The Bell Tree

A manifestation that appeared in Drelmere's town square overnight — twisted limbs like cloaked arms, a hollow where a face should be, bells swaying in windless air. It rose from the earth like a cloaked figure carved in shadow, and the town came to understand only slowly that it was not a thing but a Shard of the Pattern wearing the shape of a tree. Its bells, when rung in the correct spiral sequence — a sequence Mayor Halrick Vann quietly worked out from the engravings inside First Root Chamber — caused the entire tree to fold inward and compress into the second Shard known to the modern Archive. It held echoes, regrets, and moments lost to the Fray; Kaerlin was the one who, on Mayor Vann's coded guidance, finally rang it.