Location
The Fingers
The Fingers are the four great peaks that stand across the northern edge of the Vale, narrow and impossibly tall, set close together like the fingers of a single hand. They are the largest and most distinctive feature of the region, and the Vale of Fingers takes its name from them. On a clear day they can be seen from much of the country, and for most people they mark the end of the map. Few travel willingly into their shadow.
The land beneath them is colder and older than the fields of the south. Stone gives way to ice, paths thin and then fail, and those who go too close speak afterward of a wrongness they cannot quite name, a weight on the mind that lingers long after they return. Hallowglass Lake lies at their feet, unnaturally still, and Northvale, the cold country around it, has always been reckoned the hardest of the Vale's regions in which to live.
The Corruption of the Fingers
Nearer the peaks, that wrongness settles into the land itself and is no longer only a traveller's unease. The ground turns against ordinary use, and those who remain too long are said to grow strange, in body and in temper, not all of them recovering. The folk of the Vale call this the corruption, and they do not separate it cleanly from the plain hardship of a cold and unprofitable country; to them it is one misfortune among many, and worse the further north one goes. What it is, where it rises from, and why it deepens toward the peaks, are questions the Vale has never answered, and has mostly ceased to ask.
Connections
Last updated: 29 May 2026