The Glassmere

The Glassmere is the name given to the twenty miles of black glass that lie where the lake-country of central Varrow once stood. It was made in a single night — the Sundering Night of 0 AS, when the Cathedral of the Hymns fell — and in the three hundred and twelve years since, nothing has grown on it, nothing has flown over it, and no one has returned from its centre with an account the archive can set down as fact. It is forbidden ground by the law of the Regency in Caldmere and by the decree of the Pale Choir alike, which is perhaps the only matter on which those two powers have ever agreed without argument.

Geography

The waste occupies a shallow bowl among low farming hills, a day's ride west of the old lake-road. Its edge is unnervingly abrupt. A man may stand with one boot on grey Varrow turf and the other on glass, and the line between them does not wander a hand's breadth in a mile. The glass itself is black and faintly lustrous, colder to the touch than any stone, and so hard that a pick thrown down upon it will ring and rebound. In places it is crazed with paler veins, as though it had frozen while still running. Rain does not lie on it long. Snow melts there a day sooner than on the fields beyond, and shepherds of the border parishes say the glass is warmest, if it is ever warm, in the dead of winter — which is when the Wound overhead is brightest.

Nothing lives within. No bird crosses it; rooks and geese alike shear away from its edge as if from a cliff, and the archive has no record of any beast found dead upon it either, which some find stranger still. At night, under a clear sky, the pale line of the Wound lies reflected in its surface like a second scar, and travellers on the hill-roads avert their eyes from it as their grandfathers did.

History

Before the Sundering the bowl held a lake, two market villages and the Cathedral of the Hymns, the last great house of the old gods. What passed there on that night is disputed to this day; by morning the lake, the villages and the Cathedral were gone, and in their place was the glass. In the Grey Years that followed, when the first of the Unquiet walked and men were desperate for answers, parties went in from every side. Most came out within a day, footsore and bewildered, swearing they had walked straight for hours and found themselves back at their own starting line. The few who pressed deeper came back changed, or did not come back at all.

Successive imperial edicts closed the waste to entry, and the Regency has maintained the prohibition, more from habit and fear than piety. The Pale Choir, which worships the Wound as a god's opening eye, has pressed for half a century to have the Glassmere declared holy ground under its own governance; Caldmere has refused every petition, and the present weakness of the Regency has made the Choir's claim louder rather than more likely. The Lantern-Wardens, who will go nearly anywhere in the Reach for a contract, will not set foot on the glass: the refusal is written into their contracts, and Preceptor Corvin Hale has declined to explain it beyond saying that the order keeps no record of what lies within, and intends to keep none.

Life at the edges

The glass itself is empty, but its edge is worked. The Mere Watch, a shabby company of forty-odd spearmen paid irregularly out of Caldmere, keeps wooden towers along the eastern and northern approaches, turns back pilgrims, and takes bribes from the rest, if the border parishes are to be believed. The villages in its shadow are poor and growing poorer with the long winters, and live largely on two trades. The first is mere-glass: shards chiselled at the boundary and sold as curiosities to collectors in Saverra and pilgrims bound for Ostrovane, though the Watch is meant to confiscate them and the Choir anathematises their sale. The second is the turnpike toll on those who come to look. A child at the edge villages will guide a stranger to the glass for a penny and stand silent beside him while he looks at it, which is the only service anyone thinks to offer.

You will not enter, nor suffer any to enter, nor take up what lies within, nor give fire to any man who says he means to. If a man comes out of it, you will hold him, and you will send word, and you will not ask him what he saw.

Rumours and accounts

The centre of the Glassmere has never been mapped. The fullest account the archive holds is that of Osmund Rill, a surveyor's man who went in with a Collegium-sponsored party in 271 AS and came out alone, nine days later, on the far side from where he had entered. Rill could give no account of the nine days, nor of his companions, and it was noted at his examination that he had also lost other things — the name of the boat his father had kept, the road to his own wedding. He lived quietly afterwards and would not go within sight of the glass again.

• Carters on the winter roads say the glass hums, faintly, on the nights when the Wound burns brightest at midwinter; the Watch's pay-book records men asking to be relieved of the night watch at that season, without a reason written down.
• It is said in the edge villages that at midwinter, from the hill above Thornfield, a dark shape can be made out at the centre of the waste, like the roof of a great building sunk to its eaves. The archivists note that no two witnesses agree on what the shape resembles.
• The border parishes burn their dead with the face turned away from the glass. When asked why, they say only that it has always been done so.
• Grey Pilgrims have been seen passing along the northern rim of the waste, keeping to their westward road. They do not turn their heads towards it, and the Watch does not trouble them.