The ruins of the Okusugi Monastery, "the monastery of the deep cedar," stand in the wooded mountains northwest of Yanagihama, and they are the reason the town exists at all. The monk Shan Lian of the Path of Returning Waters founded it in 2,927 AC around an ancient cedar of legendary size, and Yanagihama was raised first to house its builders and then its monks. It has stood empty and shunned for longer than anyone in the town has been alive.

By the old pilgrims' accounts, terraced halls and meditation cells once climbed the wooded valley around the great cedar. Today the forest has all but taken them, and few living souls have seen the place up close in decades.

No one, by design. Since the Night of Splintered Steel the town's policy has been simple and absolute: whatever holds the ruins now, let it. The reclamation crews down in Yanagihama refuse, to a man, to walk the Pilgrim's Path to its end.

Shan Lian taught the Path of Returning Waters here for nearly thirty years and gave Yanagihama its Everbright Lantern. After her death in 2,961 AC the community dwindled and scattered, and by 2,967 the halls stood empty. Two years later came the Night of Splintered Steel: woodcutters sent to fell the great cedar returned to town at dusk, dead and walking and carrying their broken tools, and dozens of townsfolk died putting them down. In the forty-six years since, the monastery has passed from memory into warning.

No one in the province speaks the monastery's name without a warding gesture. Whatever waits at the end of the Pilgrim's Path, the deep province is content to leave it undisturbed.