The Naath Council

The Fountain Pavilion and the Right to Speak

Naath set the Council where the city breathes most clearly. The stone basin of the Fountain holds the meeting ground the way a palm holds water. Here the elders take their benches beneath the watching roots and the steady voices of the six carved spirits. The Wardens keep a quiet ring, spears grounded, and the sound of falling water turns heated words into something cooler.

When the bells call a session, folk come from the Roothearth, the Embergrove, the Boughring, and the far edges of the Grovefields. The first words are always for the land. A draught from the Fountain is shared, then the elders begin, each speaking in turn, each bound to finish with a clear ask that any listener can carry away and repeat. The Council’s court is not a closed hall but a living square. Decisions are spoken where anyone can hear and then posted at the Pavilion and the Eldertree boards so no voice is lost in the noise of trade or festival. It is a simple shape that has held through storms, thinnings of the ley, and the long dark winters.

The Choosing of Elders and the Weight of Ritual

Elders do not simply appear on the benches. Each season, castes send their names with a seal from lineage and lodge. Traders put forward keepers of ledgers who have settled more disputes than they have won. Wardens send walkers who know the shrines by the sound of their dripping stone. Lorekeepers choose those whose ink has dried over maps and rulings and star tables alike. The circle is set so no single craft, shrine, or vault can rule the others. The oath is taken in plain view. Hands are washed in the Fountain. The elders swear to listen before they lead, to bind only what the land can bear, and to write what they bind.

Sessions begin with witness from the Cloister when the ley has turned strange, or from Rootwatch when sign on the borders speaks of trouble. Voices are heard in order and woven toward consensus, and where consensus fails, a vote is taken with lantern stones so the count stands against the daylight. Outsiders rarely see the choosing, yet the city marks it in song and work, not spectacle. The benches are for labor, not for show.

Law in the Open and the Long Memory

The Council’s first duty is to keep the lines of life unbroken. They grant the permits that turn carts into caravans and stalls into guild places. They set harvest limits when bark and resin run thin and close paths when floods take the culverts. They approve the shaping of bridges and storage courts and record truces with neighbors who would test the city’s patience. Where harm rises inside the walls, the law is plain and posted. Theft draws fines and the loss of license. Violence brings confinement and service to those harmed.

Magic that strains the flows earns public censure, and if it endangers land or people, it may earn exile that only a future vote can lift. These are not fast measures, and they are not easy. The Council prefers repair to revenge. It demands witnesses, records, and clear cause. A ruling in Naath is meant to endure the way barkstone endures a thousand steps, and when a mistake is found, it is amended the same way roads are mended, with craft in the open and a notice on the board.

The Wider Charge: Water, Wild, and High Country

Beyond permits and posts, the elders must keep the city’s edges from fraying. They hold the ban on reckless spellwork over Selenmere, honoring the lake-wardens who rise in fog and rain to answer the first pull of the deep. They answer reports from Rootwatch when shrines are fouled or marker posts torn down by winter or by hands that do not love this place. They charter the Seekers when a caravan is lost, when a spider city stirs in Varnhollow, when Redfang brands begin to show on reclaimed gear, or when giants drift too near the snow roads.

They listen to the Cloister when the star tables and the flow-charts speak of a lean season, or when a working requires witness and record so the land is not made to carry more than it should. The Wyrmshade remains a named boundary, and the Council keeps it that way, not with caprice but with memory of bones and mists and searches that never found their end. If Naath has endured, it is because the elders have chosen to move slowly in public rather than quickly in private, to speak under the breath of water rather than behind doors where ink outruns sense. The city accepts their pace because the land does too.