Chapter 7: Shadow-Wraiths at the Thornwall

The Thornwall announced itself the following afternoon as a line of standing stones so old that the Greywood had simply grown around them, incorporating them into its architecture with the indifference of something that measures time in centuries. They were not decorative. They had not been erected as a monument or a boundary marker in any cartographic sense I recognised. They had been placed, with the considered precision of engineers rather than priests, as a structural element — the way one places a keystone not for the beauty of the arch but for the specific and necessary fact of it.

I noted this as we approached, and filed it under *function uncertain but purposeful*, which is my standard notation for things I do not yet understand but have reason to suspect I will.

Caelen held up a fist and we stopped.