No one knows which reign or empire it was began carving tombs out of the Garedaron Vale. The mouth of the vale faces West, and the setting sun strikes the end of the valley once a year, on the eve of High Winter. There's a road, also, faced with black stone, in which the weeds never grow. The hillsides are full of cracks and holes, where the cold rivers flow out from unknown paths in the dark.
Some say the first true tomb conceals a path into the mountains which leads to the realm of the dead, but what of that? Tomb-robbers have journeyed to the vale for many years. Some bring out treasures, and some come back shaken and with a dark tale; some don't come out at all, and some speak of rare finds slipping from their hands at the end of a dark hole.
Off course, there are taemsprits and parson-hawkes lurking in the scattered tombs and barrows, but the worst of it (the old thieves say) is what the vile curses of the sorcerer-priests do to living things that shelter all unknowing in an enchanted crypt. What of a spider and toad and rat all blended together, hungry and foul and half-dead?
Barrows, tombs, monuments, caverns and ossuaries, they're all there to see by daylight, but after dark, what looks down on you from the valley walls?
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