The Briar Barrens
Thorn scrub and pine on poor sandy soil, unwanted by anyone, which is exactly why the pukwudgies still have it. The Barrens are the Wilds' apothecary — nearly every poison and nearly every cure in circulation was brewed from something growing here, and the pukwudgies are careful to sell both.
The Land
Sand, thorn, and pine on ground that will not hold water, cut by dry washes that run once or twice a year and take everything with them when they do. Outsiders read the burns as devastation. They are crop rotation.
The Barrens are the least generous land in either realm and the most chemically interesting. Poor soil selects for plants that defend themselves, and the Barrens' flora defends itself with an inventiveness that has made a nation of apothecaries out of a people nobody wanted to trade with. Nearly everything here will do something to you. The pukwudgies' whole civilization is a four-century catalogue of exactly what.
- Fire season. Deliberate, managed, and terrifying to visitors: the pukwudgies burn in rotation, because half the Barrens' most valuable species will not germinate without it. A managed burn at Faerie scale is a wall of flame two hundred feet high moving at walking speed. They walk beside it.
- Thirst. Standing water exists in perhaps a dozen places. Travel is planned around them and a guide who misjudges is not employed again, or anything else again.
- The thorn. Not hedgerow thorn — Barrens thorn is fine, barbed, and everywhere, and it does not so much wound as install itself. Pukwudgie hide handles it. Nothing else does, and outsiders in the Barrens move like people who have learned this recently.
- The washes. Dry channels that flood in minutes, once or twice a year, with no rain visible from where you are standing. They are also the only easy roads, which is the Barrens in one sentence.
- Everything is a dose. Sap, thorn, resin, pollen, smoke. There is no inert scenery here. Visitors are advised to touch nothing and are advised again after they touch something.
Flora and Fauna
| Feature | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Pitchpine | Resinous, fire-adapted, seeds only after burning | The reason for fire season; the resin is in half the Wilds' remedies |
| Thornbriar | The structural species; fine barbed thorn everywhere | Fortification, hedge, and the province's most common injury |
| Sleepbriar | A thornbriar variant whose barb carries a sedative | Harvested with enormous care. The Quill's most profitable export |
| Hearthroot | Bitter tuber that keeps months and cures the wasting fever | The cure that makes the Kingdom's physicians pretend not to buy |
| Fool's hearthroot | Identical above ground. Kills in a day | Distinguishing them is a Quill apprenticeship's first two years |
| Bitterberry | Grows on burned ground within a season | Famine food, dye, and the base for four different poisons |
| Antlion larvae | Diminutive; a cone of dry sand that is a mouth | The sand flats are full of them. You see it once |
| Bullet ants | Small; one sting, twelve hours | Colonial, aggressive, and the pukwudgies farm the venom |
| Fence lizards | Large; a sunlit rock is never just a sunlit rock | The Barrens' most common lethal surprise |
| Quail | Colossal; ground-nesting, and it eats what it steps on | Fire season drives them. Fire season is when people die of quail |
The Quill
A hidden warren of thorn-tunnels that nobody finds without a guide, governed by a council of brewers whose recipes are family property and defended as such.
Other Settlements
Emberline (3,000) — a fire-crew town on the burn rotation's edge, half of whose population is seasonally employed setting the fires and the other half putting them out, often the same people in the same week.
Waterthorn (2,500) — built around the largest permanent spring, with a thornbriar wall grown rather than built, and a standing rule that anyone at all may drink and nobody at all may camp.
The Wash Camps (transient) — trading posts in the dry channels, occupied ten months a year and abandoned on the pukwudgies' word, which has never yet been wrong about a flood.
Ninth Kiln (1,000) — resin distillers on the Kingdom's old border, working in a ruin nobody has explained, and doing a discreet trade with Faerie physicians who arrive after dark and pay in coin with no marks on it.
Factions
The Brewers' Council. Thornmother Pesk and the family houses of the Quill: the government, and a government of trade secrets. Recipes are property, property is inherited, and the province's entire political structure is an argument about intellectual property conducted with poison.
The Fire Rota. Emberline's crews, who decide what burns and when. On paper a technical office. In practice they hold the province's agriculture, and a Brewers' house that annoys the Rota discovers its groves are scheduled early.
The Physicians' Road. The discreet trade with the Kingdom: hearthroot out, coin in, no records either side. It is worth a great deal and it is the reason the Barrens have never needed to swear to anybody.
The Unsworn Position. Not a faction so much as the standing policy: the pukwudgies have never sworn to the Goblin King, receive the Great Hunt hospitably, sell it what it needs, and remember that the Kingdom's border once ran through here. Their view is that a crown is a crown.
The Long Memory. A minority who think the Unsworn Position is cowardice dressed as wisdom, and who have started talking to Gorrach's people in the Bloodmoors. Pesk knows. Pesk has done nothing, which everyone is reading differently.
Sites of Interest
The Quill. A warren of living thorn-tunnels grown over four centuries into a defensible maze, unfindable without a guide, and containing the brewing houses, the recipe vaults, and the province's entire accumulated pharmacology. It has never been taken. Two Kingdom expeditions have tried; the first could not find it, and the second found it, which was worse.
The Burn Line. Wherever fire season currently is: a moving wall of flame with crews working both sides of it, and the single most spectacular sight in the Outer Wilds. Everything valuable in the Barrens grows in its wake, so the burn line is followed by a moving market of harvesters, buyers, and thieves, all of them within a few hundred feet of an advancing fire.
Waterthorn's Spring. The largest permanent water in the province, with a rule attached: everyone drinks, nobody camps. It has held through four wars, two famines, and the Great Hunt's passage. It is the closest thing the Outer Wilds have to sacred ground, and the pukwudgies enforce it with a total absence of sentiment.
The Old Border Stones. A line of Kingdom boundary markers running through the Barrens' northern scrub, forty kilometers inside what is now the Wilds, in the Chancery's own hand and style. The Kingdom's official history says the border has never moved. The stones say the border has moved a very long way, and the pukwudgies have kept every one of them upright, cleaned, and legible, for four hundred years, on purpose.
Hooks
- A Kingdom physician needs hearthroot in a quantity that implies an epidemic nobody has announced, and needs it delivered to somewhere inside the Ring.
- Fool's hearthroot has turned up in a shipment that went out under a Brewers' house seal. Either a house is committing murder for hire or somebody is framing one, and Pesk has asked outsiders to find out because she cannot trust a single one of her own.
- The Long Memory wants an introduction carried to Iron Jarl Gorrach. Carrying it makes the party party to it.
- The fire rota has scheduled a burn through Ninth Kiln's groves. The distillers say it is deliberate. The Rota says the groves are due. Both are telling the truth as they see it, and the burn starts in nine days.
- Somebody has begun pulling up the old border stones — carefully, one a week, from the far end, in a direction that suggests they are working toward the Quill.
Relations
The pukwudgies have never sworn to the Goblin King, though they receive the Great Hunt hospitably and sell it what it needs. They remember that the Kingdom's border once ran through the Barrens, and they have taken the sensible position that a crown is a crown.