The Saltwood

The Saltwood is a stretch of old cliff-forest roughly half a day's hike northeast of Saltmoor on foot, set inland along the narrow peninsula the two share, where the salt marsh gives way to wind-bent coastal pines that lean inland all together and shouldn't grow so close to the sea, but do. It is home to a peaceful druid circle led by the elder Bracken — the people Flint traces his own druidic kinship to.

There are no walls. The circle lives among a scatter of driftwood shelters, drying-racks, and carefully tended tide-pools, gathered around one enormous fallen pine gone silver with age. Gulls and seals work the shore, and the circle has long kept company with an old coastal bull elk they've known for thirty years.

The party arrived to find the camp under attack: that same bull elk, sickened by the blight creeping down the coast (see below), had been driven mad and was ravaging the shelters — eyes weeping an oily sheen, reeking of hot metal. Rather than kill it, the party helped Flint calm the beast and the druids rope it down alive, and were welcomed for it.

The Blight, and the Machine-Place to the North

The Saltwood sits at the edge of something wrong. A poison has been seeping in from the north all season, worsening steadily: an acrid, hot-metal sting on the wind, an oily iridescence filming the tide-pools and standing water, the ground gone sour and the salt-scrub dying back in patches. Birds go quiet and crowd the branches; animals that range too far north sicken and turn — the maddened elk the worst of it, and proof the blight now reaches living things.

The druids know roughly where it comes from: an old machine-place far to the north where they do not go — the work of the same cold-handed makers who cut these cliffs in an elder age. On a still night a faint mechanical thrum carries on the wind from it. What it is, or why it has stirred now, they cannot say — only that it can be found, and (the old stories insist) stopped.