Ithalva'al is a world where the gods didn't retreat to the sky — they grew into the ground. Divine Bone turns up in bark, in stone, in the marrow of things that were never built to have marrow. The trees run cathedral-sized, older than any calendar, bark ridged and Bone-like where old remains have gone into the wood.
The region of Fanewick can't leave its own spring: days of birdsong and sun-rose vines climbing visibly toward the canopy, then a week of night, when patches of night-bloom light the canopy and the air turns sweet-burnt with something rotting just beneath it. Out past the tree line sit the border ruins — the subject of a lifetime of scholarship, and the destination of a research sabbatical Serendel had been putting off for a year.