The Land of Velun

There is a place where the world listens and dreams.

Tucked between the jagged ribs of ancient mountains—stone sentinels clawing endlessly at the firmament—and pressed against the salt-bitten edge of the Aruahn Sea, the Land of Velun lies cradled in a hush of eternal wilderness. Here, time does not move as it does elsewhere. It folds and breathes, uncoiling slowly like spiral steam rising from deep earth. The forests are colossal, cathedral-like in scale, their trees towering and archaic, singing as the wind threads through them in low, reverent tones. Their roots writhe beneath the moss like dormant serpents, locking into stone and soil with a patience that speaks of eons.

Dappled light breaks through the dense canopy only in shards and slivers—motes of silver pollen and volcanic ash drifting like fragments of thought, suspended in breathless air. The forest floor is a quilt of mosses, decaying blossoms, and fern lace, soft and springy underfoot, saturated with the scent of wet earth, bruised fruit, and ancient rain. One does not walk through Velun; one is absorbed by it, made part of a living, dreaming whole.

At the heart of the coastal range rises the Mountain of Veu-Nahra, a black monolith erupting sheer from the sea and speared through the coastal earth from an underworld titan. Its vertical face slick with salt mist facing the sea and streaked with veins of emerald, calcite, and bone-white quartz throughout. The sea crashes against its base with tireless ferocity, waves bursting into vapor that climbs into the forest behind in salt-laden curls. At first glance, Veu-Nahra appears untouched, impenetrable—a blade of obsidian thrust into the world. But if the light strikes just right, or if one looks with patience and reverence, a perfect circle becomes visible near its midsection: a portal, cut so precisely it defies nature, as if a divine instrument once marked the mountain with a single, unerring stroke.

This aperture caressed by a hired and recessed winding path is no common cave. It is smooth, warm to the touch like clay sun-baked at dusk, and at night it glows with a violet sheen, faint and breathing. As though remembering a starlight long passed. It is the mouth of something vast and inward-facing—an invitation, a warning, a witness to aeons.

Beyond it lies a spiraling labyrinth, carved with organic precision into the stone. The halls of Veu-Nahra coil like petals of a dark, sleeping flower, their walls engraved with looping script that dances between language and music. Each stroke of symbol can be sung, resonating against the skin of those who wear the tattoos that interpret them. The stone, it is said, listens—and sometimes, it responds.

As assumed, this mountain is not hollow. It is not empty. It is alive. A rich enclosed ecosystem of natural perpetuating rhythm.

It is the home of the Aevori, an ancient tribe of women whose lives harmonize with the pulse of the land and the breath of stone. Their technology is not divorced from nature, but woven into it—fluid, symbolic, intimate, breathing. Lighting their way, guiding their tasks and rituals, are the Vehlune Spheres: floating orbs of translucent glass, hovering with the intelligence of familiars. No larger than a ripe apple, they move with thought, gesture, emotion. When their bonded Aevori speaks or dreams, the spheres shimmer—sometimes golden like lantern flame, sometimes silver like moon frost, and sometimes invisible when the moment calls for silence.

They are not machines. They are companions, sentient in their attentiveness, spirit in their silent service.

Inside, their light washes across the carved stone and living murals—stories etched into monument and wall, into boulder and grove. Each carving sings a memory: births, storms, victories, losses, the passage of ancestors into wind and root. Some are read with eyes. Others with fingers, or song. And always, always with breath. In Velun, even language is a form of respiration, a sacred act.

The Aevori live not in defiance of their wild home, but in coalescence with it. Every scent, every taste, every sound is ritual. Even the food they harvest is steeped in reverence.

Outside, within the shaded hollows, from coiled silver vines, grows Vel’shara—a fruit whose perfume is honey warmed by rain and bark-sweet decay. Its flesh is tender, dissolving on the tongue with the slow bloom of fire and frost. A single bite releases a cascade of flavor: citrus, mint, and memory. It is eaten during offerings, placed at stone shrines nestled in root and shadow, to honor the balance between what lives and what has lived.

If one follows the path of red moths—those ember-winged guides that drift like floating petals—and one will find the mossy outcroppings where Thunel Root grows. Dug carefully with bare fingers, its exterior is rough and coral-like, but its heart is pungent, dense, alive. When roasted over geothermal vents and wrapped in warm leaves, it becomes grounding, like earth made edible, like thought given taste. It is food for mourning. For remembering. For releasing.

In the upper mist-canopy grow the Skyvane Leaves, kissed by dawn. Their translucent blades catch the light like stained glass, trembling with dew that holds the sunrise in droplets. Dried and spiraled, they crackle with citrus tang, followed by the grounding aftertaste of pine resin and cool stone. They are consumed before journeys, when awareness must be sharpened to the twitch of a bird wing or the shift of a shadow.

And there are the Eshmura Blossoms—large-petaled, cream-white with red edges, smelling of crushed plum and spiced wood. Some Aevori sleep beneath them for their sedative scent; others braid their petals into hair and ritual cloth, knowing the dreams beneath their boughs are messages from long mourned ancestors.

On cliffside vines touched by sea-mist grows Zahluni, the moon-fruit. Its skin is dark blue, almost black, heavy with metallic sweetness and electric tang. When eaten during moon-cycle ceremonies, its juice stains the tongue a luminous indigo and glows faintly in the dark—marking the Aevori as luminous, as participating in the ancient rhythm of tide, moon, and memory.

Spring brings Kurell Vine fruit—spiked, teal, rubbery-skinned. Its cracked scent is cedar warmed in the sun, touched with clove and pepper. The taste? A flash of lemon and effervescence, layered with the dusky aftertaste of rain on humming clear crystal. Children laugh as they eat it; adults become flushed with content love; and elders grow still. In Kurell’s taste is something buried—a moment, a person, a time that only returns when the fruit breaks open.

In the wilderness, even preparation is ritual. Crystalline bowls filled with fragrant leaves and herbs sit in natural kitchens, their contents stirred by gestures alone—causing Rai’len Rods, sacred instruments of sound, to emit delicate melodies in response. The sound is never loud. It hums through the bones like a reminder.

The Aevori do not write history—they carve it. Spirals, curves, ridges on sacred stones vibrate when sunlight touches them, or when the correct note is sung. These are the Memory Stones, scattered across the forest and nested in the mountain. Some warm the hand inexplicably. Others respond to voice or breath with subtle glow. They are not just records. They are awakenings.

Beneath the forest floor, deep mineral stone roots stretch outward from Veu-Nahra, forming an unseen web of tunnels and chambers—repositories of story, of ceremony, of ancestral knowledge too sacred to be spoken aloud. Some are reached only through hidden paths known only to the oldest elders of the tribe.

The interior of the mountain itself pulses with quiet life. Veins of luminous ore vein every corridor—violet, blue, molten gold. Some glow in rhythm with breath. Some only in the presence of truth. There are still wells whose mirrored surfaces ripple to voice, reflecting more than image—perhaps listening, perhaps remembering.

There are bright atriums carved like lungs, their stone open to sky through natural chimneys that carry birdsong and heat. Here, rituals are shared—vision-singing, dream-touching, grief-weaving. The Vehlune Spheres dance like stars made tame, responding in color and movement to tones woven in communal voice.

And there are silent rooms—rounded, smooth, quiet. Their floors carved with spirals meant to be walked barefoot, awakening nerves in meditative rhythm. The scent here is of stoneflower—lilac, sage, wet metal. It anchors the breath and silences the restless mind.

At the mountain’s deepest root lies the Sanctum of Resonance, where the eldest gather—not by age, but by the gravity of their voice. Their tattoos are dense, complex, fluid in design. Some say they are older than memory. Others say they sing to the stars. Here, they listen to the mountain—not with ears, but with breath and skin and bone.

And when the full moon rises, the Night Hall awakens.

A domed sanctum of blackened stone, its walls carved with bas-reliefs of the Aevori’s first emergence—hands outstretched from sea and soil. Overhead, a sky of embedded crystals mimics the true constellations above, even those not visible from the forest below. When the tribe sings in full chorus, the tattoos on their skin shimmer, the Vehlune Spheres orbit, and some among them rise into the air as if caught by a gravity older than this world. It is not spectacle. It is communion.

And always, the forest listens.

At the sea-cliff’s edge, far from the main paths, stands the Last Gate—an ancient stone, one face smooth as aged remembrance, the other torn and broken like grief. It bears no words, no marks but a single deep curve that drinks moonlight like a scar. No one speaks here. The air is still, and the wind carries a taste like iron, like a storm unbroken. Some say it is the oldest wound. Some say it waits for a new awakening.

And through it all, the Aevori endure. They speak in silence. They listen in song.

And the mountain remembers.