The Marker Stone
A large inscribed stone at a path junction between the starting settlement and Strandviken. Too heavy to have been moved recently. People have always left small things at its base. Since the disruptions, it appears to do something.
The marker stone stands where two paths cross — the coast road and a muddy track that runs inland toward the tree line. It is too large to have been moved recently, which means it was placed when the effort of moving it was considered worth making. The inscription has worn to near-illegibility. Someone has left dried flowers at its base in the last few weeks. Someone else left a fish hook.
Before the disruptions, people left small objects at the stone without quite deciding to — not as part of any church or civic ritual, but in the way coastal communities accumulate habits. The stone had been there longer than anyone's grandmother could say. There was no agreed-upon reason to leave things. People did it anyway.
It does something now that it did not do before, or that nobody noticed before. People who stop there for any length of time come away changed in small ways: better footing on shingle, a longer reach, a capacity to run further than they should be able to. Whether this is the stone or simply the rest, and whether rest alone might explain what people say they feel after, is a question nobody in the area has the time or safety to investigate properly.
Generated by lore-from-features agent