Compiled from edge-holding records, forestry returns, and the accounts of those who went in Attributed to the Lorekeeper tradition

Classification

Region: The Deepwood Fringe Designation: Continuous woodland ring enclosing the Heartlands Associated House: None Elevation: Low and even throughout Climate: Temperate, damp, still. Notably less windy than the country it borders

A note before the rest

This survey is shorter than it should be, for want of material.

The Deepwood Fringe encircles the entire dominion. It is the largest single feature in the Heartlands by area, larger than any two House regions together. It has been on the edge of every map ever drawn here.

Nobody knows how deep it is, even roughly. Neither the Lorekeepers nor the Crown holds a figure. The people who live against its inner edge and cut timber out of it for a living hold none either, and they are the least troubled about it of anyone.

What follows is what can be established, and it is thin.

Primary Phenomenon: You Come Back Facing Inward

The Fringe is ordinary woodland of oak, ash, hornbeam and thorn, dense but passable, and dark the way any old wood is dark. Travellers report nothing strange at one mile in, or at five.

At some depth, which no two accounts place in the same position, the direction of travel stops being reliable.

This tradition finds the accounts more persuasive together than any one of them alone. A traveller walks outward for a day, or three, or nine. They are experienced and they keep the sun where it should be. In due course they come out at the inner edge, having never turned around.

They come out calm and unhurt, and puzzled, the way a man is puzzled when he has miscounted his change. That calm is what most unsettles the people who take their statements. Several have gone back in within the week to check.

We have thirty-one such accounts spanning four centuries. They contradict each other on the terrain, the timing, the weather and what they ate, and all of them end the same way.

What the Lorekeepers can offer

Very little. We have no mechanism and no theory we would defend in print. We have not established whether the effect lies in the ground, in the traveller, in the direction itself or in the accounts.

This tradition is generally comfortable saying a thing is not understood. The nearer truth here is less comfortable: the Fringe has never been properly surveyed, for the ordinary reason set out under Economic Value below.

Terrain and Geography

The inner edge

Well defined and well settled. The woodland begins the way a field ends, within a few dozen yards, without the scrub and thinning a natural boundary produces. Edge-holdings run along it continuously.

Inside

Old, dense and level, with little undergrowth beneath the closed canopy, so the walking is easier than its reputation suggests. Water is plentiful. Every account mentions the stillness. The Fringe has almost no wind at any depth, and the quiet is close and calm.

Sightlines

This is why the Fringe features in cosmology at all. From anywhere inside the dominion, the horizon ends against the Fringe. Nobody has ever seen over it or through it, and nowhere in the Heartlands stands high enough to try.

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What grows and what hunts

Ordinary trees in ordinary health, and ordinary deer, boar, wolves and birds in ordinary numbers, behaving as they do anywhere.

It is worth stating flatly, because the expectation runs so strongly the other way: nothing hostile has ever come out of the Deepwood Fringe. Recorded history holds no incursion, no incident, no creature and no event. Animals and weather cross both ways, and that is the entire list.

The Lorekeepers find this the most remarkable thing in this survey. By every instinct, a wall that size and that old, so little explored, ought to have something behind it.

Population and Settlement

People live along the inner edge in ordinary numbers, doing ordinary work: forestry, charcoal, pannage and some poor farming on the cleared strip.

They have no tradition of grim warnings, and the several published accounts saying otherwise were written by visitors who arrived wanting them. Edge-holders regard the Fringe as their woodland, dark and useful. They do not walk into it past the marked cuts, for the same reason nobody walks into any large forest past the marked cuts.

Asked what is out there, most of them say they have no idea and change the subject. They have been asked a great many times, by people who came a long way to ask and were visibly hoping for a better answer.

The edge-holders are as ordinary as any people in the Heartlands, and they live against the most mysterious thing in it. This survey records that without knowing what to make of it.

Economic Value

Almost none, and that explains the region.

Fringe timber is ordinary wood, unlike Heartwood. It carries no resin, conducts nothing, and is worth what firewood and building timber are worth anywhere. The Fringe is the largest forest in the Heartlands and by a wide margin its least valuable.

That has shaped the region's whole history. Nobody has funded an expedition, since there is nothing to bring back, and no House has claimed it, since there is nothing to hold. The Crown has never surveyed it because a survey costs money and returns a map of trees.

So the Heartlands has left its largest feature unexamined for four hundred years because examining it would not pay.

Hazards

Ordinary forest hazards at ordinary rates: exposure, injury, water and boar.

The turning. Every account ends with the traveller walking out alive, so it does no harm in itself. It is still the reason nobody plans a route through the Fringe, and why the edge-holders' rule about the marked cuts is absolute and unexplained.

Nothing else. There is no predator here, and no seasonal or recurring phenomenon.

Open Questions

How deep is it? No figure exists, though the question could be answered.

Why does direction fail, and at what depth? Is the depth fixed? There are thirty-one accounts and no method.

Is the effect in the place or in the person? Nobody has taken the obvious step of sending two parties in on converging courses to see whether they meet, for want of money.

Why has nothing ever come out?

And the question this tradition has been asked more than any other, in every generation, by people who deserve a better answer than the one we have: ████████████████████████████████████████████████.

This survey is maintained by the Lorekeeper tradition. Field corrections and additional observations may be submitted to any recognized archive.