A city of perhaps fifteen thousand people built on and around the Springs of Vyowehr, deep within Ierya at the heart of the Walking Forest. Lacire is the only permanent settlement of any size in the entire forest, and it survives for one reason: its people have given up speech.
The city of silence
Lacireans do not speak. This is not a figure of speech. Within the city, speaking aloud is forbidden, and the prohibition is absolute enough that a child who has never made a sound louder than a footstep is considered well raised. Lacireans communicate through Stillspeech, an elaborate sign language, with written notes for anything complex or permanent.
The rule is not religious and it is not arbitrary. It is survival. The Grayls who dwell in Ierya find mortal voices physically painful, the pitch and speed and volume of speech causing them real distress. When the founders first reached the springs and spoke as any people speak, the Grayls' response nearly ended the colony inside its first year. Those who lived through it learned to be quiet, and their descendants have been quiet ever since.
Silence in Lacire is more than the absence of speech. Lacireans walk softly, set objects down with care, and build from materials that swallow sound rather than throw it back. Buildings curve around the great roots and follow the line of the spring-pools, with no flat face to carry an echo. There is intent behind the shape of the place. The Postronamas built in straight lines and ringing symmetry, and their heirs build nothing that could ring. Music survives only as percussion, low drums the Grayls will tolerate, perhaps because the sound is slow and even rather than sharp. Children learn Stillspeech before they learn to walk, and they learn it well enough to carry poetry, argument, gossip, and filthy jokes. Lacireans are proud of it.
Outsiders may enter, but they keep the silence. Those who cannot are confined to a visitors' quarter at the city's edge, where low voices are permitted and closely watched, and repeat offenders are expelled. People who shout, whether from anger or fear or ignorance, are not handled by any city guard. They are handled by the forest.
Midday in the market square, and the loudest thing is the rain coming through the canopy. A fishmonger and a buyer settle a price in a flurry of fingers. Somewhere a child is being scolded, the whole reprimand carried in one parent's face. The only sound that travels is a drum two streets over, marking the hour in slow, even beats.
The Compact
Lacire's founders were survivors of the Postronamas Empire, gnomes who fled the collapse of everything their people had built.
When the deep crystals beneath Enimogos broke the minds of the Postronamas leaders, the madness ran outward along the resonance network, pillar to pillar, until the empire tore itself apart inside a single generation. Most who survived it died soon after. Some climbed the Chakatann pillars and became the Seyiki. Some fled into the singing forest of Melodia. One band ran the other way, east, away from every humming stone, past the Woods of Systoril and into the Walking Forest, where no pillar had ever stood and no crystal sang. They were dying of thirst when they reached the springs.
They drank, and the springs gave them dreams. The Waters of Vyowehr carry something of the Grayls' slow awareness, and those who drink at the source sometimes dream true. What the founders dreamed was how to live in Ierya: what to do, what never to do, how to share a forest with beings who measure time and sound on another scale. No voice struck the bargain, because the Grayls cannot bear a voice. The agreement passed through the water, in sleep. Lacireans call it the Compact.
For a people unmade by sound, silence was never the price of the bargain. It was the thing they had been looking for.
The Compact's terms have held unchanged since. No fire larger than a candle may burn within Ierya, so cooking is done over the geothermal vents near the springs. No living wood may be cut, so the city is built from deadfall and stone. The springs must stay open to anyone who comes in peace. And once in a generation a delegation walks deep into Ierya to stand before the eldest Grayls and renew the agreement. In return, Ierya holds still around Lacire. The outer forest migrates a mile a year; the city does not travel with it. Lacire sits in a fixed pocket of a forest that refuses to stay put.
The delegation that renews the Compact numbers nine, by old custom, and goes without packs or lanterns. They walk into Ierya until the canopy closes over the last of the daylight, until the trunks stand wider than houses and the moss throws its own faint glow, and there they stand among the eldest Grayls and say nothing at all. The Grayls may not move. They may not seem to notice. They notice. The delegation comes home when it comes home; some years it is gone a week, some years a season.
Economy
Lacire lives on three things the rest of the world cannot get elsewhere. The first is the water. The Waters of Vyowehr heal, slowly and genuinely, and a sealed flask of it commands a high price across the Westwilds and well beyond, so the city rations export with care and never draws more than the springs renew. The second is Grayl-amber, hardened sap found on the forest floor or, more rarely, bought from a Grayl willing to part with it, prized by enchanters and alchemists. The third is harder to carry home. Anyone who needs to cross the Walking Forest needs a Lacirean guide, because only Lacireans know which paths are open this season, which groves to leave alone, and how to travel ground that will not stay where it was. The guiding is expensive. It is also the only reliable way through.
Defense
Lacire has walls and barely mans them. Its defense is the forest.
Hostile forces that enter the Walking Forest find the paths closing behind them, the landmarks gone, the trees leaning in. Most never reach the city at all; they wander until their supplies run out. The few armies that have made it to the walls found the Grayls waiting. Grayls do not fight the way mortals fight. A Grayl can stand without moving for hours and then strike with sudden, enormous force, and there are always more of them in the deep forest than any scout has reported.
The Grayl Market
Outside the walls, at the forest's edge, sits the Grayl Market, a trading post where Grayls sometimes come to deal with mortals in silence.
What the Grayls bring is their own substance: shavings, bark, sap, and now and then a larger piece cut from their own bodies, a thing that costs them something mortals do not fully understand. They were hunted for that material for most of their history, which makes the offering of it stranger still. What they take in trade is stranger yet. Seeds from far-off places. Memories someone has written down. Descriptions of music, signed in silence, which seem to mean something to them. Accounts of places that stay where they are put. A transaction can run for days, because the Grayls will not bargain on any clock a mortal finds comfortable. For those with the patience, the goods are worth a fortune.