The Singing Winds Mountains and Leaning Tree Pass

The Singing Winds is a mountain range that runs through the interior of the continent, and it takes its name from a phenomenon that has to be experienced to be truly understood. Unusual pockets and formations in the rock cause even the lightest breeze to produce a constant, eerie whistling effect — as though the mountains themselves are exhaling. On calmer days it is almost pleasant, the kind of thing that might seem magical to a traveler hearing it for the first time. On days when the wind picks up in earnest, the sound becomes something else entirely — a howling, roaring wall of noise that can make conversation nearly impossible and render the mountain pass one of the most disorienting environments in Thanria.

Leaning Tree Pass is the primary route through the Singing Winds, and it is immediately distinctive for reasons that have nothing to do with sound. There is not a single tree in the pass that grows straight. Every tree leans — some at forty-five degrees, some worse, some growing so nearly horizontal that a traveler can look over the top of what should have been a twenty-foot trunk without difficulty. The relentless, powerful winds that funnel through the pass have been bending trees for so long that the entire landscape has adapted around them. First-time travelers frequently find the effect deeply unsettling, producing a low-grade vertigo that makes an already challenging journey feel stranger still.

Despite all of this, Leaning Tree Pass remains a popular route for those willing to accept its risks. Traveling through the pass rather than around the southern end of the Singing Winds can cut nearly twenty days from a journey — a savings in both time and provisions that makes the narrow roads, the noise, the disorientation, and the very real dangers of the mountain interior worthwhile to many. The reduced speed of travel through the pass itself — typically half what travelers make on open roads — is still far preferable to the alternative. It is a route for people in a hurry, or people willing to gamble. Often both.