The Whisper Isles are a scatter of low coral islands in the northern Western Isles, south of Migos on the lanes that run down toward the Shattered Sea. They were named for a sound. The reefs that ring them once broke the surf into a long soft hiss that carried for miles downwind, and sailors called it the whisper of the isles. Nothing whispers there now. They are the only place in the Western Isles where sound does not travel at all.
Stand on a Whisper beach and the wrongness arrives before you can name it. Waves climb the coral and fold over and make no noise doing it. Speech dies a few feet from the mouth, so two people standing apart hear nothing of one another and learn to read lips or go without. A struck bell shivers in the hand and will not ring. Gulls wheel offshore and do not land. The silence is not quiet, which is an absence you can fill. It is a prohibition, and it does not lift.
The Silencing
The silence is a working, and the Pity Knights made it. When the lich who held Thergon could not be killed, the order set out to break his grip on the city's dead the only way left to them. The dead obey spoken command, because Deoric is a spoken tongue, so the Knights forbade the command-tongue itself to carry across the isles. A prohibition drawn that wide takes every other sound with it. It half-worked. It loosened the lich's hold enough that he fled the Western Isles, and it has not lifted in the two centuries since.
What this means for anyone who lands there is plain and unpleasant. No spoken working functions in the Whisper Isles. A Deoric command dies in the throat, a sung Faesong line dies with it, and so does a shouted order across a deck. The undead the lich left behind cannot be commanded, by him or by anyone who comes after, and no spoken rite can unbind them either. They can only be cut apart by hand, in silence, by people who cannot call to one another while they do it.
A bell-tower on the Thergon waterfront, its great bronze bell still hung and swinging in the wind off the reef. It moves all day and makes no sound. Beneath it, on the steps, a handful of the city's dead stand where their last order left them, facing a market that closed two centuries ago.
Thergon and the coral
The ruined city of Thergon holds the southern island and carries its own entry; it is the reason the Knights came and the reason the isles are silent. Before any of that, Thergon was known for one thing the rest of the Western Isles wanted. Its divers worked the red and rose coral off the surrounding reefs into collars, beads, and inlay, and Thergon coral set the standard that lesser work was measured against from Iypos to Sheîr.
The trade did not survive the city, but the jewelry did. Worked Thergon coral still surfaces in the markets of the Western Isles, scavenged out of the silent ruins by divers who go in knowing the odds. The pieces are genuine and the price is high, because the supply only ever shrinks and because a fair number of the people who go after it do not come back. The dead are still in those streets. A diver who cannot hear them coming, and cannot call to a partner for help, has very little warning of anything.