Compiled from trade records, grazing-line returns, and such time as Vaulin has been willing to grant Attributed to the Lorekeeper tradition

Classification

Region: The Turtle-Groves Designation: Mobile forest, carried Associated House: Vaulin Elevation: Variable, in every sense Climate: Whatever the grove is currently standing in

A note on what this survey can tell you

This document knows a great deal about the groves and almost nothing about the turtles.

The gap is deliberate on Vaulin's side. Vaulin will talk about bark, resin, grazing, shed timber, soil depth, canopy management and the grove economy at any length you like, warmly, over several days, with diagrams. Ask what the animal underneath actually is and the conversation moves, gently, until it has arrived somewhere else, and you are three miles down the road before you notice you were steered.

Every Lorekeeper who has worked this region in four centuries has recorded the same experience, and we record it again here in place of knowledge we were not given.

Primary Phenomenon: The Groves Move

A grove is a forest growing on the back of a living creature large enough to carry one.

The scale is what description loses. A grove supports mature timber and standing water, permanent settlement and its own weather. From the ground beneath it a grove is a wooded ridge. From a distance it is a hill that stands somewhere else next season.

They move slowly. A grove covers ground at something under a walking pace, and only some of the time. The great turtles graze, which is Vaulin's word and the only one this survey has found that fits. They crop the country they stand on, move on when it is cropped, and come back years later when it has recovered. A grazing circuit is measured in decades.

So the country beneath a grove takes no harm from it. It is grazed and left, on a cycle longer than a working life, which is why the western Heartlands is some of the best pasture in the dominion and nobody there resents the shadow passing over.

What follows from movement

In practical terms, a location in the Turtle-Groves expires.

Coordinates are good for about a week, and written directions are worthless in a season. There is no map of the region and never has been, because the only map that would work would show where things are going, which is a different document.

So groves are met where they will be. Vaulin publish a grazing line at the opening of each season: the route a named grove intends to walk, in order, naming the country instead of a position. A courier or trader travels to intercept. Miss the window and you wait, because chasing a grove on foot is a well-known way to spend three weeks arriving nowhere.

The Groves

Eleven are known by name. Ashenback, Sundermere, Longwake, Thistlecrown and the Widow are the ones an outsider is likely to meet; the other six keep to the deeper west.

Eleven is the number Vaulin will confirm, which is different from the number Vaulin will state. Asked directly whether eleven is all of them, every Vaulin this tradition has ever asked has grown uncomfortable in a way none has about anything else, and has not answered. We record the discomfort as data and draw nothing from it.

The Widow

One grove stays put.

The Widow's turtle died within living memory. The grove on its back is still standing and still growing, now permanently sited at the western edge of the Boundary Lands.

It is the only fixed settlement in Vaulin territory, and in practice it is where every outsider who has ever "visited the Turtle-Groves" has actually been. The markets are there, along with the trade and the Registry post. A traveller who has spent a season among Vaulin has almost certainly spent it on a grove that stopped.

Vaulin treat the place as something between a market town and a grave, and for them the two sit together easily. Business is done there daily and cheerfully. It is also the only place in Vaulin territory where an outsider is asked, quietly and once, to keep their voice down after dark.

Much of what the dominion believes about Vaulin comes from the one grove that has stopped doing the thing that makes Vaulin what they are.

Terrain and Geography

Surface

Mature mixed woodland on deep soil. Standing water in the hollows of the shell, which behaves like any other pond and is fished. Clearings kept open by cutting. Underfoot it is ordinary woodland, with nothing at all to suggest what lies beneath.

The edge

Every grove has a lip, the rim of the shell, where the soil thins to nothing and the drop begins. The drop is fatal.

Most grove edges have no barrier, and no Vaulin has ever suggested building one. Children are taught the edge before they are taught to read, formally and at a set age, and this is the most consistent custom recorded across all eleven.

What grows

Trees found nowhere else, and this is the region's hard economic fact. Shell-grown stock transplanted to ordinary soil dies inside a season. Somebody tries it every century, having worked out what it would be worth if it succeeded.

Heartwood is shed material. Vaulin never fell a tree. They collect what the grove drops, meaning bark, deadfall and the resin-hardened growths the shell sheds on its own schedule. That is the whole supply from which the dominion builds, arms itself and keeps warm.

What hunts

Whatever came aboard.

A grove's animals descend from whatever walked on wherever its turtle was standing generations back, and have been isolated since. No two groves share the same fauna. Longwake has a fox found nowhere else in the Heartlands. Thistlecrown has no ground predator at all, and its birds have lost the habit of caution.

Nothing hunts a turtle. Nothing has ever been recorded trying.

Population and Settlement

Vaulin build in timber, low and light and easy to repair, and rebuild often. Nothing on a grove has foundations. Everything is pitched, on the assumption that the ground will move.

Settlement clusters inboard, away from the lip. Water is managed. Waste goes over the edge, on the reasoning that it fertilises the country below, and Vaulin treat this as basic husbandry and are quite serious about it.

Outsiders are welcome and escorted, and almost entirely confined to the Widow. Permission to travel on a moving grove is granted rarely, to particular people for particular reasons, and Vaulin regard it as a considerable courtesy, never a transaction. This tradition has been granted it four times in four hundred years and has published each time, gratefully and thinly.

Economic Value

The Turtle-Groves supply the material the Heartlands is made of.

Heartwood conducts Aura. Every House blade and farm tool, every guard's spear and every practitioner's focus in the dominion began as something a grove dropped. There is, and has always been, no other source. Vaulin have no competitors because shell-grown timber will grow nowhere else, and everyone has satisfied themselves of that independently.

A monopoly that complete, held for four centuries by a House that habitually declines to press its advantage, deserves more attention from historians of the dominion than it has had.

Secondary trade is resin, seed and medicine, and the fixed markets of the Widow.

Hazards

The edge. The commonest cause of death in the region, every year without exception.

Being left. A grove that resumes its grazing line does not wait, and a visitor who has wandered inboard while the settlement is packing has a serious problem within the hour.

Movement itself. A grove under way is gentle but never quite still, and the first night aboard costs most people their sleep.

Ordinary forest hazards after that, at ordinary rates, several hundred feet up.

Open Questions

What are the turtles? This tradition does not know and has not been told. We cannot be sure whether Vaulin know either.

Are there more than eleven?

How long do they live, and how do they die? The Widow is the only recorded death, and nobody, Vaulin or otherwise, has published an account of it.

Do they breed?

Where were they before the groves grew on them, and how old is the oldest standing timber on the oldest shell? Vaulin's own dating puts one stand on Ashenback well past the age of any forest on the ground. They do not offer this as remarkable, and become interested when an outsider does.

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