The path ends in a hollow of old forest, and there is the pool: round, perfectly still, perhaps a stone's throw across, its rim of pale stone softened by moss and gripped by the roots of the silver-barked trees that lean over it. Keepers already sit on the stones, notebooks and lenses on their knees. No one greets you. No one speaks.
Above the ragged gap in the canopy the aurora is burning, green and violet, rolling slowly across the sky. Look down. The moon lies in the water exactly where it should. The stars around it do not. They have gathered into patterns no one here can name, denser than the sky above, some in colours the real sky has never shown. The surface does not tremble once.
A pen scratches. A lens catches violet light. Only when the aurora fades and the water holds the familiar stars again do the keepers breathe out, and begin to argue.
The place
The Moonwell of Aestra lies in the forest of Eilvaran, one of the few Eilvaren places marked on any map. The map records that it exists, not how to reach it; like most paths in the Silverwood, its approaches are withheld from outsiders. On an ordinary night it mirrors the sky so exactly that the forest seems to stand on it. But when an aurora storm burns overhead, the stars in the water stop matching the stars above.
It is a place of watching. Eilvaren keepers have long sat by the pool on aurora nights, and their memory-songs describe skies that appear on no chart. In the Age of Bright Works the Eilvaren learned the star charts of the Aethyr openly and corrected them in return, so today's watchers have more to compare than any generation before them, and the differences have only grown stranger. Eilvaren star-lore holds that every star "sings in the same key", as if all were once a single fire. Whether the stars in the Moonwell belong to that song is the question its watchers argue over most.
What is told
No one knows how old the Moonwell is, or who Aestra was; the name is older than any explanation that survives. What the strange constellations are, real stars, past skies or other worlds, remains unknown. Lately the pool's quiet has drawn interest from powers far beyond the forest, and the Eilvaren must decide whether a place of silent watching can stay silent.