The Heartland is a piece of a world that broke. It came loose, drifted for generations, and came to rest once the Heartwood had grown deep enough to hold it. It's six to eight hundred miles across, the sky over it stays put, and at the centre there's a frozen ring that has never thawed. There are five regions, each strange in its own way, and between them lie the Boundary Lands, which is where nearly everyone lives.

The short history, because you will walk through it

There are five ages. I'll give you a line on each and then leave them be, since what you'll actually run into is the ruins.

The Age of Earth. The world was whole, all of it land on one unbroken foundation, and iron was common enough that people thought nothing of it.

The Age of Ascent. The world broke. A war between powers whose names are long gone split the land and tore pieces of it up into the sky, and most of those pieces fell or came apart. This one held together.

The Age of the Four. Four people held the world together at the end of that age, and it cost them their lives.

The Age of Settlement. The survivors gathered and built what we have now.

The Ringbound Era. Ours, centuries old by now, and the ordinary backdrop to every story anyone tells.

Why the ruins matter to you specifically

Ruins from all five ages are still standing, and each age left something different behind in them. One of them needs saying plainly.

The Age of Earth had iron, and plenty of it. They dug it out of deep-vein mountains that are gone now, and it was so ordinary that people made nails from it. Every treatise you'll read calls iron vanishingly rare, and every one of them is right about the world as it stands today. An Age of Earth ruin is the exception.

If you're a practitioner, think hard about that before you go into one. Iron interrupts your connection, so a place with iron in its walls makes you more ordinary with every step further in. I've met two people who have been inside one, and they described it the same way. It's quiet and painless. You only find out when you reach for something and come up empty.

Everything else in an Age of Earth ruin is worth a fortune, which is why people keep going in.

The shape of the place

It's six to eight hundred miles across, and getting from one House seat to another takes two or three weeks of hard travel, longer in the wrong season, and a good deal longer again if your luck turns in the Expanse. I've yet to see a map I'd trust, so I'll describe it the way a carter would.

The Still Ring sits at the centre, where the Four made their ending. It's frozen and has stayed frozen through all the centuries since, and the Crown sits in the basin around it. Pilgrims go there and come home saying they felt watched, and they're always a little embarrassed to admit it.

The Whispering Deep runs beneath the basin, caverns of memory-stone with entrances scattered across the surface above, and Hollowglass runs all of it.

The Chiming Snow lies to the north. Crystal falls out of the aurora and rings as it lands, thousands of pieces at slightly different pitches, coming at you from every side including underneath, all day and all night. Ironvale chose to live there.

The Turtle-Groves are in the west, whole forests growing on the backs of creatures big enough to carry them. The groves move, and Vaulin moves with them, so you'll find that a Vaulin seat is somewhere you meet rather than somewhere you visit.

The Shimmering Expanse is in the east. It's desert, and it's where reality wears thinnest in the whole dominion, so a mirage out there may turn out to be something more. Saltmarch crosses it for a living, and they hold to a Code about telling the truth, which in that desert is a real achievement.

The Sablemire Lowlands are in the south, a country of bayou and river delta and mist, where the channels serve as roads. Sablemire is in there somewhere, and they'd rather you left it at that.

Where people actually live

The Boundary Lands are the country between the regions, all farms and market towns and mills, with a great many parishes whose names never travel past their own district. Most of the people of the Heartlands live here, and most of them will go their whole lives without meeting anyone from a House.

If you've read about the Heartlands before, you'll have read about the five regions, because that's where the interesting things are. The dominion really lives in the Boundary Lands, though, and nearly everything else I've written leans on that.

The Deepwood Fringe is the outer ring, one continuous forest running right round the whole of it and hiding the edge. What lies past the Fringe is another question, and I haven't been.

The sky

The sky over the Heartlands stays put. The seasons come on time and the stars keep their places. The winds run the same paths they ran a century ago and will be running them a century from now, and in all the dominion there has never been an astronomer who had to redraw a chart.

People find that comforting, though they can't tell you why it should be so, and I can't either. The usual account says the Four settled the sky along with everything else, which may well be true, though it's a belief and I've found no evidence either way.

Visitors rarely notice it, and the people who live here can't picture it any other way. I think it's the strangest single fact about the place.