The ash-dry road climbs out of the west, and the ground changes under your boots. Stone turns to glass: whole ridges of it, black and veined with red, fused where an old war burned the land, the edges sharp enough to cut leather. Ash sifts down onto old snow and greys it. The wind is cold, yet heat rises through it from below, and the horizon glows in more places than any traveller can explain. A fused tower leans against the sky. Beside it squats the bulk of an abandoned war engine, half buried in cinders.
At dusk the sky goes red and the glass catches it, until the ridges seem to hold a second sky, burned and broken. When the wind shifts, metal somewhere begins to sing. The people who live here go quiet at that sound and listen, because in this country even the path under your feet can start to tremble.
What a traveller finds
The Ember Crown lies south of the Blackspine and east of the Black Throne; its western approaches pass through ash-dry country beyond the Reed Marches. Despite the name, it is not the seat of the Crown of Ash: the word describes the ring of volcanic heights. Scattered frontier towns cling to stable springs and old engineering stations, and Crown crews, Warden scouts, ruin-seekers and people with nowhere safer to go share the same valleys. Glass can vibrate in sympathy with damaged resonance devices, and a safe path can turn deadly when it does. Cinder Wolves roam the scarred ranges, along with ash revenants, glasswings and ember stags.
Its story
The land was fused during the War of the Burned Constellations, the civil war of the Aethyr, which also tore parts of the Aurora Veil. Here Vaelra, later the Raven Crown, was mortally wounded while holding a failing lattice of the Veil, and Lysara, the Dawn Physician, saved her life by giving her a star-heart. Today the Crown of Ash wants to control what the war left behind, while the Root and Tide Wardens destroy the devices nobody can safely contain. Some say the heat beneath the glass is kin to the heat beneath the Blackspine. Not every glow on the horizon is a weapon, but nobody here bets on which ones are not.