Places
The Wall
Atop A Wall · Book 1
The whole world, as far as anyone knows. It runs two ways, and nobody has walked it end to end.
There are only two ways to go on the Wall: dawnward or duskward. It is wide enough to hold a whole village, so most days it feels like solid country underfoot. But it has edges, and past the edges is a long fall toward a ground nobody visits.
Every so often the Wall steps up or down, and each step is a border. Moss gives way to bare stone, stone to timber, timber to things stranger still. Each stretch has its own weather, its own food, and its own people, and travelers speak of them the way you might speak of foreign lands.
Weather here is an event. Rain comes down hard enough to knock a traveler flat, wind can sweep someone clean off the edge, and sun on bare stone turns it into a desert. Worst of all are the birds. To anyone without wings, the open sky is where danger comes from.
Most people never go more than a settlement or two from home. Ask them what lies at the end of the Wall and they will shrug. As far as they know, it doesn’t have one.