The Pools of Tragedy are a chain of dark lakes in the northwestern Crimson Coast, strung along the lower River of Wights where the land flattens and the current slows. The river comes down out of the highlands already carrying the residue of the killing upstream, and the pools are where it settles. A still basin holds silt; these basins hold worse. The water is safe enough to drink, and tastes, by every account, of grief — a flat sorrow on the tongue that no rinsing clears for hours.
Local telling gives each pool a sorrow of its own: a massacre at one, a drowning at another, a betrayal at a third, the particular story shifting with who is telling it. The pattern under the stories is real. Sleep on these shores and you dream other people's losses, funerals you never attended, faces you never knew, a mourning that belongs to someone dead. Travelers who can avoid camping here do. Those who cannot learn to wake themselves before the dreams finish.
Drink if you must, the water won't kill you. But don't sleep here. You'll wake grieving someone, and you'll carry it three days before you can set it down, and it was never yours to carry. — a drover crossing the northwest highlands
Downstream the river runs on toward the Void and the haunting thins, which is the only reason its lower stretches are fished at all. The pools do not thin. They are where the water sets its grief down and keeps it.