The Bone-Marker Circles

The Bone-Marker Circles make Nhalgrin's roads legible to the living and accountable to the dead. They maintain storm signs, burial cairns, exile lines, avalanche warnings, and the pale markers that tell a traveller where safety ends. Their work smells of stone dust, frozen leather, lamp oil, old bone, and pine smoke from small ritual fires. A wrongly placed marker can save an enemy, doom a child, or guide soldiers through a pass no one meant to open. That is why marker-tampering is punished without negotiation. In Nhalgrin, geography is law written in bone.