Arboris
Floor 5
The city at the crossing of the boughs, where the harvest never ends
Four great boughs meet here, and where they meet the bark lies flat and wide enough for a city. Highbark's masons cut it out of the bark itself: walls, a market, a guild hall, and the Hall of the Tree under its spire. The Tree caught the city in the best week of its year, and the harvest has not ended since.
Outside the walls lie orchards that are always heavy, mills that always turn, quarries and old kilns. Beneath the Hall, around a root of the Tree, the city laid its dead in the Undercroft; south of the walls, in the Warden's Yard, stands the Iron Warden.
Highbark, the city at the crossing of the boughs. Four great boughs of the Tree meet here, and where they meet the bark lies flat and wide enough to build on. Our masons cut the city out of the bark itself: every wall you see was quarried within a mile of where it stands. When our world ended, the Tree took the city whole - its fields, its mills, and its dead.
HighbarkThe OrchardsMillwind TerracesThe QuarriesThe Old KilnsBramblegateThe Warden's YardThe wilds grow stronger the further you go from the Hearth.
The Quarry Colossus
The Quarries, Level 22
A giant the masons began to carve from the living stone at the head of the Quarries, a king or a saint, and never finished. Now and then it pulls itself out of the face and walks; it shakes the quarry floor, throws boulders and brings rockslides down in a line.
It wakes on its own about every half hour, and the whole floor hears it: Stone grinds deep in the Quarries: the Quarry Colossus has woken!
For a party of up to six, from level 22. Every party walks its own copy.
Highbark's crypt beneath the Hall of the Tree, behind the door at the Hall's foot, which the Lector opens once you bring him pitch for torches. Mourners of bark keep their vigil among the tombs; the Tallowmaw lies in the wax vault, and at the bottom, where the Hallroot comes up, the Ossuary Tree has grown among the dead.
The Iron Warden
Level 25
Highbark's guardian, once its pride: a giant of iron and barkstone the masons and smiths built together to keep the south road, its heart of sap drawn from the Hallroot. The rot reached that heart; now it holds its walled yard against all comers, charging like a falling rampart and lashing with its broken chains.
Waits in the Warden's Yard. Everyone who climbs fights it together, and it grows with them. The first time it falls, Galewind Spires opens for everyone; then it returns, to be fought again for what it leaves.
Highbark
