Uum's Place

Just south of the Ice Mountains and North of the farm fields of Vren, the Godlian Empire allowed the continued existence of a primitive-seeming hospice, high atop the spur of a mountain, built among the ruins of an abbey that was constructed on the even older ruins of a great castle from ages unknown. Villagers called it Uum's Place, or the Witches Lair, for its elder and leader, Uum,(pronounced oom) and the healer women who lived there tending to the suffering of those lucky enough to reach them.

From Talland's Story (The Scrolls of Nef)

"It was an abbey of the ancient religion built inside the walls of a ruined castle, a thousand years fallen. So high and isolated was it, on a giant tower of rock separated from the mountain itself, and up three hundred feet, that it had never been dismantled or smashed, but left to be forgotten when one civilization fell and another rose, making this far-flung mountain castle no longer the edge of empire, no longer a fortress worth dominating.

The tumbledown castle walls were now gentle slopes at the top of the cliffs, green with wild grass. Only the main gate of the castle remained, between green hillsides. Within there was a warren of stone rooms, some of them roofed in thatch, surrounding the squat central tower with its long slit windows staring down the granite slopes out to the wide air above the northern valley. Beyond were the wider valleys, and beyond those valleys just visible were snowcapped peaks, where the planet itself seems to curve down at either edge of the horizon, revealing its shape.

To be safe they called the abbey simply Uum's place, but it was known throughout the peninsula, and even beyond, to be a haven for Celebrants, especially the itinerant healers who wandered from wounded village to wounded village, exhausting their youth and then their health...."