Cathbad's Journal
Summary: Starting Location: the strange keep beneath the Sinkhole Current Location: Aoife's inventory
Notes
"Trust, like tree roots, grows in hidden shapes. What I write here is not the whole root -- only the curling tip I have touched."
-- Cathbad the Druid, Seer of the Verdant Glade
"Beneath the roots of Lake Ailin, a people once whispered to the stone. Their voices were neither mortal nor monstrous—but both."
I call them the Vanha—“the Before Folk,” though none I’ve met have ever named them so.
Their bones lie deep under soil and crystal, in the buried outposts swallowed when the mountains rose. And yet, their echoes remain, carried in root-song and stone-dream.
I have seen fragments: stone walls etched in spirals that shimmer without sun, a bowl that sings when touched by moonlight, a child's toy carved from petrified root-wood that pulses faintly when I sleep.
They did not birth children as we do. Instead, there were three to a soul:
- A mother,
- A father,
- And a third, whom I call the Soul-Weaver or Sieluhaltija.
This third did not shape flesh—but breathed soul into it, through a rite lost to us. I have dreamed of such a ritual—of veils of light and a great well, from which spirits were drawn like thread.
But I must warn: the soul-wells may be poisoned. I feel it in the air near the sinkhole—something broken was placed into the Weave, long ago. The soul-laced songs of birds fall silent near it. A warning?
To Brighde, my sister-daughter, I leave this scroll. To the druids, I say: do not burn the past, even when it burns you. To the town, I say: build your songs of the future upon stone, not sand. If I do not return from the Glade, know that I have chosen to root myself—perhaps literally. Let the forest decide what becomes of me.
— Cathbad Dunleigh, last of the Rootwalkers, Voice of the Verdant Pact