiths come from nowhere.
Greyhallow is the last fire before the gate, and the place to settle a build before the act's last fight.
Up into the white. Above the cloud the colour drains out of the world, and the path ends at a bridge: the gate of heaven.

On the second climb

A century on, Orrin's barrow still stands open, and is warmer. The households march further, and more of the pass is held. If you chose the Heirs, their banners reach Greyhallow's door. See the second climb.

Its place in history

The kings of Velmarch were carried here to be buried, each with a procession from Saltreach over the High Pass. Ten of the barrows hold a king. The eleventh was dug in the first year of Orrin's reign, as the custom was, and it stands open and empty, and warm inside. Orrin is still on his throne. The Salt Road over the pass was Velmarch's spine; since the drowning nothing has come up it but the cold. See History.

In the game

The Barrow Moors and the High Pass are concept. Rime Wraiths are in the current build from depth 3 of its caves.

Rumours

The open barrow is warm because something sleeps in it on stormy nights.
The Stormglass Loop was found on the moors, on a shepherd who had been struck by lightning and lived. He said he could hear the sky through it.