Shrines Raised After the Sundering

The folio is a working book. Its sheets are loose, folded and refolded until the creases have gone soft, and tied between two worn boards. On them are drawings, bearings taken on landmarks, and a commentary that runs down the margins in one hand throughout. The folio is the work of Ragna Stonemark, a dwarf and a travelling surveyor, who signs the first sheet. Her habits are an archaeologist's: she measured a thing before she drew it.

By her own account she set out to follow what she calls 'an older reference' to six shrines raised after the Sundering. She gives the reference no title, only its age and her trust in it. She reached three of the six, came within sight of a fourth's country and turned back, and places the last two only by the reference's wording. What she brought home is a dry book of bearings and measurements, with a grumble about the state of the roads running beside it in the margins, and one general sheet: a rough map of the Vale with the sites marked, or as many of them as she would commit to a map. The folio is held among the supervised references of the Great Library, in the Reference Rooms, and is read there and nowhere else.