Field observations compiled from Registry records, Crown Guard survey, and independent scholarly inquiry Attributed to the Lorekeeper tradition

Classification

Region: The Still Ring Basin Designation: Low basin surrounding a permanent metaphysical structure Associated House: None. Seat of the Ringbound Throne Elevation: Lowest ground in the Heartlands, and simultaneously the highest inhabited Climate: Temperate across the Basin floor. Freezing over the Ring itself, and the boundary between the two is a matter of yards

Primary Phenomenon: The Suspended Land

What hangs there

Above the Basin, the land is in the air.

Fragments of ground torn loose in the last hours of the Deepening hang at every height, from a few feet over the fields to a mile and more overhead. They run from stones a child could lift to landmasses carrying towns and orchards, with standing water on them. The largest holds the palace of the Ringbound Throne. Several dozen more carry the halls of the older families and the great institutions, the offices of the Registry among them.

They neither drift nor turn, and they do not settle by a finger's width from one century to the next.

Visitors get this wrong first. Told that the land floats, they arrive expecting motion and find the most fixed landscape in the Heartlands. A stone hanging forty feet above a farmyard has hung there since before the farm existed. Basin children throw things at the low ones, a game whose only object is to confirm what everybody already knows, which is that nothing moves.

Why it does not fall

The Basin holds that this is Eiran's work.

Every telling we have collected gives the same account. At the sealing the fragments were caught and kept in the condition they were in. Nothing bears their weight. They were set aside, as a thing is preserved, and not allowed to continue, so the rock that was falling is still falling and has simply never been permitted to land.

Nobody claims to know how, and the Basin is easier with not knowing than other regions are. Ask in a Basin market how the islands stay up and someone will tell you cheerfully that it was Eiran, with no sign of ever having thought about it further or meaning to start.

The Lorekeepers can add little. We can confirm that the fragments have not shifted within the period of reliable record, and that no measurement has ever found strain, decay or motion in them. Every attempt to dislodge one has failed. Past that, the answer is the Basin's.

Living above the ground

Because nothing moves, the Basin has done what no other region could attempt, and built permanent structure into open air.

Where fragments hang close, they are bridged. Spans of timber and stone, some four centuries old, cross gaps of thirty or forty feet, and the older ones have houses on them. Longer gaps are crossed by cable: hauling lines strung between anchor towers, carrying enclosed gondolas worked by winch crews at either end. The long crossings take an hour and cost a fare. The crews shout the weather to each other across the drop, because a cable carries a voice better than a horn does.

Going up and down is done by counterweighted hoist. A loaded platform rises as a tank of water ballast comes down, and the water is pumped back up at night. Families have run the hoists for generations and think of the work as a trade more than a marvel.

A practitioner has no need of any of this, yet most of them use it. Flight that would carry a person a mile straight up is beyond the tiers most practitioners reach, and anyone who could manage it finds that arriving at a high house by air instead of by hoist is read as a statement. The Basin decided early, and for good, that a city should be reachable by anyone who can pay a fare.

Height is still the plainest expression of rank in the Heartlands. The Throne is highest and the old families are high. The institutes and the Registry offices are high enough. Everyone else lives on the ground, and knows exactly how far up everyone else lives, because they can see it from the fields.

The Ring Itself

The ice

At the centre of the Basin lies a flat sheet of ice a few miles across, unbroken and without a single feature.

It has never thawed, and it shows no crack or drift or build-up of any kind. Snow falls on the Ring as it falls on the rest of the Basin, yet the surface beneath is the same each morning as the last. Cores taken at the edge, in the years when that was permitted, found ice of no determinable age with nothing frozen into it.

The cold sits directly over it without spreading. Walk toward the Ring across ordinary ground on a spring afternoon and within a few dozen paces you have gone through to winter, and walking back brings the spring again. The Basin's farms are temperate and productive within sight of a permanent freeze, and nobody local thinks this remarkable.

The silence

Within sight of the Ring, sound does not carry.

Nothing echoes in the Basin's centre. A shout makes one flat syllable that ends where it was made. Bells ring badly, and a dropped tool makes a sound without shape. Musicians who work the high houses learn to play for a room that gives nothing back, so Basin music is unlike any other in the Heartlands. It is slow, and written for an instrument that will be heard once, at exactly the volume it was played.

The region is named for this quality, and visitors take longer to stop noticing it than anything else. The Chiming Snow exhausts an outsider because it never stops, and the Basin exhausts them for the opposite reason. The ear keeps waiting for a return that never comes. After a week of it people report sleeping badly, and then better than they ever have.

What a practitioner feels

For a practitioner the Basin is anything but quiet.

They describe it consistently, in almost the same words: it is like standing near someone at Presence and never being able to step away. There is a pressure on the nerves, and a low continuous sense that something enormous is close by, attending to nothing in particular.

It does no harm. It wears on nobody the way real proximity to a Presence does, it leaves sleep alone, and four centuries of Basin residence have shown no cumulative effect. It simply never stops. Practitioners raised in the Basin say that leaving is the strange part, and several have told us that the outside world feels slightly abandoned when they first step into it.

The unspoken rule

Nobody walks on the Ring.

There is no cordon or guard, and nobody asked can produce a law. The towns of the Basin keep a respectful distance and none has ever built toward it. Children are told, and grow up to tell their own children, without any of them knowing what the penalty is or who would impose it.

The exception is the annual pilgrimage, when the surface is walked openly by anyone who wishes to.

Terrain and Geography

Surface

The Basin floor is broken country. The ground that went up left holes, and they are still there: shallow craters and sheared faces, sudden drops in the middle of ordinary pasture. The Basin has farmed around them for four hundred years, and the field boundaries follow the damage so closely that from a height the whole region reads as a map of one night's violence.

The soil is good, but there is far too little of it to farm the way the Boundary Lands are farmed. No Basin settlement has ever fed itself, and none has ever needed to.

Climate

Temperate and mild, and wetter than the regions on either side. The Basin has four proper seasons and a long growing period, with weather that comes in from the west and behaves itself.

The freeze over the Ring sits apart from the weather and has nothing to do with it. Rain crossing the boundary turns to snow and falls without settling.

What grows

Ordinary things, grown well. Orchards cover the larger fragments, where the drainage is perfect and nothing browses. The floor is given to pasture and market gardens. Everybody in the Heartlands knows the Basin's fruit is the best there is, though that owes more to the growers having money and time than to anything metaphysical.

Nothing grows on the Ring, or within about a hundred paces of its edge, where the ground is frozen through.

What hunts

Very little. The Basin is the most thoroughly settled and most heavily policed region in the Heartlands, and the large predators were gone from the floor within a century of settlement.

The fragments are more interesting. Each has carried whatever was living on it when it left the ground, in isolation ever since. Several of the high islands hold small populations of birds and insects found nowhere below, and at least two carry a line of foxes cut off from the mainland stock for four hundred years, which shows.

Population and Settlement

Who lives here

The Basin is comfortable, unusually so.

Its people come largely from the upper and upper-middle ranks of the dominion: the old-money families with old names, the institutions that need to be near the Throne, the very large administration the Registry requires, and the trades that serve all of them. Nobody in the Basin is destitute, and there is little poverty of any kind.

Even the lowest-paid worker in a Basin town has clean water and a physician within reach, with no real prospect of going hungry. The Basin does not call this generosity. The region imports every mouthful it eats through institutions that would look very bad indeed if people starved in sight of the palace.

Basin residents say just as plainly that nobody here is self-sufficient, and nobody pretends to be. A Boundary Lands village that dislikes its governance can ignore it for a season. A Basin town that lost the Crown and the Registry in the same week would be in serious difficulty within a month. Dependence is the price of the arrangement, and the Basin considers it paid.

Order

The Crown Guard polices the floor and the Registry polices the practitioners, which makes the Basin the safest region in the Heartlands by a wide margin. Visitors from the Boundary Lands find all the uniforms oppressive, and Basin residents find the Boundary Lands alarming for the lack of them.

The festivals

All four of the year's festivals are kept in the Basin. Three are held at scale with the Throne at the centre.

Bran's differs by custom, with no decree behind it. It is held away from the palace and no royal presides. Any town or village may hold it, at whatever scale that place can manage, and it honours the people who did the ordinary brave thing: the guard who stood, the driver who turned back for someone, the neighbour who went into the water. The Basin keeps it the same way the Boundary Lands do, no grander and no humbler.

Outsiders

Well looked after and closely counted. The Basin sees more travellers than anywhere else in the dominion and is equipped to handle them, including a registration apparatus that notices when a practitioner arrives and makes no secret of it.

Economic Value

The Basin produces almost nothing and is the wealthiest region in the Heartlands.

What it exports is permission: licences, titles, judgements and charters, with the Registry's stamp on all of them. Every practitioner in the dominion is assessed under authority that starts here, and every assessment carries a fee.

The rest comes in as taxation. The Registry's levy on the practitioner economy is collected across the whole Heartlands and settled at the centre. On top of that the Basin taxes the traders who work from the middle of the map, and there are a great many of them, because a house with business in five regions puts its counting office where all five are three weeks away instead of six.

Goods come in and paper goes out. The Basin knows how that looks and does not seem to mind.

Hazards

The Basin is the least dangerous region in the Heartlands. What danger remains is worth setting down.

The drops. Falls have always been the leading cause of accidental death in the Basin, by a wide margin. Bridges have rails and hoists have gates because both were paid for in lives during the century before they had them.

The broken ground. The Basin floor is full of sheared edges and old craters. Most are fenced, though some are not.

The freeze. Walking toward the Ring in ordinary clothes is unpleasant but survivable. Falling asleep near its edge is fatal, and a few people manage it every winter.

Nothing else. No predator, seasonal event or recurring phenomenon troubles the Basin. For anyone but a practitioner with unclear registration, it is the safest place in the Heartlands to be.

Open Questions

The Basin has been lived in continuously for longer than anywhere else in the dominion, and it is still the region we understand least.

By what mechanism are the fragments held? Is their state permanent, or only very long? Is there a limit to what it will hold, and has anyone ever tested it? Why is the freeze bounded so exactly, and what is the boundary? Why does sound fail to return within sight of the Ring, and is that the same phenomenon as the suspension or a separate one?

Then there is the question the Basin declines to find interesting: what is under the ice?

No record exists of anyone cutting it, and no law forbids it. There is only a custom four centuries old, held by a whole region, none of whom can say where it came from or what they think would happen.

A prohibition nobody can explain has usually outlived its reason. This one is too young for that, and its reason should still be within reach of somebody's memory.

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