The Old Wood covers the western arm of Kretavia, where the land turns south from the coast of Sahalim and climbs. It is mountain forest, wet on the seaward side and cold in winter, and it is the only part of the country with timber worth the name. In a nation that burns charcoal hauled four days across the desert, that makes this coast quietly essential.
The land
The mountains come down to the water steeply and leave almost no harbor. Adhran is the one sheltered anchorage of any size, and it is a hard beat to reach in a westerly. Most of what the Wood produces therefore goes the other way: cut on the slopes, dragged to the headwaters, and floated down the Green Water to Kretivat, where it is rafted on to the coast. The timber road and the river are the same road.
The forest is old in a way that people mention unprompted. Stands of it have never been cut, the trunks run to sizes a Feldian shipwright would not believe, and the ground under them takes a lantern to read at noon.
Work
Timber and resin. The resin is the more valuable of the two by weight — it is burned in the temples of the Kharsa, boiled into varnish for hulls in Tannurah, and hardens over years into a clear amber that goes north as a luxury. Charcoal burners work the lower slopes for the desert trade. Cutting rights are granted by the temple and taken seriously: a felled tree is paid for with a planted one, the count is recorded, and a woodsman who falsifies it loses his rights for life.
Nobody cuts the oldest stands. There is no written prohibition. There does not appear to have ever been one.
Custom
The faith here is as strict as anywhere in Kretavia and the habits underneath it are older, which the temples have long since stopped making an issue of. Things are left at the treeline. Men going up for a season’s cutting do not explain themselves to outsiders and are not asked to twice.
The island
Everyone on this coast knows that the land offshore was once part of it. The charts show the bite; the folk story says the Wood lost a limb and grew over the wound. What is out there now is Jrakvia, which does not trade, does not send word, and does not receive visitors by any arrangement anyone has been able to make. Boats that go west from Adhran come back, or they do not come back here.
Scholars in the oasis cities occasionally argue about whether the forest on the island is the same forest. It is not a question anyone has been in a position to answer.