Codex

Circle of Stone

Landmark · part of Northlands

Like Stonehenge but far more imposing—colossal stones arranged in an ancient circle, each stone unbreakable and emanating massive magical power.

Type
Landmark
Peoples
Cendelle · Wydling · Neth · Velthari

Like Stonehenge but far more imposing—colossal stones arranged in an ancient circle, each stone unbreakable and emanating massive magical power. The site sits at a convergence of Earth and Force leylines, allowing for extraordinarily powerful geomancy and force magic. The stones predate every civilization the Northlands remembers, and their builders left no name in any tongue the Northlands still keeps.

The Circle is not a monument raised beside that convergence. It is the armature of an old working that seized it. Someone in the deep past channeled Golus and Dynus together to bind the crossing leylines into one sustained working, and in the binding bent them out of true. The stones are what that working left behind: matter that earth-shaping packed and force locked into a mass denser than stone can ordinarily be, which is why no tool marks them and no weather wears them. The binding never spent the convergence. It over-tuned the seam, and the amplification has held ever since, which is why geomancy and force magic spike here past anything a natural crossing should give.

The Circle has become a pilgrimage site for geomancers and force-attuned mages seeking to study or harness the immense power concentrated here. The draw and the danger are one fact. A working drawn on this over-tuned seam runs larger than it was aimed: Golus resolve sets the rock before the shaper means it to, and Dynus thrust lands at twice its intended size, the crossing throwing its full stored weight behind whatever small thing the shaper meant to do. Pilgrims who reach past their own control are sometimes found set waist-deep into the ground, or flung clear of the ring.

The working is Korrun. The deep ancestors of that people raised the ring in the lost ages before any Northlands tongue now remembered them, channeling Golus and Dynus together in a working no one since has matched in scale. The modern Korrun recognize the hand in it — the stone packed to that density, the force-lock on the seam — though no complete account of why the ring was raised or how the binding was sustained has come down through their memory. What the Northlanders cannot read, the Korrun can only half-remember. The working is theirs even so. Whatever the ring was raised around, a central stone or a focus buried at its heart, still holds the charge of the moment the seam was bound, and that intact core is what keeps it over-tuned.

The Codex of Alaria