An excerpt of my in-progress fantasy novel, a sketch of the history of the highlands in my world.
It was a land of stone and heather, of misty moors and rocky slopes lost to the archives of indomitable time. Mist lay upon the murky meres, shaped by cold winds into the fluttering cloths of ghostly robes. A few raucous birds disturbed the water with their wings, sending ripples wrinkling along the surface as they skimmed across the face of the lake. Roe deer grazed near the shores, blending with the grasses so that they were nearly invisible but for the twitching of their white-tipped tails, while in the brush rustled a pine marten or mountain hare, searching for food. No footsteps marked the damp soil. No smoke rose in the distance. A strange silence lay upon those highlands, a silence made inscrutable by the roving mists and voiceless heather. Barred from civilization as it was, bordered by the trees of the forest, this place was cut off from the world as much as if it had been locked in a cage of iron. Few traveled there, few set eyes upon its expanse, and few hazarded the endlessness of it for fear of never returning. The highlands were left to the silence of the sun, an unmapped wilderness carved from the beating rains and howling winds of the north.
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