Howdy, y’all, and welcome to Hickahala Valley, tucked deep in the Aetherspine Mountains. We’re simple folk here: farmers, ranchers, trappers, and miners who believe in big families, hard work, and neighbors who show up when the barn roof gives way or the cattle wander. The soil is black and rich at the southern end of the valley, and most evenings you’ll find us gathered at the Mule Sweat Tavern swapping tall tales over something strong and homemade.

Life here is good.

Mostly.

The mountains shelter us from the worst of the eastern storms. Beyond those peaks lie powerful realms of magic, old rivalries, and courts that scheme beneath fractured skies. We prefer the steadiness of plow and pickaxe to such matters. Still, travelers bring news, and lately that news has grown darker.

Six centuries ago, the Old World shattered when a gate was opened to something beyond understanding. Across the Greydeep Ocean, three thousand miles east, reality split like a frozen lake struck from beneath. The horizon there still glitters with impossible cracks. Ships that sail too close never return.

Most of us have never seen the Wound itself.

But we feel it.

The eastern winds carry strange cold one week and unseasonable heat the next. Frost bites midsummer crops. Livestock grow skittish when the sky hums. Hunters whisper of deer with the wrong eyes. Twisted creatures sometimes wander down from the high ridges. Miners find hairline fractures in the air deep underground—thin places where lantern light bends and echoes come back wrong.

Scholars call them “tendrils.” They say the cracks spread slowly. Half an inch a year, give or take. Slow enough to ignore. Slow enough to doubt.

But sometimes the wind tastes like metal, and the sky seems closer than it should be.

Hickahala stands at a crossroads between frontier stubbornness and creeping uncertainty. Faithful folk argue whether the Wound was judgment or accident. Prospectors chase rumors of crystallized magic along fracture lines. Rangers track strange wildlife along the eastern ridges. And every so often, someone disappears after following the wrong whisper into the trees.

We are not a kingdom of archmages or warlords.

We are a valley that endures.

So come sit a spell by the fire. Share a drink. Listen to the wind slide down from the eastern passes.

Just don’t pretend it isn’t getting louder.