Of the seven bloodline communities the old stories speak of, only four remain by the time the twenty-eight are born — each hidden by the same old protection, each shaped by the land it was given.
Waldheim sits deep inside a genuine, dense stretch of the Black Forest — old-growth, thick enough that sunlight reaches the ground only in broken patches. To anyone without the forest's permission to be there, it's the kind of place that swallows sound and swallows sense of direction alike; someone unworthy of entry could walk close enough to hear Wilhelm's hammer and never see so much as a wisp of chimney smoke through the trees.
For everyone the forest judges worthy, it simply guides them through — a gap in the undergrowth exactly where it's needed, a fallen log conveniently bridging a stream. Once inside, Waldheim feels entirely ordinary: cottages built around a well, washing lines strung between houses, chickens underfoot, the smell of Anna's baking drifting through the lanes by mid-morning.
Notable features: the boundary stones where the Covenant ceremony takes place; the council chamber; the underground shelter chambers used during the opening siege; Wilhelm's forge; the ancient oak where Agnes told her stories, and was later buried; the stone circle at the village's north-eastern perimeter.
Morgenthal lies east of Waldheim, deeper into valley and river country than dense forest — greener, wetter, with more open sky above the settlement itself. Where Waldheim feels tucked into the trees, Morgenthal feels tucked into the land, nestled low between two ridgelines with a river close enough that its sound carries into the village at night.
Its people lean toward the Miller and Baker lines in daily character as much as bloodline — Morgenthal runs on watermills and ovens, and visitors remember it for the smell of the place before anything else: river water, wet stone, and bread. The same forest-sense that watches Waldheim watches Morgenthal too, though it works differently in open valley country: travellers find themselves drawn toward the correct river crossing more often than they find themselves lost.
Distance from Waldheim: roughly three weeks on foot by the original diplomatic route, or four to five days once the faster network route is established.
Felsenburg is unlike the other three settlements in almost every visible way — built into the mountains rather than hidden within them, cottages and halls set against rock and snow rather than timber and leaf-litter. It holds the northern passes, which gives its people a harder, more martial bearing; Gerta's role as war leader fits naturally into a settlement that has always needed to watch its borders directly.
Winters come early and stay late. Visitors describe thin air, sudden weather, and a silence in the high passes that feels colder and more exposed than the forest's hush. Despite the harsh setting, it's no less a home for its people than Waldheim is for its own — Karl's forge works iron pulled from the mountain itself, Helga's carpentry runs to snow-shedding roofs, and Amara's weather-sense makes her indispensable to anyone planning a journey through the passes.
Defence: the same protective instinct that guards Waldheim's forest guards Felsenburg's mountains — a sudden fog to hide a pass, a false trail leading an unworthy tracker to a dead end.
Abendwald sits south-west of Waldheim, in a stretch of forest lower and denser than Waldheim's own, where trees grow close enough together that daylight reaches the ground only in scattered coins of light. Before its fall, it was the smallest of the four settlements — no more than a dozen households along a single winding lane. What it lacked in size it made up for in closeness; everyone knew everyone else by name, and Berta's standing as leader came from being the person most trusted to settle an argument fairly.
Its protection worked like Waldheim's, hiding the settlement from anyone not chosen to see it — though survivors describe it as quieter, less a sense of being guided and more a simple, easy stillness that made the place hard to think about once you'd left it. When an unidentified, professional second enemy came — distinct from the Baron's soldiers — that same quiet worked against the village. Abendwald had never needed Felsenburg's walls or Waldheim's numbers, and had nothing to fall back on once its attackers proved immune to the forest's usual defences.
Aftermath: twenty-three survivors, led by Berta, are granted sanctuary at Waldheim — bringing the total to fourteen cosmic children under one roof, and warning of a second, still-unidentified hunter.
The old stories speak of seven bloodline communities, scattered into hiding after persecution. By the time the twenty-eight are born, only four remain — three others destroyed long before Waldheim's own children were born: a Northern settlement lost to pride and isolation, a Southern settlement to internal conflict, and a seventh never identified at all.